Category: Movie Reviews

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.

EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Reviews a ‘Terror Video’

[Editor’s Note: Recently I came across this striking video above, by New York-based filmmaker Richard Mosse. At first glance, I was shocked by what appeared to be a shahid-style terror video made by a Western filmmaker. Watching the video through, however, it occurred to me that this likely was not an actual terror video, so much as a kind of ‘genre’ piece or riff on terror videos. My thoughts then moved to the question of what an expert in this area might think of it. Fortunately I was able to turn to LFM Contributer ‘Max Garuda,’ who works in the field and has access to Arabic translation.]

“A short terror video made in Gaza. Possibly the only such video ever made by non-Palestinian producers. As a result, the representation breaks with the conventions of the Palestinian suicide video genre. In Arabic, ‘shahid’ means martyr, or witness.” – Filmmaker/photographer Richard Mosse, describing his video Shahid.

By ‘Max Garuda‘. The artist’s commentary above alerts the viewer to the existence of a ‘terrorist video genre,’ and that Mosse’s creation breaks with that category. This assertion raises two questions: what is the ‘terrorist video genre’ and what conventions does Mosse’s video contest? (An argument can be made that any film belongs in any genre if anyone can make a compelling argument for inclusion. Or, said differently, film/video genres are not fixed sets of criteria by which categorizations are easily made. Rather, they are fluid, evolving bodies of work, responding to artistic practice, distribution/marketing strategies and audience expectations.)

That being said, why does Mosse desire to characterize his video within the ‘terrorist video genre’ or by comparison to it – especially when the differences that do exist are so significant enough to make a strong argument that his video doesn’t break from the genre, but rather has nothing to do with the genre. But first, a little background on the ‘terrorist video genre.’

The 'theater of terror.'

As the title might suggest, the most obvious distinguishing characteristic of the genre was originally the provenence of the video followed by content. Generally speaking, only terrorists made ‘terrorist videos,’ which were used to showcase the terrorizing act or transmit a message requiring some expression of authenticity. The terrorist act depends on shock and a visceral reaction by the ‘public’ of the terrorized. A beheading that occurs in the forest is just a beheading; a beheading captured on video and spread globally by broadcast news or the Internet is an act of terror. Videos showing murders, explosions and other deadly acts were created to broaden the impact of the terrorist act. The ‘theater of terror’ is a common framework for understanding terrorism, in which the terrorist’s act must have the paralyzing effect of fear – because the scope of the actual violence is quite limited. Even the 9/11 attacks, with their relatively high death toll, depend on the ‘theater of terror’ effect for their power–changing how Americans (and other countries and their citizens) conduct their daily lives, from intrusive security measures to a simple constant state of fear. Many early terrorist videos operated in this domain.

The other common example of early terrorist videos were simply video-based messages. Whether VHS tapes smuggled out of remote bivouacs to eager news outlets or digital videos posted to websites, the form of the terrorist video was targeted primarily at followers of the movement, to ensure them that the leadership was still alive and in control. Hence, the periodic release of a video of Osama bin Laden exhorting his followers or Ayman al-Zawahiri expounding on a facet of Islamic exegesis that fits his extremist goals. The target of these videos was generally the faithful, and secondly the ‘contested populations’ or those that don’t openly support the extremists but aren’t too convinced of the piety, competence and forthrightness of local government.

Strategic messaging.

More recently, though, we see a fusion of these two goals (theater of terror and strategic messaging) into the genre of the ‘terrorist video’ that Mosse and his collaborators purport to produce. In this newer class of terrorist videos, we usually see direct address of the camera by the producing group, images of their heroes (Bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi, etc.), and sometimes images of their terrorist acts or types of acts the video implies are imminent. Because these newer videos are not as gruesome as the beheading type video, and because they are frequently hagiographic in their treatment of extremist heroes and martyrs, their access to the ‘theater of terror’ is less about instilling fear in a subject population, but rather in making a spectacle of the process of terrorism and thus improve recruitment within the contested population (particularly disaffected youth). Continue reading EXCLUSIVE: Libertas Reviews a ‘Terror Video’

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.

Classic Movie Obsession: Leave Her to Heaven

[Note:This article contains SPOILERS. I love Leave Her to Heaven, but I was spoiled for one of its biggest scenes. Ideally you should watch it first, then come back and we’ll peel the face off the Technicolor mask.]

By Jennifer Baldwin. Is there a better movie about romantic obsession than Leave Her to Heaven? Is there another movie as disturbing and unflinching in its portrayal of a woman obsessed as this film, this nightmare vision in Technicolor? To see the film only once is to remember it forever. It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve been obsessed with Leave Her to Heaven for over a decade. It’s a movie not only about obsession, but one that invites obsession on the part of the audience. We are invited to obsess over the colors, the beauty, the horribly evil acts committed by Gene Tierney’s Elle Berent. That Ellen is a deadly enigma only makes it more fascinating to obsess over her.

I blame Martin Scorsese. One night, many years ago, I stumbled onto his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies playing on TCM. Three movie clips from the documentary stayed with me long past that night, haunting me, nagging at my mind: clips from Cat People, Scarlet Street, and Leave Her to Heaven. As time went by, it became a kind of quest to track these movies down. First came Cat People and I was spooked by the shadows and the dreaded suggestion of horror. Next came Scarlett Street and I was shocked by the brutal violence and even more brutal cynicism.

When I finally saw Leave Her to Heaven it was almost too overwhelming to describe. The colors, the murders, the pounding tympani, Gene Tierney’s eyes – all the lurid perversity of it burned forever into my brain. I loved it. It was the most delirious melodrama I had ever seen. It still is. It’s woman’s melodrama with a black soul. It pulls the mask back on the notion of romantic, all-consuming love and gives us the horror underneath. And yet, it is achingly beautiful to look at, the beauty and the horror intertwined so that it becomes more than just the story of a monstrous, murderous woman – it becomes a tragedy. Fitting that the title should be a line from Hamlet.

Leave Her to Heaven is essentially two things: Leon Shamroy’s color cinematography and Gene Tierney’s lead performance. Bringing these two essentials together, of course, is the underrated director, John M. Stahl. It is Stahl, in an act of alchemical wizardry, who is able to fuse Tierney’s subtle, disturbing performance with Shamroy’s wild, unrestrained use of Technicolor (all with a handy assist from the set design, art department, and costuming).

Stahl’s film is popular art at its best, a finely balanced creation that melds melodramatic, expressionist visuals with naturalistic, subdued, almost mannequin-like acting styles, so that the effect is a kind of hallucinatory hyper-reality that nevertheless remains remote and mysterious. We never quite know what to make of Ellen’s character.

Why does Ellen act the way she does? Why is her love so ruinously obsessive? Is she evil? Is she merely insane? Is it possible to feel sympathy for her even as she scares the hell out of us? What about her love? Was her love completely rotten and selfish to the core or was there some small piece of it that was true and human and only later became twisted?

Gene Tierney doesn’t get enough credit either as an actress or as a movie star. As far as Leave Her to Heaven is concerned, she is the whole movie. The film loses something – some spark, some energy – when her character dies and Tierney has left the screen. Only Vincent Price’s theatrical courtroom shouting saves the last quarter of the film from collapsing into anticlimax.

And lest anyone doubt Tierney’s performance or her star quality, answer this:  what was 20th Century Fox’s highest grossing movie of the 1940s? Leave Her to Heaven. You don’t deliver the studio’s highest grossing picture of the decade if you’re not a star. And who was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 1945? Gene Tierney. It’s a shame that she is not more well known today.

Leon Shamroy’s cinematography won the Oscar that year, deservedly so. But it really should have been a double win for Shamroy and Tierney at the Academy Awards of 1945, because Shamroy’s cinematography is merely an extension of Tierney’s performance and vice versa. No one can fault the Academy for giving Joan Crawford an Oscar for Mildred Pierce, but I think in a perfect world it would have been Tierney.

I’m fascinated by the decision to shoot the film in color. Most color films in the mid 1940s were musicals or big budget Westerns. A melodrama like Leave Her to Heaven would ordinarily be a black and white affair. Except Leave Her to Heaven was based on a bestselling novel by Ben Ames Williams – a novel that was wildly popular with audiences, resulting in one of the most highly anticipated film adaptations of the day. It was the kind of prestige picture – and potential moneymaker – that could justify the extra cost to shoot in Technicolor.

What Stahl and Shamroy did with that color is nothing short of breathtaking – not just in the look of the color, but in the way color was used. I’m hard-pressed to think of another movie that depends so much on the use of color to affect mood, theme, and character. It’s been said that the color cinematography in Leave Her to Heaven is so powerful that it’s almost a character in its own right. I think a better way to put it is that the color cinematography isn’t a separate character so much as an extension of one character, the central character of the story: Gene Tierney’s Ellen Berent.

Gene Tierney was one of Hollywood’s greatest beauties, but one thing I’ve heard is that the camera didn’t quite capture how beautiful she was. Part of this had to do with the fact that she made a lot of black and white films and those films weren’t able to display one of her greatest features: her blue-green eyes.

No such problem in Leave Her to Heaven. In fact, the color scheme of the film – dominated by blues, greens, reds, and pinks (along with an eerie amber glow that hovers over most of the film) – is primarily dictated by Tierney’s appearance. Her blue-green eyes and striking red lipstick are used as a template to color almost every frame of the picture. Everywhere there is blue, green, and red. Just as Ellen promises Richard (Cornel Wilde) that she’ll never let him go, so too do Ellen’s “colors” never let the film go– they dominate to such a degree that her presence is felt in almost every frame, even when she’s not there. Continue reading Classic Movie Obsession: Leave Her to Heaven

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.

Mad Men Season Four, Episode 5: “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”

Betty & Edna.

By Jennifer Baldwin. After two blessed Betty-free weeks, the former Mrs. Draper returns in this week’s episode. And wouldn’t you know it, this episode gave us Betty at her worst (the vindictive, Sally-smacking, “I’ll cut your fingers off!” mother from hell) and at her most sympathetic (Betty in the therapist’s office).

I’ve always been sympathetic to Betty when she’s in these therapy scenes. In the first season, her vulnerability with the (duplicitous) psychiatrist was heartbreaking; it was Betty at her most likable and human. Whenever she gets talking on the therapist’s couch, Betty often reveals more about herself than she knows — there’s a very wounded and messed up human being in there beneath the cold, aloof, shrewish surface. This is Betty at her most honest (even if she’s unaware of the honesty bleeding through her pretense) and as a result, it’s hard to hate her in these scenes. Perhaps that’s why I was so anti-Betty last season — we were only given the surface pretense and the outward coldness and very little of the inner, human Betty.

Well, we get human Betty again this week — after a long absence. In a meeting with a child psychiatrist (for Sally), Betty unknowingly starts having a therapy session with the shrink herself. This makes sense, of course, since Betty has been much more of a “child” than the other adult characters on the show (recall her twisted, sometimes tender, but ultimately creepy relationship with young Glenn Bishop). Betty doesn’t really reveal much outwardly, but the little pauses, the half sentences, the tone of her voice and her demeanor all show just how much pain Betty is in — and how much she’s trying to suppress and disguise it. Eeesh. Betty is so screwed up.

However, Betty does make a good point, re: Don. Why did Don plan a date when he knew he’d have the kids? Of course, Don reveals later to Faye in the break room that he doesn’t see his kids enough and he doesn’t know what to do with them when he does. He feels relief when he brings them back to Betty – but then afterward, he misses them. Eeesh. Don is so screwed up.

This episode had weird shifts in tone, from strange and disturbing (the Betty/Sally storyline) to comical and bouncy (all the stuff with Don and Miss Blankenship and the caper involving a rival agency and the Honda account). An uneven episode, and probably the season’s weakest overall (also: the first episode this season to not be written or co-written by Matthew Weiner).

Miss Blankenship.

Which is not to say it doesn’t have some spectacular moments. The trick Don and Co. pull on rival agency CGC is pure delight — accompanied by the kind of swinging mid-60s music that makes it all seem like a Tony Curtis comedy. And everything involving Roger’s WWII service and his continued animosity toward the Japanese is precisely the thing that makes historical drama fascinating. It’s a peek inside the mind of a WWII vet, twenty years after the war. It’s hard for us to imagine now — that lingering hostility towards our WWII enemies — but Roger’s words and actions show how hard it was for some men to forget. Plus it gives us another perfect scene between Roger and Joan. Forget Peggy and Pete, and Don and Betty — Roger and Joan are my all-time favorite pairing.

Other points and observations:

On the weekly Pete front, I must say, Pete’s vocabulary always amuses. Vincent Kartheiser rolls out lines like “A Deerfield chum of mine” as if he’s been saying it his whole life. Also: “Christ on a cracker!” Seriously, where does he get this stuff?! And Pete speaks for many of us when he asks: “Who the hell is Dr. Lyle Evans?” (Is the line a red herring?).

I might be in the minority opinion, but I find the never-ending vaudeville comedy routine between Don and his new secretary, Miss Blankenship, to be a hoot. Yes, it’s rather low comedy, but it’s added a bit of levity to a show that sometimes takes itself too seriously.

Also good for some comedy gold: The Japanese, their translator, and one Joan Holloway Harris.

Honda Honcho (in Japanese, while staring at Joan’s breasts): “How does she not fall over?”
Joan (to the translator, noticing the Japanese staring eyes): “They’re not very subtle are they?”
Translator: “No.”

Bethany — who looks like Virginia Mayo — makes a reappearance this week. Also, who knew Benihana was around in the 60s? Apparently I need to bone up on my cultural knowledge!

Pete & Ichiro.

Continuing Cultural Reference Watch: “A Margaret Dumont-sized disaster” (note that she died just about the time this episode took place); Man from U.N.C.L.E.; and of course, the title of the episode: The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

It’s interesting how the Japanese this season are playing the role the British played last season. Culture clash and the growing influence of Asian culture on American culture: business and entertainment, Honda and Godzilla.

Also of note: I was indeed right — Dr. Faye was wearing a wedding ring. But … she’s not married! It’s basically a “keep away” sign for all the wolves. Of course, now that Don knows the ring is a fake, how long before he and Faye are “doing it,” as Sally would say? I predict it happens in two weeks.

Finally, the closing credits song was “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” as sung by Doris Day. “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” of course, is from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, made into a film in 1961, and starring James Shigeta and Miyoshi Umeki. Both Japanese.

Posted on August 26th, 2010 at 10:05am.