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The discreet charm of Koreeda

Matt5 Comments

Yes, I like my Quentin Tarantinos and my Martin Scorseses. I enjoy TV series about New Jersey mobsters doing mobsterish things (like breaking kneecaps) or Ancient Romans doing Ancient Roman things (like slicing through kneecaps – remember the Thirteenth!). I don’t mind watching films and TV that walk the dark, cruel side.

But sometimes I think that gentleness is more difficult to pull off and pull off well, at least for an entire movie. Think about it: how many films do you know that you’d consider good and that you’d describe first and foremost as gentle? The problem is that “gentle” sounds milquetoast and boring, but it shouldn’t be mistaken for its blander distant cousins, “timid” and “nice”.

The Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda is one of the best directors when it comes to gentle films. His work is by no means harmless in its themes, even if it’s decidedly low on kneecapping – his characters deal with painful issues, which is never more apparent than in Nobody Knows, in which a disturbed young mother leaves her four children to fend for themselves. While tragedy is increasingly likely to strike as the film proceeds, Koreeda is not interested in making a domestic disaster movie where we sit on the edge of our seats waiting for the worst to happen. His guiding feeling towards the people he depicts seems to be compassion, as he bears witness to the fact that living, let alone being good, is hard, people are often prone to weakness, fear and pettiness – but we all deserve compassion.

Still Walking, a film in which disaster has already struck, years ago, permanently damaging a family, is similarly suffused with empathy. It’s not happy-clappy, sappy “we’re all human beings so let’s group hug!” empathy – Koreeda’s film does not shy away from the characters’ selfishness and cruelty in any way, but he urges us to look closer, not to condone but to understand, which in the end may be much harder and more uncomfortable than sitting in judgment.

For all the enjoyment I get out of films and TV series that wouldn’t know ‘gentle’ if it held them and stroked their hair, there is something soothing, even healing about Koreeda’s films. While I love visiting the more brutal worlds of many of his fellow directors, it is his world that I would want to live in. (And even be dead in – his After Life, my first experience of Koreeda’s films, is a wonderful, witty and, yes, gentle take on death and memory.)

Tyrannosaurus wrecks

MegeLeave a comment

Some men know precisely where the fine line between right and wrong lies. That doesn’t prevent them from stepping across it. Joseph seems to be a borderline case. He kicks his dog to death outside the betting shop, and immediately regrets what he’s done. Later, he collects his unemployment money at the post office, spouting forth racist crap at the Pakistani behind the counter who tells him not to come back here. That scene must play out regularly because he might have been out of a job for a long time. Joseph apologizes immediately, and I think he means what he says. Outside the shop, he finds a rock and throws it through the shop window. That scene reminded me of a Roger McGough poem: I am sorry, but this is the way things are.

Joseph is not a racist – worse, he hates everybody. One day, he hides behind the clothes rack in Hannah’s second-hand store in order to escape a beating. She lets him stay and offers him tea. He insults her with precise, well-aimed words. He comes to apologize the next day. She throws him out, but he is… curious about her. He sees her and wants to clean up his act. Then she turns up with bruises on her face.

This is the point where the movie gravitates towards a temptingly easy solution. Joseph could give Hannah’s husband a good thrashing – just as a warning to stay away, of course – and hook up with her. She would feel safe, and he could let his shoulders slump. They would make a nice couple. A lesser movie would go for that solution. “Tyrannosaur” has other plans for its characters. At first, I thought the title referred to Joseph’s predatory nature. It doesn’t. He crumbles in the presence of Hannah’s good side. There is a spellbinding scene where Hannah prays at his dying father’s bedside while Joseph is looking on. She does what he should do, but can’t. Maybe he can return the favour, but he knows she will never agree to him beating up her husband. Their need to find help is overpowering to them both, and if they cannot help each other, they must help themselves, or it might be too late.

“Tyrannosaur” is Paddy Considine’s first movie. It’s about violence and guilt, but doesn’t get bogged down in either. It sidesteps all the cliches of similar movies: Joseph and Hannah are alcoholics, but they behave erratically also when they are sober. Drink is not the trigger, but the drug to numb the pain and the guilt so they can go on for a little while longer. None of the characters reveal their past and present us with the reason they are the way they are. There are hints at Joseph’s family, but they don’t even begin to explain him. The same is true for Hannah. That’s as it’s supposed to be. What if the reason you are the way you are comes from a trivial event? What if the fact that you cannot change your past breaks your spine? What if the reason for your behaviour has gone missing or been forgotten? What if there isn’t any, and that is just the way you are – abusive and violent? In most cases, atonement is impossible. There is no closure – closure is for those who need a shiny cover. You don’t miraculously heal thyself. You go do what you have to – sometimes that means revenge, sometimes it means leaving for good. You have to live with the fact that you might be past saving.

Joseph and Hannah don’t play house, pretending everything is fine now, because they still are who they are. They don’t sleep with each other. They don’t take in the boy from across the street who is afraid to go home because of his useless step-dad’s pit-bull. Joseph tells Hannah in no uncertain terms to leave after she has taken refuge in his living room, and she complies with his demand because she understands him, and she understands what having her in his house means to him, and to her.

The performances are flawless. Peter Mullan has a way of projecting hurt and guilt while only standing there. His Joseph is a man who is twisted back on himself because of all the rage he carries around. Olivia Colman has only turned up on my radar with this movie, but she is on my watchlist now. Eddie Marsan goes to unknown human depths with his role as the husband. There is a scene where he apologizes to Hannah for having beaten her. Listen to how he speaks rather to what he says. Then watch Hannah’s face. Paddy Considine may know that neighborhood – it is only three doors down from Shane Meadows’ “Dead Man’s Shoes,” in which Considine played the lead.

The ending caught me cold, but movies like this are not about their ending. If you need a happy ending, look elsewhere. In situations like this, almost any change is an improvement. There is no real ending to stories like this, and the movie’s ending is far from happy, but not one of the characters would ask for happiness; they get some kind of relief, and must be content.

Down in the Ocean of Sound

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Here’s the thing: on Monday, Elvis Costello and the Imposters were four musicians, while Death Cab for Cutie last night at the Kmplex 457 in Zurich were a band. It’s a surprise to me that the newcomers were the better act than one of my favourite musical artists.

I’ve learned from the net that people tend to avoid the Komplex for its bad acoustics, and I see their point, but Death Cab were so good that this didn’t bother me at all.

They were there for the music. Ben Gibbard barely uttered a dozen words between songs other than his almost shy thank yous. They played almost flawlessly. Some very few effects that give some of their songs their distinctive flavor came from a sampler (like the percussion bits from “Transatlanticism” or the nervous drum from “St Peter’s Cathedral”), but the rest was live craftsmanship, and very atmospheric. It helped that there were no seats, and maybe that’s what stopped Costello from performing better.

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They knew what they were doing. The intro to “I Will Possess Your Heart” had the right mixture of sneak and speed; there was “Doors Unlocked and Open” letting you dangle, but pushing your forward at the same time; and I’ll be damned if “Soul Meets Body” wasn’t a perfect piece of pop – maybe it’s the rhythm, not too fast, not too slow, but just right. The song sounds careless, but it has such a warm tone that I can’t name one other song with that same warmth.

It looked like they didn’t really feel comfortable being on stage, and especially Gibbard keeps slinking around with his back to the audience, but they were there to play their stuff, so they threw everything they had into the sound. It worked really well. No extravagant show necessary.

Somewhat spellbound by the spectacular spinning songbook

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Elvis Costello isn’t the easiest of persons – I kept that in mind last night while entering the Kongresshaus in Zurich. He’s just weird and nasty in some interviews and downright odd in others, and then he comes out and surprises you by being really tame and gentle. So if he announces his tour with the return of the Spectacular Spinning Songbook, I knew that it would take some getting used to. The stage was dominated by that gigantic colored wheel full of songtitles and little in-jokes such as “imperial chocolate.” There was also the Hammer of Songs and the Hostage of Fortune Go-Go Cage. At home, you get Mr McManus the musician; in here, you get Mr Napoleon Dynamite the entertainer.

When he came on stage, I realized the place was only two thirds full, and the applause was sort of lukewarm. No matter – Mr D started with “I hope you’re happy now,” and the go-go girl in the cage made it clear that the maestro was here to have fun. To me, the setting was a slight distraction from the music, and the music… I had a hard time to warm up to it in the first half-hour. I found “Turpentine” flat and uninspired. It was only when someone spun the wheel for “Tokyo Storm Warning” that I knew I had come to the right place. “She” was proof that there was a cupboard crooner in the house.

Besides Costello, there were Steve Nieve at the keys and Pete Thomas on drums, both longtime companions of the Attractions as well as of the Impostors. They did what they could, but there was no way for them to play some of the songs in a way that would have made them more distinct from one another. I had hoped for a rhythm section and some horns that would have played a gloriously loud “Bedlam” or “Needle Time”, but no. “Tramp the Dirt Down” didn’t stand out at all.

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So I went along with what was there: a couple from the audience who didn’t know or didn’t want to tell if they were married, and to each other. (Mr MacManus: “Is there something you want to tell us?”) A good rendition of “Condemned Man.” And there was that folksy woman during some sort of “break,” yodelling and playing a small accordion. Was she local? No idea.

Then after that break, something happened. Elvis Costello came back alone and played an acoustic bit with “Jimmie Standing in the Rain”. That stuff worked beautifully, because here, the musician took over from the entertainer. I didn’t mind that he invited some more audience members and the go-go girls back on stage. And, of course, there had to be “I Want You,” which sounded not nearly as fucked up as it should have. I really would like to hear one live version of that song where it almost falls apart and breaks down. It works best when it barely works at all. It’s a song of its own kind.

Then he started to cheat. He wouldn’t accept requests for “Oliver’s Army,” even when it came up on the songbook, and played something else. It pissed off some people in the audience, but I had to smile to myself. That’s just typical, but what did you expect?

It was a good concert once it clicked. There were the typical imported bits, this time the Rolling Stones’ “Baby You’re Out of Time” and the Beatles’ “Please Please Me”. Last night Mr D the entertainer was in a good mood, and I wish the musician Mr C would have tried to have as much fun as him.

Hold on tight to your severance package

Mege1 Comment

Margin Call is Shakespearan in several outstanding ways. It takes place mainly on the trading floor of an investment firm. Four out of five people get sacked. Why? Nobody seems to know. It’s the economy. One of the first to be sacked is the manager of risk assessment (Stanley Tucci). If guys like him get fired first, something is up. On his way to the elevator, he hands over an USB stick to a low-level analyst (Zachary Quinto) and tells him that there is something suspicious on it, but he can’t quite figure it out. The young analyst can, and it’s looking bad. The firm seems to go bankrupt in the next few days, and nobody is able to stop it unless the financial market will take a worldwide dive while the firm will be safe. This makes getting sacked look alluring. The mechanism that lies at the core of the problem is explained at least twice in the movie, but did I get it? Not really. We have here movie history’s first McGuffin that is explained, but not understood. It doesn’t need to be, because neither do the main characters.

That catastrophic news travels up the chain of command. It’s amazing how clueless these guys are. The analyst’s boss (Paul Bettany) understands so little that he works as a go-getter for the firm. His boss, responsible for the trade floor (Kevin Spacey), has worked for the same firm for all of 40 years, but is clueless as to what all the charts and formulas mean. His boss (Simon Baker) and the chief analyst (Demi Moore) are those who will have to explain that imminent crash to the senior partners and the CEO (Jeremy Irons). None of them understands it either, and they have to invite the Quinto character to explain it once again. The CEO doesn’t get it, and in a priceless scene, Irons tells him with a smile: “Explain it to me as you would to a child. Or to a retriever.” That scene is priceless. Not one guy sees farther than the edge of his desk. If you listen carefully to the dialogues, you’ll hear a lot of questions asked, and the response is either “I don’t know” or another question. What does that tell you about those guys?

I’ve made it sound like people are nervous and in a hurry. Not so. There are secret meetings, blocked phone calls, sideways glances, but no shouting matches or fistfights. A movie that reminds us that an attaboy can mean ruin does not need to show a single drop of blood. The tension builds because those who sort of know what will happen have no power to decide, while those who have sit around a mahogany table and have no clue as to the consequences of their decisions. The whole movie takes place within 24 hours and does not contain one single weak minute.

When I say it’s Shakespearan, I also mean the cast. Kevin Spacey has done his Buckingham and his Richard III, and his role here is only three doors down from Glengarry Glen Ross, but with a whole different pay grade; Jeremy Irons must have done a lot of the bard on stage, but I remember him best from The Merchant of Venice. I’ll give Paul Bettany the benefit of the doubt, and playing Geoffrey Chaucer is close enough. The concept of the movie – the decline of an enterprise, if not of a whole nation caused by the implication of a flawed idea – is pretty close to King Lear. This is an ensemble piece, and they don’t come much better than that.

There are no heroes and no villains. (If you want villains, go see Inside Job, a very good documentary, and the other side of the same coin.) It’s just that nobody really seems to see the whole picture, and the rest is office politics. Tucci hands over his information out of concern for the firm, not in order to take revenge for being sacked. Spacey is reluctant to sell stuff that everybody knows has no longer any value, but considers doing it anyway. Irons is not greedy; he is simply responsible for the survival of the company, but knows that he will fail at least partly. He has to make the crucial decision: should they keep the junk papers, do nothing and thereby destroy the firm, or should they sell all of it to unknowing buyers and let global economy crash? Hmmm… Tough one. Listen to Irons when he tells Spacey why he thinks he has made the right call. It’s one of the best monologues I can remember. David Mamet should turn green with envy.

Maybe the financial crisis started this way, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. Maybe a few firms were confronted with a similar problem, and the ones responsible acted the way they thought best. Either way, there were casualties, and not just the obvious ones. I don’t understand the ending fully, but I find it scary. I guess it’s about loyalty, but that is such a dangerous commodity in this movie. It’s a damn tragedy, and Margin Call is only the beginning. We haven’t seen the end of it. (by mege1)

We need to talk about Lisbeth

Mege2 Comments

In my heart of hearts, I knew it. There may be many girls with dragon tattoos, but there is only one Lisbeth Salander. David Fincher’s take on men who hate women is too slick and too self-assured to get anywhere close to the 2009 Swedish original, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. While I cannot recommend parts two and three of the original, the first part is pretty damn good entertainment sprinkled with bits of character studies. We meet a determined but far from bullet-proof journalist who cannot believe the story he has been dragged into. Michael Nyqvist gets his role just right: He knows what he wants to do next, but is far from sure whether it’s wise to do so. I always had the sense that with him, he kept thriving on the difficulties. His dogged determination seems to melt the snow around him. There are many moments where you can see him think, and then act. Daniel Craig’s Blomkvist is too sure about himself; he is never really scared, never really surprised and never really drunk. He isn’t even too fazed when someone tries to shoot him in the woods. He is the wrong choice for this role.

Of course, the Swedish movie will always have the advantage of having introduced us to Lisbeth Salander, on of the most intriguing characters in popular movie-making in a long time. I don’t know how, but Noomi Rapace has exactly nailed the character (now there’s a painful pun) and I pitied Rooney Mara as soon as her name was up for Fincher’s movie. Rapace plays her damaged and in self-chosen isolation, but highly self-reliant; I’ve never been able to see the character behind the role, which is a very good thing. With Mara, I felt I was looking at a goth runaway with an attitude problem and random bouts of Asperger’s. I could see the clockwork behind her acting, and it made the scenes where she brings Wennerström down less credible. The original Salander was surprised at herself that she could feel something akin to love for Blomkvist; the other Salander’s love for him comes to her like an afterthought and finally only stops short of a soppy Christmassy gesture.

Comparisons aside, I also had a number of problems with Fincher’s movie itself. The first three minutes play like Lord Voldemort’s idea of a Prodigy video. As the story unfolded, I could not shake the feeling that this must have felt like watching Gus van Sant’s Psycho remake: the same camera angles, the same lines, the same plot points – heck, there were moments where I was almost sure that the two Salanders and the two Blomkvists inhabited the very same hut, shooting on alternate days. The only good thing they left out were the scenes where little Mikael has Harriet Vanger babysit him.  There are some other changes, but they are insignificant – except, except… they changed the ending. Remember the scene where the original Blomkvist stands in full sunlight for the very first time in the movie, approaching a woman who has her back to the camera whose hair is ablaze with sunlight? Remember what happens then? They cut it. They cut that and turned the ending around. That, and giving Lisbeth that soppy street urchin ending. And while we’re at it: It is a huge, huge mistake to let the characters talk English with a Swedish accent. Once I know the main characters are Swedish, I can suspend disbelief and think of them as Swedes, even if they use proper English – that’s especially true for a movie that engenders a whole lot of disbelief.

I don’t know why I felt that Fincher’s version is longer than Oplev’s. Maybe it’s slower because the atmosphere is so much more subdued. I know a certain drabness and coolness is Fincher’s trademark, and it is essential to Se7en and Zodiac, but here, it sabotages the feel of the whole movie. Blomkvist and Salander are not cool characters – they may just behave like normal people, but they are churning with stuff. They need to be, because otherwise that cold Swedish winter and the shock-frozen Vanger family will get to them.

This is not the geek humour you’re looking for. Move along.

MattLeave a comment

Star Wars humour can be extremely lazy, but I really enjoyed this beautifully deadpan article from McSweeney’s: “On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor”. Enjoy this slice of well-executed geek humour – and give me a couple of days to collect my thoughts before I post my take on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. (It may feature the word ‘elliptic’ prominently.)

Cribbed from today’s IMDB Hit List, just ’cause.

You’ve got mail: Letters of Note

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Courtesy of today’s IMDB links I happened upon this site: Letters of Note. Definitely a nice way to fritter away a quarter of an hour… I was especially taken by this exchange between British comic Spike Milligan and his healthcare provider, Bupa, on the topics of hospital nightgowns and volcanoes. My mum would’ve loved it.

And the second instalment of the January Variety Pack is to follow later this week, featuring semi-crazed German filmmakers, Paleolithic graffiti artists and impossible missions, should you choose to accept them. See you soon!

Schweden lügen nicht

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Something’s odd with WordPress today (no dashboard), so I’ll make this quick’n’easy. More proper updates to follow in the new year (2012 – bring on the apocalypse!), but for now here’s what Michel Gondry gets up to when he’s bored:

For those who don’t get it, check out the plot synopsis for Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind and especially this. If you still don’t get it, well, the French are weird, y’know?

Enjoy the rest of 2011 – see you next year!

Some snyde remarks, part three

MegeLeave a comment

I am the guy who thrashed Eden Lake and The Social Network. I am the guest author of this blog, so I am not really behind most of the interesting and well-informed entries around here. That is someone else, and he is in no way responsible for the whining and whingeing about how bad this or that movie is. In fact, he is much more careful in choosing his drug of choice.

So, hey, part three. You’ve been warned. And since you’re still reading after the warning, here’s a promise: I’ll find a movie that I like, and will write about it. So much disregard for your own mental well-being must be rewarded.

Sucker Punch is all style on the outside, and evil smut at its centre. It’s like that golfball that’s supposed to contain poison. There’s that girl, played by Emily Browning, whose mother is dying of some unknown disease. Shortly after, her uncle or stepfather goes after her younger sister, and she dies, too, but I am not sure how, or whether there was any paedophilia involved, as the scene seems to suggest – I think someone became jittery about a possible NC-17 rating and screwed up the stylish display of kiddie abuse by re-editing. She is carted off to a mental asylum, where, strangely enough, the inmates are all teenage girls. Maybe there are other wings, one for old men, one for…

Hang on, where am I? Oh yeah, the staff. There is one half-way sympathetic character, their therapist Dr. Gorski, played by Carla Gugino. There is also the janitor, a shady guy named Blue, who recommends to the stepfather that the girl get a lobotomy, because then his visits would require only one consenting adult, while she will be no longer consenting to anything, nor ever see adulthood. Stepdad agrees, and so the doctor, who looks deceptively like Jon Hamm, points his tool at her forehead. I am talking about that metal needle they use for the lobotomy, and I take exception to the way you think, but it’s Zack Snyder’s fault, not yours.

And just when he wants to insert the needle into her eye, someone says stop, and we are in the Browning character’s psyche, where the asylum is a brothel ruled by Blue the pimp, and the girl orphans, who are all dressed in skimpy school uniforms that would break any school unform rules anywhere, take dancing lessons under Madame Gorski, the dance instructor. The girl, who is now called Baby Doll, is by far the best dancer, but we never get to see her dance, because when she does, the movie switches to yet another level, where a guy who looks deceptively like Scott Glenn tells Baby Doll about a quest she and the girls must go in order to be free: They have to recover a map, a lighter, a knife, a key and another mysterious object. It was at this point that I remembered that whenever a movie goes into cheap CGI mode, it is a good idea to think fondly of the fact that the whole of the Muppet Show is out on DVD.

Baby Doll has to distract the staff by dancing so the other girls can steal the items they need. The second dance shows the girl gang in some sort of super-Gothic bombed-out Dresden. I guess Baby Doll must have liked 20th century history, but got confused on the details, because the real Nazi soldiers were not zombies powered by steam and clockworks. This scene is so ridiculous that it made up for the rest of the movie. I mean, the Third Reich could have used zombies without the machinery, if only to save on the overhead, but never mind. So the gang kill a lot of the steamheads and shoot down a lot of fighter planes, although their mission is to steal a map from a messenger on foot.

And so on. At some point, the music for Baby Doll’s dance stops, and they are discovered. All of the gang except for Baby Doll and Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish) are shot by Blue, who finds out about their plot. It is here that the movie definitely is confused and confusing: We are still in Baby Doll’s mind, so why oh why does she allow for Sweet Pea and herself to be saved, but let the others die? Horror vacui is a real, real thing, people. In the very end, Baby Doll allows Dr Hamm to go through with the lobotomy so Sweet Pea can run from the asylum and board a bus driven by someone who looks like… oh, forget it. Dr Hamm, right after his umpteenth lobotomy, realizes that lobotomy is… WRONG! He will have a great career in advertising. Blue is arrested, but poor Baby Doll is lobotomized. Ha! Didn’t see that one coming, but maybe she did. The movie shows her slightly smiling, suggesting that she has won. But won what?

Sucker Punch has a feminist message, and it is this: Girls rule, especially those with the semi-automatics and the samurai swords, and never mind the skimpy dresses. I have a message for Sucker Punch: show me a kind of feminist statement that involves names like Baby Doll and Sweet Pea, where the female protagonists have to do what their fatherly mentor tells them, and I suggest to you an improved kind of feminism involving spirited debate about equal rights and passionate demands for the improvement of the women’s cause, free of charge, and I don’t even have to try too hard. Because you see, even I, a guy, can see that all that fighting and killing while flashing your cleavage and gusset can wear even the angriest girl out. Me, too.

It is beyond me how Abbie Cornish, who stood up for herself in Bright Star and who impressed me in a small gem of a movie called Somersault, could have said yes to such a piece of guano as this. And Emily Browning is not a moron, I’ve gathered from a few interviews. There will be a movie with her called Sleeping Beauty that seems to feature those sexual politics that Sucker Punch relegated to its own screwed subconscious. Seems like Baby Doll wasn’t the only one lobotomized.