Babylon A.D.

The strength of this film is in its dialogue. Here is an excellent example, “We protected each other like family….We’re all going to die in New York. Goodnight.” These lines spoken by Aurora (that’s right, the lights of the north) serve to summarize the plot of the film.
The action choreography is standard fare from Vin Diesel but with less finesse and precision than the “Chronicles of Riddick” series. This is unfortunate. But when was the last time one saw an excellent action film from the French? Audiard comes close but his are not action films, they are films that have action sequences.
Like every action film the group flees one place in order to go to a second place where, surprise!, things are not as good as they thought. Flight to NY in a plane with a “Coca-Cola Zero” advertisement painted over it. It is both a comment on the pervasiveness of advertising, capital consolidation and most important, a product/brand placement. The world is chaos, America and Coca-Cola survive. Would one assert that the criticism of global capital is encoded in this scene? That would require a bit more than these shots of brands in unexpected places. In fact, the appearance of a brand in an unexpected place is one of the goals of advertising.
Kassovitz’s dialogue is, well, interesting. He does an excellent job of not only distilling the plot (and at the same time, I suspect, making fun of the whole project) but of distilling the attitude of the West toward global warming. Again it seems as though he criticizes the view that any attempts to rectify the problems associated with human waste (and thereby ‘save the planet’) is nothing more than human hubris. This of course implies that human beings should do whatever they want to do as it concerns the ecology. Now doesn’t that sound like human hubris? Toorop (Vin Diesel) addresses the issue:
“Save the planet. Whenever I’ve read that bumper sticker I’ve had to laugh. Save the planet. What for? And for what, ourselves? What about God, can He help us? I don’t think so. God gave us what we have to see how we use it. Shit, rats in a cage would have done it better. Life’s a bitch and then you die – bumper sticker philosophy. Yeah, right. Sometimes, you get a second chance.”
If one substitutes “this film” for “the planet” and “the studio” for “God” in the above dialogue one can hear Kassovitz’s true lamentation.

A Man Without A Past

A man freed from all that he was before. He can make his life anew. He is not limited by expectations or playing the role expected of him. He can determine the direction of his own life.
A man unbound by the chains of history. This is another attack on Marxist dialectics. Here is a man unbound by “historical necessity” because he has no history.
Of course the Marxist concept is not meant to be applied at an individual level. Kaurismaki demonstrates that such a discounting of the individual is profoundly dehumanizing. In the process of detailing human alientation, the Marxist conception of capitalist alienation merely adds another layer to the dehumanization of modern society.
Kaurismaki seems to refuse this dialectic. And much to his credit.

The Proletarian Trilogy

“Shadows in Paradise”
“Ariel”
“The Match Factory Girl”

Aki Kaurismaki said before the release of “The Match Factory Girl” that he wanted to make a film that makes Robert Bresson pictures look like epic action films. Indeed he does adopt many of Bresson’s techniques.
The most valuable of these techniques is really quite simple. With longer single takes we actually have the ability to look at something. The modern corporate film cuts before the audience can really see the detail of a given scene. Instead of cutting away after the climax of a scene, Kaurismaki keeps focus.
The bold primary colors and sparse dialogue give the impression of a bleak life for these working class Finns. However, this superficial bleakness is a kind of story-telling that Hemmingway called, “the iceberg principle.” Only a very small part of the iceberg is visible while the bulk of it is under the surface, invisible to the viewer.
It is a bold move to imply that what is not on the screen is as important as what is on the screen.
The consequence is that while the film appears bleak it is actually richly nuanced. Kaurismaki shows us that this is what he is up to from the first frame. The first few minutes of the film are a kind of documentary of how the factory produces matchsticks, from a cut tree to the principal character that checks boxes of matches for quality as they travel along the final line before shipping.
Not only do we learn how it is that match sticks are produced but we immediately ascertain the alienation of factory production. Without some characters talking about their alienation we see it within the tapestry of a single life and the objects that surround it.
Make no mistake. Kaurismaki does not lament the alienated toil of the workers. Such analysis tends to increase alienation by shoving people into some tiresome dialectic. Instead we see a person, fully human, that makes her way in a society fundamentally opposed to her being fully human. This Marxist conception of the worker as merely the part of the machine made of flesh serves to further alienate working people. Kaursimaki addresses this inadequacy by showing us the depth and breadth of peoples’ lives.

The A-Team

2010, Twentieth Century Fox

The Twentieth Century Fox corporation keeps delivering such passionately dull fare. After about half an hour I stopped following the plot and began to wonder why Liam Neeson (Taken, Batman Begins) takes these right-wing roles. Mr Neeson takes a particular kind of right-wing role. He takes the role of the vigilante that has lost his faith in the system. This is not a new role. Clint Eastwood invented the modern incarnation of the just vigilante with the Dirty Harry series and Bruce Willis carried the torch into the 21st century with the unceasing Die Hard series. Those films, like the Batman series, deal with the decay and failure of urban institutions. The A-Team represents a long-awaited advance in the vigilante film.

As with previous vigilante films, those in positions of authority within the established hierarchy are not trustworthy. Further, the honorable protector role of the military is subverted by the private contractor, rogue intelligence operatives (in this film the rogue CIA operative eats finger sandwiches and drinks champagne) and corrupt generals. The film primarily focuses on the role of military rank, substituting the usual melodramatic roles (father/son, friends/lovers) for their military equivalents.

It seems that every twenty minutes someone is losing or gaining rank. The Team rejects the legal distinction of rank. However, it is the hierarchy itself that has given birth to their camaraderie. By rejecting the legal/institutional distinction they preserve what is most important to the existence of hierarchy: the fact that everyone believes in it and generally act according to their roles. In other words, these beliefs, to quote a great military thinker, are the unknown knowns.

Child’s Play

1988 d. Tom Holland

This film is an excellent example of one of the aesthetics of consumption: cuteness. The doll is cute like the child that is devoted to it. But this doll reveals an important part of cuteness, the grotesque.

The doll is evil. This evil creates disorder. It is similar to television commercials about cleaning products. Always a woman is at war with kitchen germs and spills. Always her cute child destroys the clean orderly kitchen.

Chucky helps us to realize what we think of children. They terrify us when we see behind their eyes another consciousness. This encounter with the existence of another is terrifying and alluring.

Why else do human beings collect dolls with grotesque anatomies?

Splice

2010 d. Vincenzo Natali

Hideous film. Mad scientist drama. Instead of one it is a team. However, the formula holds. This couple lacks a third and this is what pushes them toward their discoveries and finally the ill-fated splice. It is as though they are having children through their creation of odd creatures. Right. Transparent and boring. This film was like being stuck on an airplane next to someone that will not stop telling you about his conversion experience.

What of this business taking the human splice to a farm and not letting the creature go outside? It’s cruelty. No one but the creature addresses this cruelty with constant attempts to escape. And we are shocked when the splice becomes violent?

Why was the ill-fated splice so dangerous? I have no idea. It just flipped out like a bad friend. Cozying up to you and then sleeping with your boyfriend.

The Wild Blue Yonder

2005 d. Werner Herzog

The music is incredible. A singer in Wolof, a South Indian chorus; it is all improvised. Brad Dourif (infamously, the voice of Chucky in Child’s Play movies) is the only actor in the film.

Brad Dourif’ plays an alien that travelled to earth from another galaxy. He is without a planet as his was destroyed.

The film is about alienation. It goes beyond the individual by sourcing the alienation at the loss of the alien’s planet.

Herzog incorporates mathematicians explaining space travel, 16mm celluloid footage of a shuttle mission and beautiful footage under the ice in Antarctica. The sun shines through the ice, illuminating the ocean.

Fiction is constructed from reality until the line between fiction and reality is blurred. In fact it becomes something else that enables a certain truthful kind of storytelling.

Downhill Racer

1969 d. Micheal Ritchie

Robert Redford plays David Chappellet. He wants to be famous. He is all alone. His father rejects him. His lover works for the ski company.

Richie uses a documentary style. Many languages are spoken. In one scene we hear his coach talking to the media and Chappellet in the background. The sound gradually shifts to David only as all the media turns to him.

“Skiing isn’t exactly a team sport.” The team as David’s surrogate family is a fairly weak plot device. I did not believe it at all. Neither did the coach or any of the skiers.

Richie made some strange films later in his career: Bad News Bears, Fletch and Fletch Lives. I struggled with how such odd and terrible pictures fit into his otherwise intelligent oeuvre. Honestly, those films are about as funny as a little kid telling you the same joke over and over.

All three of these films demonstrate the evil hypocrisy that governs the adult world. In the first we see this through the interaction of adults and children and how the children exhibit the worst parts of adults. In the last two we watch an adult behave like a child in a world of horrible adults. These three films while mostly tarnishing Ritchie’s career do fit in with his more interesting films like The Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom in which an adult plots the murder of a child. What is most interesting and most hilarious about this film is that the plotters maintain this equality between adults and children just as in the first three films.

Perhaps Ritchie learned an important lesson about the USA early in his life: An adult is a person that is in a position of authority in a land of children.

Even Dwarfs Started Small

1971 d. Werner Herzog

Nightmare. The opening scene shows chickens cannibalizing each other.

Rejection of petty bourgeois conventions. Watering flowers with gasoline, marriage as nothing but the social legitimization of copulation – marriage reduced to pornographic lust.

The objects humans create are monstrous. All is out of proportion. It is the dwarfs that are normal and it is the world of human made objects that is horrifying. Herzog shoots from the dwarfs’ level with the camera angled upwards.

Nature itself is oppressive- the landscape is burnt, a stark blackness against the white sky, bereft of native vegetation, a lunar landscape on earth. The animals cannibalize one another as if something is wrong at the heart of nature.

The dwarves rebel against these oppressive elements.

The dwarfs leave a car to run on its own in a circle – this is life, constant circular motion from which there is no escape.

The Secret in Their Eyes

2010 d. Juan Jose Campanella

At some moments I felt that I was watching a telenovella. The film employs the aesthetics of the telenovella: the quick zoom close-up during emotionally tense moments, the color saturation (this one earth tones), and the placing of eyes in the center of the frame.

I have the feeling that this film has something to do with the “Dirty War” that plagued Argentina for almost thirty years. The disappearances, the murders, the feeling of not being in control of anything.

Campanella’s previous work includes an entire season of Law and Order. His film handles the subject of law and order not in the droll procedural way but in a more existential way.

The A.D.A. extracts a confession from the killer by slighting his manhood. The way in which she does this cuts to the heart of Argentinean machismo, revealing what is at its center – a deep loathing of women.

Clever plot device: The principal character remembers his past by writing a novel. Is this one of the functions of art in Argentina? Remembering?