By D.K. Holm
December 31, 2004
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on, and perhaps you should stop reading the Internet.]
The Life Pelagic
THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU
I may never watch a movie with "the people" ever again.
I went to Wes Anderson's THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU last Sunday and had the worst time of my life. It wasn't the movie. It was the audience.
There were two couples sitting behind me, two Patagonia wearing bald men and their dumpy wives. The women talked through the whole movie, translating the English dialogue into English for each other (this was the 4:40 PM show, on Sunday, December 26, at the Century 16 on SE 82nd Avenue in Portland, Oregon, in case they are reading this, which I doubt). Their voices were high and squeaky, and they reminded me of the time I saw STAR WARS sitting in front of a chick who kept mimicking the sounds of the robots for her boyfriend. When the credits rolled, one noted in a booming voice that the songs were by David Bowie and said, "You know, if all these songs are by David Bowie, I have that album at home."
I thought about turning around a saying something (I looked back at them once but nothing more). But I was worried about a fight starting and whether the friend I was with would be put off. And there is no point in going out to complain to the manager, because they never do anything. I've heard that there is some legal reason for that, but they never throw out disruptive patrons. Something about buying the ticket gives them a right to stay. Thus evil holds us all hostage, and drives good from the theater.
I suppose I wouldn't think too much of this except that for the past two months I've been going to the movies on Sunday to get caught up and at every single screening at least someone talked all through the film. And no one, including me, did anything. I'm sick of it and not playing anymore. The public may deride the critical press for the luxury of private, advance screenings, but believe me, the chattering public has driven them to these oases.
Another thing that the fat couples did was laugh all through the movie with this high-pitched, almost shocked squeal. They especially rollicked when Bill Murray and his team made a raid on an abandoned resort hotel. Every time they cackled I asked myself, why do they think this is funny? What is amusing about this? Because if there is one thing THE LIFE AQUATIC isn't, it's funny.
I'm not sure that it was intended to be. I'm not sure what Anderson (and credited co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach) were after with this film, except a continuation of the feel-good company playing that he established in THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. I don't think that its not being funny is a flaw, however. The seemingly humorous surface is a trick, meant to disguise the fact that it's about serious subjects — paternity, family life, loyalty, and revenge.
But overall what it is really about is filmmaking. Though on the surface a tale of the Cousteau-esque Zissou and his financial crisis as he sets of on one more exploration - photo op to slay that exotic shark that killed his loyal partner (Seymour Cassel, seen only in Zissou film footage). The thrust of his mission is compromised by the departure of his wife (Angelica Huston), the arrival of a hostile reporter (Cate Blanchett), the embedding of an observant accountant (Bud Cort), and the arrival of a Kentucky pilot who claims to be Zissou's illegitimate son (Owen Wilson).
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Imagine this ragtag group less as an exploratory mission than as a film crew, and in fact the Zissou team primarily makes films. Imagine that what they do on the sea is what a film crew does on location — fights, fucks, gets drunk, struggles to raise more funds. Though some of the events that occur in the film are sad, for the most part the film is a celebration of the unity that a film crew builds for itself. The public events that open and close AQUATIC, in which the latest Zissou films are premiered, come across very much like film festival screenings.
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As homage to the filmmaking process, THE LIFE AQUATIC could be expected to make references to previous films, and it does, but almost in a way you wouldn't notice. Anderson loves the films from the 1970s, and above all HAROLD AND MAUDE: thus we see Bud Cort in a small role. The bisected view of the Zissou ship evokes Jerry Lewis's THE LADIES MAN (which is from the 1960s). But the filmmaker who seems to be the biggest influence on this and Anderson's previous film is Peter Bogdanovich team. As in Bogdanovich films such as THEY ALL LAUGHED and TEXASVILLE, Anderson accumulates a roving group of even-tempered people who all love each other and face no natural predators.
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Anderson also reprises them all in his variation of a John Ford curtain call at the end, and the rhythm of the narrative — ship then island then ship then somewhere else then ship then another place — mimics the rhythm of so many Howard Hawks films. But Anderson's references go back further, to silent cinema, and Victorian stage shows before that, in his succession of tableaux in which a row of actors fill out the widescreen frame.
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There were lots of things I liked about THE LIFE AQUATIC. I loved that Blanchett's character was reading Proust (though it was the old Scott-Moncrieff translation rather then newer, non-bowdlerized editions). The inclusion of a fake son reminded me of a key plot point in Gore Vidal's novel TWO SISTERS.
And Bud Cort is shown using a copy of the NEW YORK OBSERVER, with its distinctive peach colored paper, as a hat in the rain hat. The OBSERVER is my favorite newspaper. But I will love above all is watching it on DVD in the privacy of my own home, far away from the real life noisy groupings that Anderson celebrates in his movie.
Apocalypse Now
There must be something about the end of the year that inspires apocalyptic images in the minds of DVD distributors. With the closing of 2004, at least five post-apocalyptic tales hit the DVD shelves.
The only problem with this plan is that the person who watches them all at once will see that there isn't a lot of variety among supposedly different end of the world movies.
The future looks basically the same to all this filmmakers. Thick-cloaked wanderers with a careful squib of black soot on their forehead. Ruined cities with rubble strewn streets. People speaking in an unexplained lingo. Computers can do anything.
The post-apocalypse movies under review fall into four categories: the Orwellian future, the ROAD WARRIOR future, the virtual reality future, and no future.
CODE 46 is Orwellian. OMEGA DOOM is ROAD WARRIOR-like. CYBER BANDITS and VENUS RISING dabble in low budget ideas of VR. TIME OF THE WOLF proffers no future.
If you are interested what it might be like to fuck Samantha Morton, CODE 46 (MGM, 2003, $26.95, Tuesday, December 28) is for VR trip you. Its high point is a long sex scene shot entirely from the viewpoint of the fucker, allowing the viewer to mentally step into his bedroom slippers. Unfortunately, that person is Tim Robbins, and intrusive visions of him interfere with the virtual reality of the Morton fuck. It's a spectacularly successful moment that mimics the lame attempts in the other virtual reality movies of the moment. Here you get the Full Morton.
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The characters whom Morton and Robbins play, William and Maria, are not suppose to be fucking. This is the future, and William, an insurance investigator of some kind (as usual in filmfuture, some basic information is kept annoyingly vague) sent to inquire about something in Shanghai, which looks a lot like Dubai. Maria is the person who did the bad thing he is investigating, but instead of turning her in, he begins a LOST IN TRANSLATION-style affair, despite the fact that he has a wife and son back home, and that the law of Code 46 disallows sexual unions between people who might share DNA, this being the future where half the people you meet might have been brewed in a test tube.
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It's not exactly clear what draws Robbins, who takes drugs (called a virus) to make him empathic, indeed almost a mind reader, to Maria, who looks just as she did in her last five movies since MINORITY REPORT, petite and rubbed raw and with hair cleaved to the bone. She also comes off as knowing and manipulative, which is at odds with the possibilities offer in this imagined future in which corporations control everything. Meanwhile his wife back home is this tall, willowy, exotic brunette with long cascading locks and a superb jawline.
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The second half of CODE comes across the way BLADE RUNNER have continued on after the drive through the Cascades in the last shots of the studio version, as now imagined by director Michael Winterbottom and credited writer Frank Boyce. William and Maria run off and try to go underground and suddenly Shanghai takes on the cast of the Sudan, all desert and camels and dunes (another movie this passage resembles is Antonioni's THE PASSENGER). Since this is a dystopian vision, of course, things must end badly, but first they must veer through ineptitude, with a contrived car accident — in the middle of the desert, no less — and William taken back home to have his memory wiped (a la PAYCHECK and MINORITY REPORT), while Maria is left to roam the desert garbed in robes and peddling something from a box on a neck strap, like a Muslim cigarette girl.
CODE 46 is too vague and then too repetitious to make any interesting or thought-provoking comments on either the future or the present. Its vision of the future is primarily realized, in the time-honored tradition of films about the future, by shooting the most up to date international architecture in the background. It creates an international patois blending Spanish with a half a dozen other languages, so that people say si for yes and refer to kids as chicos or chicas.
The disc comes with a short making of feature, three truly ephemeral deleted scenes, the trailer, and a few other MGM trailers, ANGEL OF DEATH and CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN TEENAGER.
Winterbottom is a puzzling director. The diversity of his subject matter, ranging from adaptations of Thomas Hardy (JUDE, and THE CLAIM, from THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE) to war in Eastern Europe to the Manchester club scene, belies a simple auteurist vision. The director I always mix him up with is Mike Figgis, an equally eclectic helmer who has made cop films, paradise fantasies, and adaptations of Strindberg. If Figgis's running theme is a guy who thinks he has it all, or thinks he has it all under control, suddenly finding himself spinning out of control, then Winterbottom's running theme appears to be young lovers meeting in international settings and / or traveling great distances. At least he seems to be able to handle a diversity of settings, even in one film. I'd recommend him as the next James Bond director.
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Albert Pyun may be a more obscure director than Winterbottom but he is just as fascinating. Never has such cinematic potential gone so awry. Weirdly, I have seen more Pyun films than Winterbottoms.
Pyun was born in San Diego, raised in Hawaii, and ended up in Japan where he worked with Akira Kurosawa, thanks to a friendship that developed between Pyun and Toshiro Mifune, who had seen a few of Pyun's short films and sent him a fan letter. Mifune introduced him to Kurosawa (and this, during the time when the two great Japanese filmmakers supposedly had a falling out). All this in his late teens.
Pyun worked on DERSU UZALA and then returned to the states to train as a trailer editor, then to Los Angeles to start his own company. But instead of following the career path of a Kurosawa doing dramas and adventure films founded in existential humanism, Pyun devolved into straight to video fare. His first film, THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, was something of a hit, but since then he has made Charles Band-level movies.
OMEGA DOOM (Columbia Tristar, 1997, $14.95, Tuesday, December 28) is very typical of current Pyun fare. Limited use of sets (there are about three). Recycling of the same shots over and over. The promise of but refusal to perform action. In one of his 8, 000 straight to video films, Rutger Hauer plays a robot who has accidentally turned good, now roaming a landscape ruined after the TERMINATOR-inspired war of the humans versus the robots. He settles in one tiny neighborhood, pitting a two groups of stalemated robots against each other, some vicious killer robots and a group of Road Warrior-looking robots led by Shannon Whirry, who doesn't even take off her clothes.
If this sounds familiar that's because Pyun borrows the premise from YOJIMBO (itself taken from RED HARVEST). To make you think that he is taking it from Fistful of Dollars, he adds a wee bit of spaghetti western guitar on the music track. At least it is good to see that Kurosawa still has an influence on him.
This is an arid movie with no suspense and no action. The disc is equally bereft. It's a widescreen transfer, but I kinda don't believe that it started life thus. The extras consist of a bio of Hauer, trailers for three other Hauer films from Columbia, and subtitles.
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VENUS RISING (Columbia Tristar, 1995, $14.95, Tuesday, December 28) is another bleak vision of the future that takes the position that freedom is slavery. It begins with grotty maggot-ridden views of a prison, called F134, where children are starving. Why are there children on this prison island in the first place? That is not clear, at first. Or ever, really. In any case, somehow an adult girl named Eve (Audie England) who was born on the prison island escapes. She washes up on the shore of some place that seems to be called Pacifica, a resort type town whose rich inhabitants maintain their emotional equilibrium with a succession of pills dispense from portable pyramid-shaped pharmacy, and amuse themselves with virtual reality cruising. Jessica Alba plays the young version of Eve in what appear to be flashbacks.
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Eve drops into town and immediately stabs to death a man who tries to pick her up on the beach. Then she falls into the hands of rich lonely matron Maria (Meredith Salenger), who also sees her on the beach but from her balcony window. Eve and Maria soon switch identities, thanks to Maria falling off a cliff (one last journey for Natty Gann) and Eve, who doesn't know how to use such things as telephones, begins to rise in society, first while working at a bar and later through the help of investments made for her on-line by a pathetic next door neighbor, Jimmie (Joel Grey, of all people).
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"Drama" or "suspense" comes in the form of Nick (Billy Wirth), a fellon working off his crime as a bounty hunter controlled by the local police. He is on the hunt for, it appears, both Eve and what I took to be her brother but who appears to be her convict island boyfriend, a character named Vegas (Costas Mandylor). Meanwhile, in VR cruising fantasies, Eve is fucking Nick, each disguised as their preferred physical idea.
Though prominently displayed on the box cover, Morgan Fairchild only appears for two brief scenes, as the bodyguard-protected owner of the club where Eve works. She instantly becomes Eve's role model. In a coda set three years later we see the fruits of that mentorhood.
This film is dreadful and doesn't make any sense. It is a must see. From its Kubrick-esque S&M love scenes glimpsed on a train in the virtual zone to the RED SHOE DIARIES music track, it is a marvel of bad choices. The film comes in a full fame image, with no extras beyond three trailers, for RESIDENT EVIL, UNDERWORLD, and HELLBOY.
The mythical land of Pacifica also appears in CYBER BANDITS (Columbia Tristar, 1995, $14.95, Tuesday, December 28), released the same year but with no other connection to VENUS RISING. The source for this film is LADY FROM SHANGHAI, as Alexandra Paul, the mistress of a mean rich computer guy, enlists the aid of their yacht navigator to steal some kind of virtual reality device. They have a few adventures in a faux BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA milieu. But basically I was forgetting this movie even as I was watching it.
It's another full frame presentation with negligible extras. Adam Ant, Grace Jones, and Robert Hays are in it.
Even artier than CODE 46 is Michael Haneke's TIME OF THE WOLF (LE TEMPS DU LOUP) (Palm Pictures, 2003, $24.99, Tuesday, December 14).
There are roughly four great living European directors, and each one is roughly a disciple of a previous great European director. Lars Von Trier worships Dreyer. Theo Angelopoulos prays at the shrine of Antonioni. Gaspar Noé blends Fassbiner, Herzog, and Godard. And Michael Haneke, an Austrian whose last few films have been in French, appears to be in the tradition of Bergman.
The connection is made clear in this latest film, with a title resonant with Bergman's HOUR OF THE WOLF (although Haneke's title comes from an ancient German poem), and a story that comes across like a variation on Bergman's SHAME. In his Bergman obsession Haneke is not unlike Tarkovsky, whose film STALKER is another arty post-apocalypse meditation, and whose SACRIFICE was also a Bergmanesque contemplation of the effects of social decay on a family. And like Von Trier's ZENTROPA, trains and train tracks figure in the plot as significant omens.
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What Haneke also shares with these other three directors is seriousness of intent. There aren't a lot of laughs in a Haneke film, despite the fact that one of his earliest films is called FUNNY GAMES. That one is also his most brutal. TIME OF THE WOLF starts out innocently enough but quickly plunges into despair. Anna (Isabelle Huppert) and her husband and two kids arrive at their country cabin with a sense of urgency. Inside they find another couple who claim squatters rights. A quick contretemps leaves Anna and her kids on the road. Actually in the fields, running to and fro like animals.
The reason for all this strife is the fact that in some unexplained fashion (apocalyptic art films never explain) the major cities have run out of food. People were fleeing urban areas. Anna and Co. were seeking out the food they customarily stored in their cabin. Later encounters with other pockets of inhumanity leave the socio-economic reasons for the crisis unexplained.
Anna and her kids find a village, but no one will help them. When society breaks down, everyone becomes selfish (although this section doesn't strike me as a consequence of apocalypse — it's what people are like in the city outside my door right now). They end up in a barn that they accidentally burn down, and then, following some train tracks, end up in station where an ad hoc group of refugees (including Beatrice Dalle of BETTY BLUE) huddle under the cruel leadership of the guy with the gun.
This ragtag group of degraded human beings experience the usual effects of apocalypse: rape, injustice, suicide. They also begin to tell each other stories about some long-ago group of gods known as The Just, who among other things sacrifice themselves for other by leaping into flames. The film ends on what surprisingly appears to be an upbeat note, with the gun-toting leader of the group comforting Anna's son after he attempts to mimic the gods to save the others. The last shot of the film is a long tracking show of the countryside as if from a train, with the sound of a train on the audio track. Is this the train that is coming to save them, as promised by the leader? Or is it testimony to their demise by portraying a landscape cleansed of all vestiges of that destructive virus, human beings?
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TIME OF THE WOLF comes with a host of extras that differ from the Region 2 disc. That disc has a 10-minute making of and some footage of the cast at Cannes. This R1 disc sports two brief EPK interviews with Haneke and Huppert, some EPK behind the scenes footage, the trailer, and trailers for other Palm pictures (SPRINGTIME IN A SMALL TOWN, LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE, RECONSTRUCTION).
Letters
From From Sean Richardson:
"Sorry to ruin your theory, since I love FREAKS AND GEEKS and Tarantino, but the ventriloquist episode of FREAKS didn't air on NBC at all. It was one of the three that only aired on Fox Family Channel. Don't remember the exact date off-hand, but if the show started on FFC in September of 2000, it would've aired sometime around late October or early November. Still, it's always possible Tarantino saw an advance copy. It's also possible that it went the other way, that Tarantino had the title in mind and they worked it into the episode."
NEXT TIME: The year's best and worst movies, DVDs, and film books, plus more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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