Category: 4. Joe Bendel

Review: Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy #1

By Joe Bendel. Gangster and self-styled revolutionary Jacques Mesrine never lacked for nerve, but he might have started to believe his own hype. That never turns out well. At least we have good reason to believe he will not go quietly at the conclusion of Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, the second part of Jean-François Richet’s two-film bio-epic, which opens today in select theaters nationwide.

After his notorious detour through Quebec, Mesrine is back in France, plying his chosen trade.  A celebrity criminal who assiduously cultivates the media, his capture becomes the top priority of Police Commissaire Broussard. Actually, catching the flamboyant Mesrine seems relatively easy – keeping him behind bars was the tricky part. When he teams up with François Besse, an unassuming but equally slippery fellow inmate, all bets are off.

Largely eschewing the personal drama of Killer Instinct, Public features two shoot ‘em up escape sequences, a number of mostly disastrous capers, some cold-blooded killing, and the brilliantly edited conclusion. Essentially, Public delivers the pay-off on Instinct’s emotional investment. Yet all the really juicy supporting turns come in the second, action-driven film. As Besse, the perfectly cast Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is an intense counterpoint to blustery Mesrine. Likewise, Dardenne Brothers regular Olivier Gourmet brings some heft to Broussard, making him a worthy antagonist for Mesrine. Instinct standout Michel Duchaussoy also makes a brief but touching return appearance as the gangster’s meekly loving father.

Of course, it’s problematic using terms like “hero” or even “anti-hero” with regard to the Mesrine films. While most of his outright misogynistic episodes come in the first installment, he is consistently presented as a problematic figure, albeit one not without charm. Arguably, though, it is his effort to preserve his good press that contributes to his undoing. Vanity—it’s a killer.

While Instinct had the occasional slow patch, Enemy speeds along like an escaped fugitive. It is all held together by Vincent Cassel’s dynamic lead performance and the film’s cool, retro-70’s look. Of course, the Mesrine films are best seen as a whole, but of the duology Enemy is definitely the superior film.  It opens today in select theaters nationwide.

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 at 10:21am.

China’s Great Migration: Last Train Home

By Joe Bendel.  Whether you consider it an unintentional disconnect stemming from China’s rapid industrialization or outright hypocrisy, the chasm between official rhetoric and reality is wide and stark in the Communist People’s Republic of China.  It might be go-go times in the big coastal commercial centers, but the rural areas are desperately poor.  An estimated 130 million migrant workers leave for those cities, working long hours for exploitative wages. They only make one annual return home for the traditional New Year holiday. Considered the world’s largest migration of people, documentarian Lixin Fan examines the taxing ritual through the eyes of one struggling Chinese family in Last Train Home, which opened Friday in select theaters nationwide.

Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin are second class citizens, veritable illegal aliens within their own countries. Under the government’s restrictive residency laws, they have few formal rights and no access to social services outside their home district. Yet, they have had little choice but to seek work in China’s teeming urban centers. As a result, they have rarely seen the pre-teen daughter and young son they left to be raised by their grandmother.

Mother-daughter relationships can be difficult even under easier circumstances, but the three years Chen and her daughter Zhang Qin have been separated are taking a toll. Yet Chen cannot entirely blame her for feeling abandoned, even while lamenting that she has not been a good mother.  Unfortunately, the resentful daughter spitefully drops out of school, becoming a migrant worker herself. It is a bitter turn of events for her parents, who now must face the possibility that many of their sacrifices will have been for naught. They also know only too well the rough education she is in for, especially when navigating the yearly mass exodus.

Sharing an obvious stylistic affinity with the Digital Generation of independent Chinese filmmakers, Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan is not afraid of holding long, quiet shots. However, he captured some uncomfortably intimate family drama, while conscientiously refraining from adding outside commentary.  Clearly, the filmmaker built up a large reservoir of trust with his subjects. In return, he lets them speak for themselves in their own words, unfiltered and unhurried.

Train is a very personal film, but it is hard to miss the underlying point that approximately 130 million more migrant Chinese workers currently endure similar conditions. Ironically, China’s peasants used to be the PRC’s politically privileged class, but now the laws are rigged against them.

Should digital auteur Jia Zhangke ever remake John Hughes’ Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, it would probably look a lot like this.  An unvarnished exercise in cinema vérité that takes on tragic dimensions, Train is a pointed corrective to the uncritical media coverage the Chinese government carefully cultivates. It is all the more difficult to shake, since it is not at all clear everything will ultimately work out alright for the Zhang family. Indeed, such is the nature of life.  Uncompromising but deeply humanistic, Train opened last week in select theaters nationwide.

Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 9:53am.

Review: Mesrine, Part I: Killer Instinct

[Editor’s Note: Mesrine was the #1 film at the indie box office this past weekend.]

By Joe Bendel. Jacques Mesrine was white and bourgeoisie, but he wanted to be the French Iceberg Slim.  A veteran of Algeria, Mesrine became France and Canada’s “Public Enemy #1,” eventually getting his wish, dying in a hail of bullets.  Before the inevitable, he glamorized his exploits in two memoirs/novels, making him something of a cult hero to the French-speaking counter-culture.  As a result, he became a very PR-conscious public enemy, who would be delighted to know his story has now been adapted in Jean-François Richet’s two-film bio-epic, the first of which, Mesrine: Killer Instinct opened Friday in select theaters nationwide, with Part Two to follow a week later.

In Algeria, Mesrine killed and tortured without a second thought.  Returning to France, he is incapable of following in his timid father’s footsteps of working, middleclass respectability.  Of course, he has certain talents to offer, which the “establishment” gangster Guido recognizes.  While Mesrine takes to racketeering like a fish to water, his wild streak is an obvious liability.  He also has issues with women.  While his conquests are many, he also seems primed for some rather ugly misogynistic violence.

Vincent Cassel as Mesrine.

Despite his unruliness, Mesrine eventually finds himself married with children.  When he even gets a straight job after an early prison stretch, it appears Mesrine might be ready to settle down.  Unfortunately, when he is laid off during an economic downturn, Mesrine soon returns to Guido’s organization.

Ironically, as the violence of Mesrine’s criminal endeavors escalates, his press becomes increasingly favorable.  He became the gentleman bandit, with a strict code of conduct and New Left street cred.  When things get too hot for Mesrine in France, he takes a sojourn to Quebec, falling in with French nationalists – further refining his revolutionary persona.

Killer Instinct is a decent gangster movie on its own, but it is really meant to establish the characters and storyline that continues in Public Enemy No. 1, the second film (that confusingly has the number one in the title).  True to its function, Instinct handles the heavy-lifting of character development, setting up the slam-bang action sequences of Enemy.  Yet, Richet presents a compellingly unvarnished portrait of Mesrine in the first film, never ameliorating his abusive behavior.

The bulked-up Vincent Cassel is like a French old school De Niro as Mesrine, vicious yet undeniably charismatic.  Gérard Depardieu also adds plenty of color as the Jabba the Hutt-like Guido.  Unfortunately, Mesrine’s women (even his Spanish wife) are not well delineated either in the script or in the various supporting performances, problematically seeming to exist only as plot devices.  Still, Instinct is not bereft of humanity, thanks to Michel Duchaussoy’s touching turn as Mesrine’s father.

After a tour-de-force opening, Richet allows Instinct to lag somewhat in the middle.  This is definitely not a problem with the next installment opening September 3rd.  Essentially, Instinct sets up the pins and Enemy knocks them down.  Altogether, it is an ambitious, shrewdly executed crime drama worth the investment of two trips to the theater.

Posted on August 30th, 2010 at 8:11am.

Centurion: No Pax Romana Here

By Joe Bendel. It is 117 A.D. and the Roman “conquest” of Britain has been a miserable, blood-soaked experience—for the Romans.  Just ask Centurion Quintus Dias, whom we first meet running for his life from a very ticked-off war party of Picts in Neil Marshall’s Centurion, which opened this Friday in select theaters nationwide.

Posted to the most distant Roman outpost, Dias is miserable in Caledonian Britain (what is more or less Scotland today).  Things only get worse when his fort is over-run by a Pict surprise attack.  The sole survivor, Dias escapes his captors, making his way to what just became the newly Northern-most Roman outpost.  Tired of taking a beating to his prestige back in Rome, the local governor commands General Virilus to hunt down the mysterious Pict leader Gorlacon with his vaunted Ninth Legion, to which Dias is now attached.

Virilus is not thrilled with his assignment, but he supposedly has the advantage of the services of Etain, a Pict tracker ostensibly civilized by the governor.  Given the way her eyes smolder with hatred, following her into battle is probably a bad idea, but they do it anyway, with predictable results.  Now Dias must lead the remnant of the Ninth as they try to rescue their revered General behind enemy lines.

Centurion is a fairly straight-forward historical hack & slash, with maybe a hint of the fantastical.  At one point Dias and his men find refuge with Arianne, a woman shunned by the Picts as a purported witch—not that she really is one.  She just seems to know a lot about healing herbs.  Neil (The Descent) Marshall definitely has a knack for gritty battle scenes, and the clever symmetry of his opening and closing scenes perfectly suits the story of ancient (if misplaced) heroism.  Unfortunately, the film lags a bit in-between, with too many scenes of rock-climbing and weary shuffling through the Caledonian forests.

Michael Fassbender is one of the few actors working in film today with potentially movie star-like screen presence.  Yet in Centurion, the grizzled badness of Dominic West’s Virilus somewhat outshines him.  Still, he has some credible chemistry with Imogen Poots as Arianne the witch.  Unfortunately, Ulrich Thomsen is a bland villain as Gorlacon (probably because the film is too conscious of its alleged modern parallels), while as Etain, former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko looks distractingly blue, almost like she walked out of Avatar.  Oddly, the Centurion’s Romans are played by Brits, whereas the Britons are mostly played by Scandinavians, Slavs, and even the Belgian Axelle Carolyn.

Centurion’s craftsmanship is definitely above average for action films.  Cinematographer Sam McCurdy’s dazzling vistas make the Caledonian mountains look like the Alps.  It also boasts one of the cooler opening title sequences of the year.  Still, its heavy-handed “occupiers” versus “insurgency” themes often sabotage the film’s momentum.  Ultimately, it is an okay summer diversion, but it is effectively limited by its reluctance to definitively pick a side and stick with it.

Posted on August 28th, 2010 at 9:55am.

State Sanctioned Theft: The Art of the Steal

By Joe Bendel. Americans expect their property rights to be respected, even posthumously. However, those rights evidently do not apply to when the property in question is especially valuable. At least that seems to be the case in Pennsylvania, where the state government, the city of Philadelphia, and a group of powerful non-profit foundations have in effect legally plundered the priceless Barnes Collection according to Don Argott’s eye-opening documentary, The Art of the Steal, now available on DVD.

Steal opens with the unseemly yet so appropriate video of former Mayor John Street’s news conference, in which he overflows with glee at the prospect of finally getting the Barnes in Philadelphia. All that is missing is a football for Street to spike before doing an end-zone dance. However, this display is problematic on multiple levels.

Albert C. Barnes hated Philadelphia. The self-made entrepreneur and Roosevelt Democrat amassed probably the greatest private collection of impressionist and early modern art. Yet, when he unveiled his collection in the City of Brotherly Love, it was panned by the local press and mocked by the chattering classes.  Eventually, Philadelphia realized what they had missed, but it was too late. Barnes had established his Foundation in exurban Lower Merion, where career-defining Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses, Picassos, and Degases were integrated into a progressive art school, with only limited opportunities for public viewing.

When the childless Barnes passed away, the terms of his will were explicitly designed to keep his collection intact and out of the grasping hands of Philadelphia and its despised Art Institute. However, as the original trustees passed away, control of the Barnes Foundation eventually fell to Lincoln University, a traditionally African American school safely outside the Pennsylvania establishment in Barnes’s day that became state affiliated in 1972. As Argott makes crystal clear, from that point on, Barnes’s intentions no longer governed the Foundation that still bears his name.

One of the unspoken ironies of Steal is that Barnes, the New Dealer and sworn enemy of Nixon confidant Walter Annenberg, was ultimately undone by Democrats like Street and Governor Ed Rendell. At least the governor consented to an on-camera interview, justifying the hijacking of the Barnes on grounds that incontrovertibly contradict the spirit of his will (like the fact that more people will be able to gawk at his collection on the Franklin Parkway). Conversely, representatives of the Pew Charitable Trust, which Argott identifies as the shadowy power player in the takeover of the Barnes, conspicuously declined to participate in the film.  (In a further irony, the only political figure in Argott’s film speaking on behalf of Barnes’s intentions is Lower Merion’s Republican congressman Jim Gerlach, to his credit.)

Producer Sheena Joyce, exec. producer Lenny Feinberg, director Don Argott.

Though he is covering the rarified art world, Argott approaches the Barnes case like a criminal investigation, and with good reason. He also memorably establishes the mind-blowing dimensions of the stakes involved, establishing the term “Barnesworthy.” As art-dealer Richard Feigen explains at a supposedly blockbuster Sotheby’s early modern show, most of the work on display that would soon be bought for millions of dollars would not have merited a second glance from Barnes. Though Feigen himself declined to assign a dollar figure to the entire collection, its value would be estimated in court filings at twenty five billion (with a “b”) dollars. This is what “Barnesworthy” means.

Steal is a smart, persuasive documentary that challenges some previously sacrosanct notions regarding the merit of museums as public institutions. While some of the finer points of estate law might sound dry, Argott makes it all quite compelling, pulling viewers through step-by-step with remarkable assuredness.

Unfortunately, the establishment considers the Barnes’ impending move to downtown Philly a done deal, even though the rag-tag Friends of the Barnes group still fights on.  Maybe so, but Argott’s film could make it a pyrrhic victory.  It is hard to imagine how anyone could willingly step foot in a Barnes bastardized by machine politics after watching Steal, regardless of the significance of the collection within.  Highly recommended, Steal is now available on DVD and streams on Netflix.

Posted on August 24th, 2010 at 11:29am.

Review: Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea

By Joe Bendel. Forget the Syfy (Sci-Fi) Channel’s Earthsea miniseries.  Ursula K. Le Guin, the author of the Earthsea novels and stories, would certainly prefer you did.  Her reaction to Gorō Miyazaki’s anime adaptation of her fantasy world has also been decidedly mixed, but arguably not as vehement.  In fact, Miyazaki’s film is not without merit, especially for those not intimately grounded in the Earthsea mythology.  Three years after its Japanese premiere, Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea, finally has its American theatrical release, now screening in select theaters courtesy of Walt Disney.

While the legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki long sought to adapt Le Guin’s Earthsea stories, it was his son Gorō, a relative new comer to animated filmmaking, who was assigned the project by Studio Ghibli, the anime house co-founded by Miyazaki the elder.  The result is a visually striking, if thematically familiar, fantasy.

Like the epics of Tolkien and Robert Jordan, Tales follows a young protagonist of destiny, Arren, a confused prince who has apparently just murdered his father, the king.  Fleeing in shame, he encounters the wizard Sparrowhawk on the road.  Like his late father, Sparrowhawk is concerned about the chaos sweeping over Earthsea.  The weather is unseasonable, crops are failing, livestock are dying, and two dragons were recently spotted off the coast fighting to the death – an unprecedented event in the Earthsea fantasy world.

From Miyazaki's "Tales from Earthsea."

Naturally, there is a Sauron-like evil overlord to contend with.  In this case, it is the androgynous sorcerer Cob, whose slave-trading minions are out to get Arren.  Indeed, Tales follows the standard epic fantasy template, but does so reasonably well.  There is also a pseudo-environmental motif of a world out of balance that should have appealed to Le Guin, but it is subtler and more nuanced than most “green” movie messages.

Miyazaki the younger is most successful creating an epic look in the film, employing watercolor backgrounds and hand-drawn animation for dramatic effect.  Indeed, his fantasy landscapes and cityscapes have an exotic beauty that elevates Tales well above standard issue anime.

Redubbed for an American audience (not an uncommon practice with anime distribution), the English language cast mostly ranges from adequate to fairly good.  Timothy Dalton (the under-appreciated James Bond) is the class of the field, lending his commanding voice to Sparrowhawk.  In contrast, Willem Dafoe’s work as Cob often sounds campy, in the wrong way.

The first Disney animated release to carry a PG-13 rating, Tales is similar in intensity (and subject matter) to Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated Lord of the Rings.  Richly crafted but predictable (as is the case with most contemporary fantasy fiction), Tales is better than genre diehards might have heard at their conventions.  It is currently screening in New York at the Angelika Film Center, and in Los Angeles at The Landmark.

Posted on August 20th, 2010 at 8:11am.