I can’t write an authoritative stinging indictment of Tokyo because I’ve only experienced a bit of it. I’ve only been here eight hours and I haven’t wandered outside of the Shibuya and Shinjuku districts. But I’m hugely unimpressed so far. I shouldn’t even be saying this but Tokyo strikes me as corporate and arid and car-friendly and full of delights for rich people. It’s a bigger, chillier, smoggier Houston with sushi and noodles and taller buildings and more stylishly dressed women. It’s titanic and rich and sprawling and so what?
It was all but burned to the ground in 1945 thanks to Curtis LeMay so the buildings are all less than 50 or 60 years old, and it just doesn’t have any character or flavor or aroma to speak of. Certainly not the kind that reaches out and pulls you in. I’m sure my opinion would be a bit more favorable if I had the time to really get into it but this is what I feel right now.
All I could think as I wandered around was “why did I come here again?”
And it’s not much of a walking city either — you have to constantly walk up and down stone staircases to cross streets. And what is there to look at anyway beside restaurant signs and the women? Big buildings are a deadly bore. And the air is light brown — I went to the top floor of the TMG building and you can see a dense layer of smog hanging over the whole town (like the air in LA in the ’70s), and there are so many people walking around with those white surgical masks that I feel I’m part of an epidemic in Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion.
People of serious character and accomplishment love Tokyo so I should probably hold my tongue, but this place feels like downtown LA or Detroit or Honolulu or….I haven’t been to soulless Sao Paulo but I’ve heard it has a similar vibe. I’m not going to get all bent out of shape about this, but honestly? I almost hate it here. There’s nothing architecturally alluring or unique and the girls are prettier in Vietnam, and they all have smaller, shapelier, more perfectly pedicured feet than the women here. I’m sorry but that’s what I’ve observed.
Too many people have told me the food in Tokyo is terrific so there’s no disputing that aspect. (I’ll be going to Ichiban, the Lost in Translation sushi bar, in a couple of hours). But I wonder if it can beat the drop-dead scrumptious food I’ve eaten in Hanoi over the last three or four days.
I’m not sure I’ll ever return here. In fact I know I won’t. Give me Paris or Berlin or Rome or Havana or London — any town with a personality and the right kind of seductive flair. A town that has something you immediately want more of, and that puts you in the right kind of mood. Tokyo is my idea of a town you really don’t need to visit. Life is short. You can have it.
The one thing that really impressed me? Some of the Tokyo taxis have an automatic rear-door opening-and-closing mechanism so when the driver pulls over to let a fare in…pop! The door swings open and then closes at the push of a button.
Here’s what a filmmaker friend recently advised: “In Tokyo go to Nakano Broadway, the largest toy-collectible mall in the world. It will give you an insight into Japanese culture being a mixture of extreme depth and extreme youthful enthusiasm for characters and toys. Go to YoYoGi Park in Shibuya. Great stores around it and an amazing shrine at its center. Go to Akihabara and geek out on the electronics and walk around Ginza for a day or two. Go to the palace and walk the gardens — even in winter they are amazing. I also recommend you make an appointment to visit the Ghibli museum. Go to the big department stores in Ikebukuro.”
I am completely and fully prepared to ignore everything my friend recommended for the rest of my days on this planet and into the next life. And when I say “prepared” I mean I am absolutely at peace with this notion.
I’m staying on the 6th floor with a nice view of the park across the street.
There are a lot of squat toilets in Tokyo, which is why they have this sign explaining to the sophistos that you’re not supposed to squat with the regular sit-down model.
The five-day Hanoi Film Festival begins today…well, tonight for me. My Hue-to-Hanoi flight leaves this morning around 8:30 am, but I’ll need to settle down and check in and file a bit before opening-night festivities. I’ll be working it for four days straight and then leaving Hanoi for Tokyo around midnight on Wednesday, 11.28. And I definitely intend to rent a scooter and buzz around while wearing a surgical mask. And I’m looking forward to whatever occurs and hoping to see something striking or even startling.
Here are the 14 films in competition. Two of the non-regional films — A Separation and We Need To Talk About Kevin — are last year’s news, but it should be interesting to gauge reactions to Michael Haneke‘s Amour, which I’ve now seen three times. The festival is handing out cash prizes to regional filmmakers. There’s a trip to Ha Long Bay planned for Tuesday.
Sonja Heinen, Berlinale co-production market and a project manager of the World Cinema Fund, is running or officiating over the Hanoi film campus, which is some kind of advisory-instructional program. I don’t know her but she’s German and my maternal grandfather was of German ancestry and here we are in Hanoi with bombs bursting and bullets whizzing past our heads.
Baby, it’s dark outside at 5:20 am. Actually it’s now 5:40 am. Time flies when you’re filing.
I think I’m done with war documentaries that make a point of not offering any sort of opinion about anything — no history or context, no political point of view, just “this is war, war is hell, taste it.” Well, I’m sick of that shit after seeing Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger‘s Restrepo, a bravely captured, technically first-rate documentary about a year under fire in Afghanistan’s Korangal Valley, a.k.a., “the valley of death.”
There’s no question whatsover that this movie lies through omission about what’s really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense. I found myself becoming more and more angry about this after catching Restrepo two nights ago at the Walter Reade theatre, and especially after doing some homework.
Hetherington and Junger spent a little more than a year (May 2007 to July 2008) with several U.S. soldiers in that besieged neck of the woods. They focused mainly on the grunts’ hilltop camp called Restrepo (pronounced res-TREP-o and named for a medic in their unit who’d been killed). The film does a clean and competent job of portraying their endless firefights with Taliban forces and their community dealings with the locals, and it acquaints us with various members of the hilltop platoon — their faces, lives, impressions — in what seems like a frank and forthright manner.
Except the kind of frankness that Restrepo is offering is, to put it mildly, selective. For realism’s sake Restrepo chooses to isolate its audience inside the insular operational mentality of the grunts — “get it done,” “fill up more sandbags,” “ours not to reason why” and so on. In so doing it misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating. Is there any other way to describe a decision to keep viewers ignorant about any broader considerations — anything factual or looming in a political/tactical/situational sense — that might impact the fate of the subjects, or their mission?
Imagine a documentary about the day-to-day life of Steve Schmidt, John McCain‘s ’08 presidential campaign manager, that ignores how the campaign is going and instead focuses on Schmidt’s relationship with his family and his dentist and his kids’ homework and his visits to a local cafe and his dealings with the guy who mows the lawn once a week. What would you call that approach? Thorough? Honest?
Rest assured that if I was one of those Korangal troops I would ask a shit-load of questions about the general game plan, as in what the fuck are we doing there and how the hell do we ever get out? But nobody wants to go there, least of all Hetherington and Junger, and so Restrepo is just about cigarettes and weapons and wrestling matches and firefights and sandbags and a cow that got stuck in some barbed wire and had to be killed, and then had to be paid for in order to chill down the locals.
I’m of the view that the Afghanistan War is pure quicksand, and that we can’t help to prevail (i.e., defeat the Taliban or at least reduce them to insignificance) because we’re foreign invaders and sooner or later all invaders are out-lasted by the natives, and that natural organisms will infect and weaken them, and as a result they’ll eventually pack up and go home. Ask H.G. Wells or Ho Chi Minh.
We’re not stopping another 9/11 from happening by fighting there. We’re just fighting a series of skirmishes and offensives that will continue for years to come, perhaps even decades, and which can’t hope to lead to “victory.” It would be great if the Taliban could be finally defeated, sure, but it’s not going to happen and any military or intelligence person who claims otherwise is dreaming. The bottom line is that (a) we can’t win and (b) there’s no way out other than just quitting.
Quitting is un-American, you say? Shameful, unthinkable, cowardly? Well, two months ago U.S. forces up and quit the whole Korangal Valley offensive. That’s right — they shined it. The lives of 42 Americans who died fighting there over the last four years? Water under the bridge, U.S commanders decided. Better to cut bait than waste more lives.
(l.) Sebastian Junger, (r.) Tim Hetherington during filming.
In fact the general thinking (as expressed in this 4.16 N.Y. Times story) is that U.S. troops’ presence in the valley may have actually made matters worse by creating Taliban sympathies among once-neutral Korangalis.” Or so it says in the Times story as well as this Wikipedia summary.
This massive fact has been ignored by Restrepo — they could have easily added a tagline in the closing credits — and was not mentioned by Hetherington during the post-screening q & a.
I asked Hetherington if he could offer his civilian-observer, non-military perspective about whether he could foresee any circumstance that might allow U.S. commanders to decide, as they’ve done in the case of the Korangal Valley, that U.S. efforts to defeat the Taliban simply aren’t working and that it’s time to just pack it in. Hetherington got my drift, but he ignored it and blathered on about how the Afghanistan situation is different from Vietnam in the ’60s.
Hetherington has been a war photographer for years, and guys like him are basically action junkies — let’s face it. He seems almost invested in the Afghanistan conflict, perversely, because it provided him with a year’s worth of adrenaline rushes as well as the opportunity to create a noteworthy film and contribute great pics to Vanity Fair. In any case he’s apparently determined to follow the script set out by The Hurt Locker — i.e., our film isn’t preaching, not taking a stand, just showing how it is for the troops, etc.
(l.) Hetherington, Rachel Reid during Friday night’s q & a at Walter Reade theatre.
“What I’m asking,” I repeated, “is if there’s any way out of this conflict, or are we going to be there…you know, five or ten more years or indefinitely or what?” Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan researcher for Human Rights Watch who was sitting next to Hetherington, said that U.S. allies were getting a little fidgety and that the U.S. economy was impacting the situation and other generic blah-blah stuff.
Restrepo doesn’t tell you what’s going on and Hetherington and Reid weren’t in the mood, so consider the following:
A 12.22.09 CNN story by Peter Bergen reported that “a December 22 briefing, prepared by the top U.S. intelligence official in Afghanistan and obtained by CNN, concludes that the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan is increasingly effective.
“The briefing, which warns that the ‘situation is serious,’ was prepared by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn last month. His assessment is that the Taliban’s ‘organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding” and the group is capable of much greater frequency of attacks and varied locations of attacks.
“According to the unclassified briefing, the insurgency can now sustain itself indefinitely because of three factors: (a) The increased availability of bomb-making technology and material; (b) The Taliban’s access to two major funding streams, one from the opium trade and the other from overseas donations from Muslim countries, which reach the Taliban by courier or through a system of informal banks known as ‘hawalas’ that operate across much of the Islamic world; and (c) the Taliban’s continuing ability to recruit foot soldiers based on the perception that they ‘retain the religious high-ground,’ and factors such as poverty and tribal friction.
This morning N.Y. Times columnist Frank Richreminded that Gen. Stanley McChrystal “is calling the much-heralded test case for administration counterinsurgency policy — the de-Talibanization and stabilization of the Marja district — ‘a bleeding ulcer.’ And that, relatively speaking, is the good news from this war.”
“U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top allied military commander in Afghanistan, sat gazing at maps of Marjah as a Marine battalion commander asked him for more time to oust Taliban fighters from a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
“‘You’ve got to be patient,’ Lt. Col. Brian Christmas told McChrystal. ‘We’ve only been here 90 days.’
“‘How many days do you think we have before we run out of support by the international community?’ McChrystal replied.
A charged silence settled in the stuffy, crowded chapel tent at the Marine base in the Marjah district.
“‘I can’t tell you, sir,’ the tall, towheaded, Fort Bragg, N.C., native finally answered.
“‘I’m telling you,’ McChrystal said. ‘We don’t have as many days as we’d like.'”
I spoke this morning with Greenberg star Ben Stiller inside a semi-quiet restaurant (i.e., not really quiet enough) adjacent to the Waldorf Astoria’s main lobby. It went well, perhaps of my certainty that Stiller delivers the performance of his career in Noah Baumbach‘s intensely granular film about midlife stagnation and L.A. loneliness. No ambiguity in your head means calm and clarity.
Greenberg (Focus Features, 3.19 limited) is easily the most intriguing film of the new year, and more than worth a tumble. It doesn’t exactly “entertain,” and yet it does — it’s just operating in a low-key way that’s almost entirely about observation, and without a single false note. If your girlfriend doesn’t like it (and she may not), you may want to think about dumping her. Seriously. Because Greenberg is about what a lot of 30ish and 40ish people who haven’t achieved fame and fortune are going through, or will go through. It’s dryly amusing at times, but it’s not kidding around.
Greenberg is a fascinating character-driven drama about Roger Greenberg (Stiller), a neurotic 41 year-old who’s caretaking his younger brother’s Los Angeles home while the brother and his family are on a vacation in Vietnam. It’s mainly about a curious attract-repel relationship between Greenberg and the brother’s gangly, emotionally vulnerable assistant (Greta Gerwig), and an amiable ex-musician friend (Rhys Ifans) with whom Greenberg shares various confessions/reflections.
Things don’t “happen” as much as we learn more and more about Greenberg’s internals. The basic drill is that he’s become stuck in a moderately unhappy fall-back position in his life, and is close to astonished that things haven’t turned out as well as he thought they might when he was younger. He blew a shot at being in a successful rock band in his 20s, we’re told, and is now working as a carpenter in Brooklyn. Not miserable but neurotic and fickle, and certainly not content.
Is Greenberg funny? In a LQTM sense, yeah, but to most people LQTM isn’t what they go to movies for. I do, however. I was quietly smirking at Greenberg the whole time, having a quiet little blast with it. And then it grew on me the second time. I didn’t realize how sublime the ending is until I saw it again. That’s my fault.
What is clear from the start is that for Stiller’s Greenberg, carpentry won’t do. He’s too much of an artist-searcher complainer, and it’s not enough to anesthetize the demons. The film reminds that when you have a hungry visionary Bengal tiger inside you, you’d best express it or the tiger will eat you up from within. That or you’ll start collapsing bit by bit.
I know that tune myself. My main job in my early to mid 20s was trimming trees, which didn’t work for me either. At all. I was fucking around on the margins as a party-hound and a rock-band drummer and a chaser of skirt. And the Bengal tiger began to growl more and more loudly — let me out! — and I began to see myself as a failure because I wasn’t trying hard enough to make that happen.
I’d told Stiller earlier that I was impressed with how deeply Greenberg just settles in with the manner and psychology of Stiller’s character without feeling the need to go all “story” on the audience. A genuinely ballsy move on Noah’s part. The humor is so subdued and embedded within situation and milieu that it’s not humor — it’s John Cassevetes-like introspection. I’m obviously saying that with respect.
Stiller’s performance, in any event, seems to me like a landmark-type thing — a seriously ego-free inhabiting of antsy-quirk neuroticism. Being, not acting, and certainly with any audience comfort-winks. A breakthrough of some kind.
If there’s a rowdy commercial horse laugh in Greenberg, I missed it — and bravo to that. I didn’t “laugh” when I saw it, but I was constantly LQTM-ing by way of surprisingly intimate recognition. I felt that I was communing in part with my late brother, Tony. Greenberg is nothing if not relentlessly itself, and never seems to go for schtick of any kind. Personal recognition laughter, as most of us know, is never “hah-hah-hah.” As Michael O’Donoghue once said, making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.
“I think you connected in the same way with the movie that we all did while making it,” Stiller replied in an e-mail — eloquently, I thought. “I too recognize Greenberg, and I have to say I’ve never had an experience like this, where a character was so specifically written, and I ended up feeling a connection with that aspect of myself. I actually feel protective of him — or maybe that aspect of people I love who have not had the good fortune to have outward success or acknowledgement in this world. It can be very painful, just to get through the days. To get past your own self imposed barriers, that are all very real.
“I feel very fortunate to have had this experience, and I love Noah for it. He is a truly good person, who as you said did something brave in movies now — allowing the character’s real, incremental growth, to be the story. I learned a lot from him.”
It breaks my heart to seriously consider and in fact strongly suspect that Barack Obama peaked as a campaigner, and that he just doesn’t have the guts to stand up like Harry Truman or Theodore Roosevelt and fight the big-money pigs (Republicans, corporates) who have cajoled and berated this country in a pit of special-interest slime and quicksand — a pit that fewer and fewer people believe we have any chance of digging ourselves out of.
Courage is a funny thing. You can talk about it all you want, but when the moment comes you need to find it within and use it. You need to grim up and look the other guy in the face and say “that’s enough” and “back off or I will deliver consequences.” And some people just don’t have that fibre, that constitution. Either Obama feels he has to be mellow and accomodating at all costs because he can’t be an angry African-American, or he’s just naturally wimpy when it comes to the tough stuff. Either way a necessary Presidential character element just doesn’t seem to be there.
In a column last Sunday titled “After The Massachusetts Massacre,” Frank Rich compared Obama’s dealings with the avaricious corporates and their paid legislative whores to John F. Kennedy‘s response to U.S. Steel’s Roger Blough after the latter announced a $6 a ton price hike in April 1962.
“Last year [Obama] pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan,” Rich wrote. “In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, Obama might look at another pivotal moment in the Kennedy presidency — and this time heed the example.
“The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.
“Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to ‘fight’ unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book ‘President Kennedy,’ reporters were left ‘literally gasping.’
“The young president called out big steel for threatening ‘economic recovery and stability’ while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at ‘a high point in popular support.’
“Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.”
Former Army lieutenant William Calley made his first public apology four days ago (i.e., 8.19) for the infamous 1968 My Lai massacre, in which he participated and for which he was convicted for the premeditated murder of 104 women, children and elderly folk on 3.16.68. Nearly 500 non-combatants were reportedly slaughtered that day in the village, which was actually called Son My.
(l.) George Lois’s famous Calley-and-the-kids Esquire cover; (r.) an August 1971 National Lampoon cover.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” Calley reportedly told a Kiwanis Club gathering in Columbus Georgia, last Wednesday evening. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
Calley has also been reported as saying that “if you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a 2nd Lieutenant getting orders from my commander” — Cpt. Ernest Medina, he meant — “and I followed them. Foolishly, I guess.
The guy says nothing about his role in one of the worst U.S. military atrocities for over 40 years? What did he do with those ghosts and demons all that time? Did they take up residence in a guest room? Calley’s silence seems especially appalling considering a 10.6.07 Daily Mail story called “Found: The Monster of My Lai“, which states that the first time he thought about openly discussing it (but only for an hour) was because he thought he might pocket a big check.
Wikipedia summarizes the story as follows: “In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, ‘Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I’ll talk to you for precisely one hour.’ When the journalist ‘showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions’, Calley left.”
Calley during last Wednesday’s appearance in Columbus, Georgia.
At the time of his conviction on 3.31.71 (which resulted in a commuted sentence and being freed from house arrest after three years), a reported 79% of Middle Americans disagreed with the verdict, seeing Calley as a scapegoat. It is presumed that many U.S. soldiers wasted Vietnamese civilians during that infernal conflict, and that Calley is just the only one who stood trial for it.
For what it’s worth I never saw the My Lai massacre as strictly analagous to the citizen-killing situation depicted in Bruce Beresford‘s Breaker Morant. To go by Seymour Hersh‘s reportings the My Lai killings didn’t seem strategically necessary as much as impulsive murders that were primarily emotional in nature. It’s too bad that Oliver Stone‘s Pinkville, which would have dealt with the massacre and the whistle-blower who finally revealed what happened, was deep-sixed.
Unless he somehow manages to commit suicide, Bernie Madoff is going to die in jail. That seems appropriate to me, but I’m wondering why he didn’t just run for it when he had the chance. He knew the Feds were on his tail and it was just a matter of time. I’m asking because something in me can’t help but sympathize with a caged bird, especially when he/she is looking at life in the slammer.
If I was Madoff I would have prepared for my escape and disappearance during my ponzi-scam days. All criminals need to face the fact that sooner or later they’ll be forced to lam it. I would have socked away massive amounts of cash in a few Swiss, Cayman Islands and Venezuelan bank accounts under fake names, with debit and credit cards attached to each account. And I would have hired pros to create several sets of first-rate fake IDs and fake passports. And I would have arranged in advance for plastic surgery with a first-rate specialist based in Moscow.
I would have slipped out of Manhattan before the Feds arrested me. I would have taken a private plane to northeastern Canada and then another to Iceland, and then a third to Belgium. I would then enjoy a leisurely car trip to Russia, my pockets and briefcase stuffed with several hundred grand in Euros, ready to bribe whenever necessary. I’d meet my plastic surgeon somewhere in the Ukraine — haven’t decided where.
After the operation I’d move to Tartu in Estonia and recover for six or seven weeks. Then I’d drive down to Moscow and hire myself a team of four elite bodyguards — two guys, two women — and invest in the finest electronic security systems and outfit all my homes with them.
Then I’d make my way to Vietnam. I’d probably build myself a high-security home in the Central Highlands and live in it for two or three months — no more. The eventual plan would be to have several “safe houses” but never stay in any one for very long. Always moving, never sleeping with more than one eye closed, “like Yassir fucking Arafat.”
I’d buy a 100-foot sailing craft and move around from port to exotic port like a wandering character in a Joseph Conrad novel. I’d hire three full-time prostitutes to travel with me, but they’d have to be prostitutes who know how to sail. I might smoke opium from time to time. I’d pay for even more hookers to drop by on weekends, but they’d have to be highly educated and well-read. No booze, no cigarettes. But I’d chill out with quaaludes from time to time.
I’d volunteer with Red Cross organizations to help the poor. I’d move to Darfur and try and use my money to try and purchase some level of comfort or protection for the poor who live there. I’d move the operation to the Amazon jungle from time to time. I’d see about getting to know Hugo Chavez (although he might not want to know me). I’d travel to the South Pole and then to South Africa, and then take a ferry to Madagascar. I’d catch plays in London twice a year. I’d buy a studio in Montmartre that I’d visit every four or five months for a week or two. I’d always stay inside days, reading and watching movies on my 52″ LCD flatscreen, and working out on a treadmill. I’d go out to dinner and for walks in the evenings, wearing shades and a fishing hat.
I’d eventually get pinched, of course. Sooner or later somebody would sell me out or spot me (even with my altered appearance). But I might stay free for two or three years, and at least I’d have a great adventure under my belt and many things to remember before spending the rest of my life in miserable confinement.
After seeing and loving Tropic Thunder I figured Pineapple Express (which opens one week before Thunder, on 8.6) couldn’t be quite as funny, despite the many months of advance praise. I trusted the buzz about James Franco being a revelation, but that “meh” Variety review by Justin Chang lowered the expectation factor a notch or two. I finally saw it last Monday night at the Grove, in any event, and about 20 or 30 minutes in I said to myself, “Wow, this is a wee bit funnier than Ben Stiller‘s movie.”
One reason is that Pineapple Express is a classic Cheech-and-Chong-meet- Laurel-and-Hardy stoner comedy. Thunder has a flaky-surreal, stoned-in-Vietnam weirdness thing going on, but Pineapple Express is just funny-funny in a character-chemistry way, although it takes a weirdly violent detour over the last half hour or so. They’re both great rides but their funny bones have different DNA.
The reason for the infectious Pineapple humor is the dumb rapport between Franco’s Saul, a low-rent pot dealer, and Seth Rogen‘s Dale Denton, a 25 year-old joint-sucking process server who’s reasonably bright but is also fairly silly and clueless at times, especially when the heat’s on. The best parts of this film are simply about Rogen and Franco talking to each other in a room. Their back-and-forths are beautifully acted. Franco plays the sweet, not-educated, not-very-bright Stan Laurel character and Seth Rogen does the blustery, somewhat more assertive but almost-as-clueless Oliver Hardy thing. Some of their scenes together are inspired. I was levitating out of my seat.
I also love how even the bad guys in this film (i.e., big-time drug dealers and their gun-toting goons) are given quirks, personalities, back-stories, odd traits and whatnot. Everybody has a bit of a story to tell and some weirdness to spread around.
I have to split for the afternoon, but I’ll have more to say about Pineapple Express over the coming days. It’s easily the best Judd Apatow-produced comedy since Superbad. It almost erased my memories of Jason Siegel‘s jiggly man-boobs in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. If it’s legit to suggest Robert Downey, Jr.’s performance in Tropic Thunder is Oscar-worthy (and I do feel that way), it also has to be cool to talk about Franco in the same light. As a Best Supporting Actor contender, I mean. The man is dead perfect in the role. It’s easily the best thing he’s done since that TNT James Dean biopic…what was that, seven years ago?
I was interviewed Monday morning by a Washington Post writer about stoner comedies, and today she wrote back to ask my feelings about Pineapple Express. “The first three quarters makes for a bona fide classic — I would go so far as to say legendary — stoner comedy,” I wrote back.
An over-examined subject, agreed, but The Australian‘s Eddie Cockrell has nonetheless interviewed yours truly, USA Today and Talk Cinema’s Harlan Jacobson, and Hopscotch Films’ co-owner Troy Lum about the uniform snubbing in this country of all the Iraq War movies. And he’s done a good job of mapping it all out in very precise detail. The piece ran two days ago. Explanation #1: “Iraq war movies have all been guilt-trippers about an ongoing conflict, whereas the Vietnam movies were all made after the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy.” Explanation #2: “There have been no surreal, eye-popping, epic-scaled Iraq war movies along the lines of Apocalypse Now or anything that has attempted to sum up the tragedy of the war, except for one, In the Valley of Elah, which deserved a better reception.” Explanation #3: “Everyone is waiting for a facsimile of the last 40 per cent of Stanley Kubrick‘s Full Metal Jacket, which is arguably the best Vietnam War film.”
Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster (Universal, 11.2) is, of course, naturally… hello?…an absolute Best Picture contender because it’s a straight, robust, high-velocity crime saga in the grand New York movie tradition of ’70s and ’80s Sidney Lumet. Which, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is a very cool and vogue-ish thing to be churning out right now, and not for ephemeral reasons.
This is not a first-rate cops-and-dealers drama by the director of Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Black Hawk Down as much as a wonderfully focused and flavorful time-machine ride back to the gritty-stinky Abe Beame-Ed Koch world of Serpico, Prince of the City and The French Connection.
I’m not speaking of some sophisticated film-maven exercise but a dead-on, true-blue revisiting — a submission by a great director to an ethos and an aesthetic that feels absolutely real and true to itself, which is to say true to what happened and particularly the way life caused two dogged, determined locomotives — legendary Harlem smack dealer Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and his opposite number, the doggedly honest Det. Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) — to crash into each other’s fate.
The result isn’t the craziest or most thrilling New York crime film you’ve ever seen, but one with a more authentic and character-rich sense of itself and its milieu than anything released in a very long time. It’s a film with absolute balls-to-the-wall integrity that can’t miss with audiences, and it tells a plain, strong story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It ought to score a bulls-eye with critics and the Academy and if it doesn’t there’s something wrong, and I don’t mean with the film.
On top of which it’s the best film of this type — complex, interesting, sympathetic good guy vs. complex, interesting half-sympathetic bad guy — since Heat.
Does this saga of the rise and fall of Lucas make you tear up and cry at some point? Does it unleash an emotional meltdown in your chest somewhere during the middle of the third act? No, and shame on anyone for asking. Did The French Connection or The Departed moisten tear ducts? American Gangster is what it is, and deserves a salute for this. It doesn’t pander or amplify or push buttons or pull any cheap tricks.
I was a wee bit disappointed when last Tuesday night’s screening came to an end. It had begun around 7 pm, and the closing credits were rolling north around 9:40 pm. What…only 158 minutes? I’d been given all the nutrition any moviegoer could possibly ask for, but I was Oliver Twist. I wanted more.
This is one of those movies that is so good and cocksure in its New York textures and tough hammer-like attitude, that you’re saying to yourself early on, “I don’t want this to end.” I wanted the indulgent director’s cut right then and there. I wanted Ridley to swing for the bleachers and make it three hours. Hell, I could have gone for three and a half. I wanted to pig out.
I mean, my God…even Cuba Gooding comes off pretty well in a co-starring role, and he’s one of those guys with an Irish banshee going “whooooo” behind his back.
Based on a New York magazine article by Mark Jacobson (“The Return of Superfly“) and working from a screenplay by Steve Zallian, Gangster follows the paths of Lucas and Roberts — step by step, chapter by chapter — and how they lead to a third-act showdown.
Lucas’s heroin-dealing heyday was from ’69 or so to 1976. He claimed in the Jacobson article to have grossed $1 million a day at one point. A lawman once described his operation as “one of the most outrageous international dope- smuggling gangs ever.” Lucas’s claim to fame is that he smuggled in his Vietnamese kilos (98% pure heroin) in the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers.
Lucas, we learn right off the bat, is a somewhat conservative guy. We first meet him as a driver/assistant for Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson (a cameo role handled by Clarence Williams III), who’s instilled in Lucas a respect for the old way of doing things. We also see from the get-go that he’s perfectly capable of pouring gasoline over some guy, lighting him up and then filling him with hot lead. But he also gets up at 5 ayem, eats breakfast in the same luncheonette every day, and takes his mother to church on Sundays.
He’s a villain, sure, but he’s fairly likable (he’s Denzel, after all) and semi-respec- table. He’s not totally crazy, and he dresses conservatively and runs his business (i.e., providing a product) like any conservative businessman would. Selling heroin is like spreading a kind of death, but I’m of the libertarian view that people have the right to dope their souls to hell if they’re so inclined. I also think guys like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are just as evil as guys like Lucas, and perhaps even more so.
The first significant thing we see Roberts, a Manhattan detective, do is come upon a suitcase stuffed with a million untraceable bucks and promptly turn every last bill into his station chief. (Anyone who says they wouldn’t at least think about skimming a few grand is either stupid or lying.) Obviously he’s a very different bird than Frank, and yet the film gradually persuades us that they’re not so far apart.
Both adhere to a strict ethical code that sets them apart from comme ci comme ca colleagues, both see their friendships and family lives crack apart under the strain of their work and their single-minded stubbornness, and both run their own renegade teams to get a risky job done.
Deep down, American Gangster is really a procedural film about the ups and down of running a tough business. I challenge anyone who’s run his or her own business to watch it and say they don’t feel at least a little respect and sympathy for Frank, who is first and foremost a vulture and a scumbag, yes, but is also just trying to run a tight ship. It’s always the mark of a good film to persuade you to feel two ways about the same lead character.
Frank and Richie, in the final analysis, are guys who believe in discipline, hard work, integrity, family, adhering to a code. They both pay for being such hard- cases, but in real life Roberts wound up becoming a full-time attorney and wound up defending Lucas in some matter. Life is funny that way, and it sure as shit isn’t black and white.
Anne Thompsonreported earlier today that there’s a faint chance that Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn, an action drama of sorts about an American pilot (Christian Bale) who escapes from a POW cap in the early days of the Vietnam War, may not make not make its scheduled dates at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival due to last-minute post-production snags. In Telluride a distributor told Thompson that “he had screened and liked the movie, but the film was so tied up with multiple producers and accounting issues” — the cause of many of these problems being the finagling of producer and L.A. club owner Steve Marlton — “that it would be difficult to negotiate a sale.”
Carl Colpaert’s G.I. Jesus is the first truly exceptional Cinevegas film I’ve seen so far.
Compared to the pickings over the last two days, this psychological domestic drama almost feels miraculous. The reception may be more muted out in the real world…who knows? But it’s certainly good enough to play at the Telluride or Toronto Film Festivals, and with some minor refinements it could even end up being distributed.
(l. to r.) G.I. Jesus costar Joe Arquette, director-writer Carl Colpaert, costars Telana Lynum and Patricia Mota following Sunday night’s screening — 8:05 pm.
This is a partly real, partly hallucinatory homecoming story that feels connected to a guilt current that seems to be popping up left and right these days among Iraqi War veterans. At times G.I. Jesus plays like a kind of Coming Home for the 20-something veterans of that conflict.
You know the drill: war veteran comes home, feels alienated and haunted, doesn’t relate, picks up evidence of marital infidelity, freaks out. But G.I. Jesus is trippier and more complex than that.
< ?php include ('/home/hollyw9/public_html/wired'); ?> G.I. Jesus doesn’t unfold from a perspective of a conservative career officer like Bruce Dern’s Cpt. Bob Hyde, the Coming Home character who was heavily invested in the rightness of U.S. handling of the Vietnam War. It stems, rather, from the head of an obviously intelligent young Mexican-American Marine Corporal named Jesus Feliciano (Joe Arquette) who’s haunted by his actions during his time in Iraq. G.I. Jesus is basically about ghosts from that conflict hovering around Jesus, and a growing feeling of betrayal and apartness between himself and his “Dominican princess” wife Claudia (Patricia Mota), whose materialistic ambitions seem, from his perspective, to be creating a gulf between them.
The signatures at work here are “honest,” “unforced,” “thoughtful.” G.I. Jesus has been shot on live video stock (so that it would blend with some real Iraqi war tapes provided by the BBC), which I found exciting, and it’s been extremely well cut by Wayne Kennedy and Nick Nehez, and nicely scored by Carlos Durango.
But there’s a dreamscape element running through the film (as it’s largely happening in Jesus’s head), and because of a decision by director-writer Colpaert to jettison a certain narrative line at the two-thirds mark, the ending, for me, doesn’t quite bring it all home.
I’m always a little bit thrown by movies that inject fantasy into a reality that’s been carefully constructed. Maybe there’s more to it than I realized and I need to see it again.
The key thing, it seems, is that Jesus’s Iraq memories haven’t been erased at the finale (far from it) and the hauntings continue. I’m not entirely sure if all the story strands have been fully dealt with by the finish, but it’s at least a debatable call, and there’s no dismissing the things in G.I. Jesus that succeed.
The film is an unquestioned triumph in the matter of Arquette (a very young Latino who’s costarring in Andrew Davis’s forthcoming The Guardian) and Mota’s performances. I believed every word and gesture from these two; everything they say and feel seems genuine.
Probably because the investment seems so complete. Jesus and Claudia have a young daughter, Marina (played by a 9 year-old firecracker named Telana Lynum), a home in a trailer park, and a texture to their characters — sexual attraction, emotional ties, credible backstory. G.I. Jesus is certainly probing and complex, and the politics behind it are obviously of a leftist humanitarian bent. There’s a shot at one point of a painting meant to evoke the glories of the Bush policy in Iraq. I, for one, found it extremely spooky.
The program notes call G.I. Jesus “an ethereal journey of one man’s struggle…to let go of the pain and agony suffered in combat in order to get on with his life.” That’s not bad, but check out the trailer on the Cineville site for a better taste of it.
Colpaert is the founder of Cineville, and has executive produced several above-average films, including Swimming with Sharks, The Whole Wide World, Hurlyburly, One-Eyed King and The Velocity of Gary. Born in Europe (Belgium, I think) and an American Film Institute grad, Colpaert began as an editor working for legendary producer Roger Corman.
G.I. Jesus costar Joe Arquette. (The only decent shot I could find of the equally dynamic Patricia Mota is on the IMDB, and they don’t allow you to copy and paste.)
I’ve never heard of anything Colpaert has directed before this, but now that I’m stoked I’d like to see The Affair, which he directed and released in ’04.
I mentioned “minor refinements” at the beginning of this piece. Just cosmetic stuff, mainly.
There’s a white Fu Manchu moustache worn in the film by a uniformed American Colonel that I didn’t believe for a second. (Conservative Oliver North types wear only Clark Gable-type moustaches.) Another wrinkle is a young Marine recruitment officer whose hair is too long in the back. Maybe these style choices can be rectified digitally.
I took some pictures of the cast and crew at the Brenden Theatre #5 last night, and I was going to hit the after-party. But I made the mistake of going back to the room to start writing this and took a break on the bed for a second. That was it…out like a light.