Beating a dead horse

Millions of horses died in the Great War. The image of those enormous and elegant, muscular and lithe bodies collapsing, terrified, cut up, scattered, tangled in wire, rotting across muddy European plains alongside the unfathomable numbers of human dead and dying is a very powerful, poignant one. It isn’t difficult to understand how storytellers would be drawn to it. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel, so I can’t attest as to whether or not it works on its own, but as adapted for the screen by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, adapted into something that doesn’t feel much like a children’s movie (except that it feels naive and oversimplified), and adapted in such a manner that the horse is no longer the centre of the story (and instead fills that centre with corny stock characters), War Horse is astonishingly hollow, simultaneously mechanical and sentimental, faux-innocent, and thus secretly cynical. In short, it brings out the worst in Steven Spielberg, whose direction of actors has never been more leaden (he gets what I can only hope will be the worst, most strained and artificial performance the normally great Peter Mullan will ever give), whose camerawork has never felt more thoughtlessly money-coated (he seems to need a crane just to shoot inserts), and aesthetically droopy (there’s a closing day-for-dusk shot that has to be seen to believe how ugly it is). It may be the nadir of Spielberg regular John Williams’ long career of composing wildly over-animated scores; every time anyone so much as smirks it’s like E.T.’s flying past the moon.

Perhaps Spielberg felt that War Horse would be a return to past glories; after tackling Normandy, he could now sink his teeth into the Somme (from the Holocaust to The War of Worlds, nothing seems to charge the elder Spielberg’s batteries like colossal, senseless death counts). Indeed, Joey, the thoroughbred-turned-plow horse-turned-war horse, becomes something of a Private Ryan. Everything stops, literally, to tend to him. Brits and Germans meet in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield and band together to rescue Joey from a lonesome, slow demise. A field doctor stops attending to a glut of agonized wounded soldiers just to help Joey. At some point, the magical aura surrounding this horse and the way it prompts everyone to ignore all else becomes, arguably, kind of offensive.

It doesn’t help that the horse is just, you know, a horse. There’s nothing all that cinematic about him. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński have no special way of rendering him charismatic. I adore horses, but just sticking one in front of a camera doesn’t make me instantly teary-eyed; the fact is, their allure, the particular nature of their features, isn’t easily captured on film... But really, I’m just struggling to make sense of why War Horse is such a dud. I think rather than generalize or theorize I should just say that this is one of those pictures where, scene-by-scene, over the course of its grueling runtime, you’re sort of baffled by all the small, wrote, bad choices that slowly accumulate: the lame comic relief (a goose), the forced emotions, the speechy dialogue. Spielberg, so much more at home with lighter material (E.T., Catch Me If You Can), has gone to war once more, and this time he really got creamed.

Terri: You're a big boy now

Terri’s eponymous hero is a rotund teen living in some warm, semi-rural place with only an uncle who tends to wander around in a medicinal fog for a guardian. With his wavy locks and formidable neck, Terri cuts something of a Wildean profile, but whatever air of sophistication such qualities might generate is undercut by his calm refusal to engage in social or academic life. He wears Crocs and socks and old school pajamas everywhere—less out of resignation, he claims, than for sheer comfort. He’s exiled from the school gymnasium for declining to participate. He observes other teens going about their activities with the same anthropological distance and wonder he brings to his new habit of murdering mice so as to witness the feeding habits of local birds of prey. He’s also regularly late or absent for class, a casual transgression that inadvertently becomes a route out of his troublesome solitude, because cutting class means going to the principal’s office, and Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, takes a special interest in Terri.

Fitzgerald is a middle-aged married man, but both his stagey manner of asserting authority and his calculated attempts to “reach out”—by aiding and abetting Terri’s class cutting through regular appointments; by offering snacks and high-fives and peppering their consultations with an earnestly intoned “Dude...”—render him less a teacher or father figure than an overgrown peer or passive-aggressively needy big brother. Fitzgerald is played by John C. Reilly, and if you start watching Terri and find yourself feeling unsure whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy, Reilly doesn’t seem to have any such doubts. He’s understatedly goofy, unflatteringly lit and very funny, as well as oddly sweet and lived-in. Reilly is often cast in the supporting bit as that guy that the central character slowly becomes friends with. It’s because it’s hard not to want to become friends with John C. Reilly.

Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, a young actor with obvious talent but, equally important in a character study such as this, he simply has a marvelously expressive face and body that, however outsized, conveys inner depths even when doing almost nothing. Walking through the woods in his PJs, Wysocki’s Terri could almost be walking through a dream, and there are moments where director Azazel Jacobs’ keen eye for low-key, ordinary strangeness pleasingly heightens that feeling. But as it goes along it becomes clear that Terri, scripted by Patrick Dewitt from a story by Dewitt and Jacobs, is firmly grounded in reality, its depiction of idiotic bullying, misguided cries for help, exploratory sadism, peculiar alliances between unlikely friends, horny fumblings in home economics, and nights spent in the shed getting wasted on stolen whiskey and uncle’s meds and making awkward attempts as sexual posturing all resonate deeply with my experience of high school at least. This is a film that’s attuned to the pains of alienation without wallowing in despair—yet neither does it offer bullshit uplift. It merely suggests that, if we stay alert, there is almost always some chance for each and every one of us to connect.

The milky way: Louis Malle's Black Moon

Black Moon (1975) opens with the initially serene image of a badger innocently snuffling its way across a quiet rural road… only to meet sudden death under the wheels of our heroine’s smart little orange Euro-hatchback. The badger’s shocking accidental demise is our entrée into this film’s distinctively violent world, violent in the literal sense—there’s some sort of war going on, apparently between the sexes, with early scenes involving young men executing a line-up of young women by firing squad, and young women tormenting and molesting some young men—and violent in the figurative sense, with its almost total absence of exposition, its dearth of intelligible dialogue (though there is a conspicuous quote from Macbeth), and its succession of bizarre images and encounters that never accumulate into anything so pedestrian as coherent causality. Black Moon proved to be something of a bête noir in Louis Malle’s formidable oeuvre, a fantastical, anti-allegorical, sumptuously photographed (by Ingmar Bergman’s long-time collaborator Sven Nykvist) work that greatly rewards those viewers inclined to shrug off things like narrative logic in favour of sustained fascination, beauty, and mystery. It’s now available on DVD and blu-ray from Criterion, who’ve made a special project of heralding Malle’s legacy.

Our protagonist, Lily (Cathryn Harrison), is an Alice-figure hovering somewhere between adolescence and womanhood, apparently oblivious to her nascent sex appeal. She finds herself at a country manor inhabited by a small, elderly woman (Therese Giehse) confined to a bed and two young, mute adults (Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey “superstar” Joe Dallesandro and Canadian actress Alexandra Stewart), each of whom seem to communicate primarily through telepathic touch, and a gang of rowdy naked kids who vanish at random. There are a great many non-human inhabitants of this house and its surroundings as well, including pigs, turkeys, a unicorn, a snake, a chorus of sheep, and flowers with feelings to hurt. Lily’s central action throughout is to look at things, most often astonishing or alarming things, and Malle and Nykvist manage again and again to render the images of her looking captivatingly. The most notable shift in Black Moon finds Lily gradually coming to understand that the old woman’s survival, and perhaps that of others she meets, is dependent on breast milk, and the film draws to its close with Lily resolving to offer her breast up to one in need.

Malle’s work frequently concerned sexual development in children, most obviously in films such as Murmur of the Heart (1971) and Pretty Baby (1978), and while its tempting to regard Black Moon as purely surrealist—especially given that one of the script’s co-authors is Joyce Buñuel, daughter-in-law of filmmaker and one-time card-carrying surrealist Luis Buñuel—there are a number of elements that prompt an interpretation in keeping with this over-arcing Mallesque theme. Many of Lily’s encounters impart a heightened awareness of gender, sensuality and the body as a site of numerous forms of erotic interest, hidden threat, and corporeal need. Not to mention the scenes where Lily reaches across a table for a giant-sized glass of fresh milk or the fairly straightforward symbolic possibilities generated from the aforementioned snake and unicorn. I don’t want to pigeonhole Black Moon so much as address some of its fecund multiple readings. It’s a delightfully perplexing film. It’s a bestiary. And it’s one of the most beguiling weirdo-discoveries on home video this year.

African Cats: Disnifying the wild Savannah

The first thing you should probably know about African Cats is that, despite its being billed as such, in no way should this Disney production be mistaken for a documentary. (Okay, actually, the first and perhaps last thing you need to know is that it's Disney, but I'm not willing to wrap this up quite so patly.) Brimming with truly spectacular, no doubt arduously apprehended images of Kenyan flora and fauna, of mist, thunderheads and endless skies, the presence of the cameras recording the action are never acknowledged; though the film features plenty of fighting and killing, the bloody brutality and messy mating habits of the film’s subjects are discreetly eschewed; Harry Potter composer Nicholas Hooper’s heavily illustrative score emphasizes adventure movie theatrics over observational accentuation; and while Samuel L. Jackson’s colour commentary runs all over this thing there’s a conspicuous dearth of zoological facts to be gleaned. Unless you consider “water buffalos are grumpy” to be a statement of high educational value.

Assigning names to and even presuming to discern the thoughts of its cast of lions, cheetahs and crocodiles, (“To Mara, Fang is the best dad ever”), Jackson’s effortlessly charismatic voice-over anthropomorphizes these animals to the max, exploiting their abundant cuteness to explore, among other themes, the difficulty of single-parenting. (Incidentally, Fang’s not such an ideal patriarch after all: he hogs all the food, abandons his wife, and doesn’t say thanks when the lady lions defend the pride from a rival lion gang. The narrative imposed on these animals is not dissimilar to that of a gangster saga, replete with a conflicted moral code about traditional family values.) Highly questionable as this approach may be, there’s no argument that it can occasionally prove perfectly entertaining, such as in the scene where Jackson offers a sotto-voiced approval of a cheetah’s attack on a gazelle (“Successssss!”). It makes you wish co-directors Alastair Fothergil and Keith Scholey would have let Jackson off the leash a little more so he could go all the way and improvise a few funny voices for the animals. Alas, if only Disney didn’t cling to their irritating dictum to render everything at once tasteful and utterly shameless.

Future family values: Dogtooth on DVD

Sea, Motorway, Excursion, Carbine. At least three of the four “new words of the day” to be learned by the three children at the start of Dogtooth (Kynodontas) could be associated with escape, while the word “escape” is itself unlikely to have entered their vocabulary. These children are actually adults, or at least on the cusp of adulthood, though they behave like pre-pubescents and have apparently never in their lives set foot beyond the confines of their family’s home, located somewhere in rural Greece, a clean, middle class fortress of self-imposed seclusion, complete with swimming pool, and nearly devoid of anything that denotes the contaminating influence of contemporary culture, which for some reason includes any consumer technology produced after about 1986. The parents have informed the children that they would have no chance of survival should they leave the property, and have taken a totalitarian approach to home-schooling, right down to the essentials of language acquisition. Sea, for example, is a leather armchair. Excursion is a very resistant material. A pussy is a big light. Dogtooth is a very strange, darkly hilarious, and rather ingenious movie. At least it seems strange while you’re watching it. Once it’s over, you may find yourself thinking it’s one of the most lucid studies of family life you’ve seen.

Why is that woman being driven blindfolded along a freeway at dusk? Why is that couple having sex while they both wear headphones? Dogtooth is crafted in such a way that context is rarely explicit. This extends to the composition of the frames, which will often depict only the torsos or legs of characters, or reveal only one speaker in a conversation. (I’ve already told you more than you’d probably ascertain in the first 20 minutes.) But the movie is far too playful, attentive, and mischievous to label as withholding. What it does, and does very well, is allow us to gradually understand the rules of its cloistered world largely from the limited perspective of its inhabitants. There’s what we might call an anthropological rigour to Dogtooth. It’s about a kind of social experiment with unintentional yet deeply sinister implications. The family property even resembles a cult compound. Where our story goes is, I think, eerily logical, though it’s also, I think, oddly hopeful.

In a video interview included on Kino’s new DVD, director and co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos, explains that the initial impulse behind Dogtooth was to make a science-fiction film that imagines life in a future where families are becoming extinct, so the parents at the centre of our story must go to extremes to preserve theirs. The movie Lanthimos made no longer bears the trappings of sci-fi, but it’s certainly easy enough to locate the essentially primal urges that motivate the parents: a desire to protect the clan at all costs; a desire to maintain a sense of (false) purity for as long as possible; and most of all a desire to redesign the world to your liking and raise your children within it. Such desires inevitably lead to disaster, but they’re still not that hard to identify with.

Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2009 and easily the biggest surprise among this year’s Oscar nods—it’s been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film—Dogtooth has clearly made an impression. It’s as entertaining as it is insightful and twisted, climaxing with a living room talent show in which the eldest child (the fearless and inventive Aggeliki Papoulia) reinterprets a sequence of Flashdance while her brother plays bad classical guitar—having no one to compare himself to, he probably thinks he’s a prodigy. The performances are uniformly detailed and focused, founded in regulated behaviour rather than conventional character development. You’d never guess these were actually normal people. I saw two of them at a party during the 2009 Toronto Film Festival, where Dogtooth had its Canadian premiere, and I was amazed to see them chatting and laughing and sipping cocktails. If they can go through all that and come out of it so seemingly civilized, there may truly be hope for all of us.

Aside from being newly available on DVD, Dogtooth is also playing at Toronto's Royal Cinema, where it can be enjoyed on a double-bill with Attenberg, the likeminded film which stars Lanthimos and was directed by Dogtooth's co-producer Athina Racehl Tsangari

Walking cure: Walkabout on DVD

The opening minutes of Walkabout (1971) function as a sort of cinematic assault, amputating diverse components from the audiovisual corpus of modern urban existence—crowds and traffic, tall anonymous buildings and radio signals, swimming pools, classrooms, brick walls and ground beef—and pasting them together in such a way so as to induce creeping repulsion and a kind of vertigo in the viewer as efficiently as possible. Soon a father and his two children, Englishmen transplanted to Australia, are driving into the outback for a rather incongruous picnic. A portable radio broadcasts a program offering instruction on proper table manners.

The latent apocalypse of the film’s opening montage manifests in the father’s next actions, which seem to have been planned in advance. He takes a pistol and begins to fire it at the kids, who run and hide. He takes a jerry can and douses their Beetle. (By this point the radio’s playing Rod Stewart’s ‘Gasoline Alley,’ which is maybe some perverse subliminal prompt for dad’s incendiary psychosis.) He sets fire to the car and then turns the pistol on himself, firing a shot to the head then flopping on his back as though in relief. Within mere moments a banal family outing has transformed into a sunlit nightmare, the patriarch dead and the only means of escape from a hostile space destroyed. The resourceful teenage daughter (Jenny Agutter) tries to remain calm and is compelled to render this nightmare a sort of game for her much younger brother (Luc Roeg, credited as Lucien John), who didn’t actually see his father’s suicide, but the pair set out into the desert with no idea as to where to find shade, water, food, or help. They’re on their own, until they meet another youngster (David Gulpilil), also without parental guidance and protection, but blacker, better attuned to this undomesticated terrain, unable to speak or understand their language, but perfectly capable of guiding, feeding, and protecting them from the elements.

A general description of Walkabout might give the impression that the film assumes a then-highly fashionable blanket condemnation of Western values and a romanticized appraisal of Aboriginal values, the former making you crazy and violent and corrupt while the latter grants you strength and wisdom and life in a perpetual Eden. Indeed, there are sequences that feel a bit overwrought in their display of civilized versus primitive behaviour, such as the one which cuts jarringly between the Aborigine boy spearing and slaughtering a kangaroo and a white butcher in a white coat chopping up meat in a very sanitized butcher shop. But Walkabout demands a level of attentiveness that forces us to look beyond the broad brushstrokes, through the complexity of the interactions between its characters and images, through the ambiguities inherent in its narrative and lack of subtitles for the Aborigine’s dialogue, and through its sheer duration versus its number of dramatic events. There’s never any lack of tension, beauty, or fascination in its many scenes of hunting, swimming, frolicking, attempted communication, or, of course, walking, but there is a deliberate lack of conventional dramatic incident, which allows us to get closer to the characters and their strange dilemma with a bare minimum of exposition. By the time we reach the end of Walkabout, we come to realize that the film isn’t primarily concerned with moralizing or engaging in facile social critique. It’s a study in the difficulties of cultural adaptation, in the role of landscape in shaping identity, in how adolescent sexuality might emerge when left to its own devices, unfettered by the constant barrage of consumerist iconography encountered in city life. Put most simply, Walkabout is a coming of age story, without the usual distractions.

Walkabout was the first solo directing credit for Nicolas Roeg, the celebrated London cinematographer who’d recently co-directed Performance (70) with Donald Cammell. Adapted from James Vance Marshall’s novel by playwright Edward Bond, Walkabout exhibits the impressionistic, vaguely narcotic mise en scène that would characterize Roeg’s uniformly brilliant work over the next decade, in films such as Don’t Look Now (73) and Bad Timing (80). His liberal deployment of ostentatious wide angle pans, flash cuts, trippy dissolves, and ultra grainy optical zooms on insects and reptiles could be said to date the film, which emerged not so long after Easy Rider (69), yet Roeg comes by such techniques honestly, endowing them with psychological or emotional nuance specific to the needs of this story and its setting. Walkabout has aged so well in fact that the Criterion Collection is now releasing it a third time. The new DVD and Blu-ray features best-yet image and sound and new supplements, including interviews with Agutter and Luc Roeg, each about 20 minutes, and an hour-long documentary about the life of Gulpilil, the truly remarkable actor and dancer who got his start in movies with Walkabout and has since embodied just about every variation on the Aboriginal persona one can image, both sophisticated and silly, in the 40 years since.

Flesh for fantasy vs. naked lunch: Food Inc.

Movies make us hungry. They can also make us disgusted. They can bypass rational thinking and make us desperate to eat things we normally wouldn’t stomach. They can take the consumption of food and render it either into gastronomical pornography or body horror. Primo and Secondo whip up a spectacularly succulent feast in Big Night; the man in the white suit cracks eggs over his mistress’ naked flesh in Tampopo; Divine eats shit in Pink Flamingos; Harrison Ford works a glazed donut and sunglasses into hot sex with Lena Olin in Hollywood Homicide; Bob and Doug McKenzie drown in beer in Strange Brew; the little zombie girl feasts on her own mom in Night of the Living Dead. Make your own list, the point is that moving images of eating prompt responses in us that other media can’t, and that’s the primary reason why, despite lame graphics and excess compression, I feel compelled to recommend the straight-ahead activist Food Inc. so highly. There are other, more thorough methods of gaining this information, but few possess the promise of inciting such immediate action from such a potentially large audience.

Helmed by TV history doc veteran Robert Kenner, Food Inc. comes out swinging, with every well-calculated punch directed at the corporate takeover of American food—and, by extension, our food—and what all evidence points to as a rigorously enforced policy of closed doors and diversion tactics that usually manifest in a veneer of pastoral serenity. Images of sunrises, freshly painted barns and happy, healthy cows grazing across a lush expanse of grass are a beard for, among other things, Frankenstein factory farming, shamefully lax disease control measures, seed patents and, obviously, appalling cruelty to animals, not to mention humans, since labour exploitation—there are allegations of big food in cahoots with US Immigration—is key to industry mechanics. The fact that so much in Food Inc. seem shocking to audiences is slightly baffling to me, given that little of this is breaking news. (I actually heard someone in the theatre tell their friend, “I can’t finish this,” referring to what, if my nose was correct, must have been nachos and some substance dubiously advertised as cheese.) But Kenner and company do such a sturdy, if too concise, job or laying out and updating the essential arguments, an approach surprisingly low on scare-tactics and big on plainspoken testimony from those inside the industry and out, that I can only hope the shocked will feel empowered to make needed changes in their diets, votes, and consumer habits.

Significant groundwork for Food Inc. was done in recent books like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Both authors feature prominently in Food Inc., with Schlosser introduced while ordering a burger and fries—his confessed favourite meal—from a diner. To be sure, the primary concerns of these authors aren’t centered on making us feel bad about wanting sugar, fat and salt. In fact, they make it plain that we’re hard-wired to crave the stuff. The question is about how those cravings are monitored and fulfilled, and what our most accessible and seemingly affordable options are doing to our bodies, the results running the gamut from obesity to an epidemic of diabetes to sudden death. Such was the fate that befell a two-year-old whose mother is now a tireless food safety activist and who also appears in Food Inc. to outline the infuriating difficulty in getting health standards enforced.

As the opening voice-over informs us, food production has changed more in the 40 years than in the previous 10,000. Supermarkets no longer have seasons. Chickens are forced to grow so quickly that their bones are too weak for them to walk. There are only 13 abattoirs in all of the US, meaning that an untold number of animals might be contained in a single patty, animals eating corn-based byproducts they’d never ate until recently, animals wading in their own shit, which follows them all the way to your plate, inviting an ongoing stream of E. coli outbreaks. Cheapness makes the products alluring, yet a Latino family interviewed explains that they have to spend a huge portion of their income on their father’s diabetes medicine rather than on basic vegetables, and indeed, a head of lettuce costs more than a cheeseburger. So yeah, something feels a little wrong here, and you have to give credit to Kenner for not only avoiding hysteria but for closing the film with some digestible advice. He also features interviews with old school holdout farmers—some real characters begging for a movie of their own—who prove that there is indeed another way to do this, though to (re-)institute it requires massive change. Are we hungry enough?

Snowbound, moribund, New in Town

The topography, weather and architecture could be that of almost any town in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba or, no doubt, Minnesota, the film’s setting and home state of one of its authors. (Turns out the actual location is wonderful-wonderful Winnipeg.) Nevertheless, the folks populating New Ulm feel very much of some self-consciously quirky cinematic non-place. The women of New Ulm especially twitter on like autistic munchkins over their knits and low-carb tapioca. Yet they’re no more the bi-product of some demented cliché than the arch, Miami-based corporate bunny with Friends hair and an endless array of heels these yokels are destined to humanize through scrapbooking and sufficient exposure to a bo-hunk single dad played, in an amusing reversal of type, by a jazz singer. So this fish out of water comedy contains within it a certain irony: it’s a story about a clash of cultures in which neither culture is recognizably human.

What can I tell you? I suppose it’s cute and all but New in Town, helmed by Danish director Jonas Elmer, is pretty hard to take. Written by Ken Rance and C. Jay Cox (surely, a pseudonym), it is so deeply formulaic as to inspire in you a certain awe when you’re not banging your fist to your head whispering over and over, please, make it stop. Watching Lucy the axe-woman (Renée Zellweger) and Ted the union rep (Harry Connick, Jr.) meet-cute over meatloaf served up by the pathologically generous Blanche (Siobhan Fallon) or bond over a day of crow hunting, you might think to yourself that this is a film made by people who genuinely love people—but are these people or just caricatures? Is this romance or just cynical screenwriting handbook determinism?

Zellweger’s proven herself a deft comedienne elsewhere but New in Town straightjackets her better impulses. Acting drunky-poo and falling face-first in a snow bank doesn’t flatter anybody. Connick, a real trooper, fares better, really selling the schmaltzier moments with striking aplomb, getting genuinely choked up in the much delayed dead wife speech telegraphed at the start of our story. It is the strange nature of this kind of movie that you get so desperate while watching it that you’re ready to weep along with the leads at the drop of a hat. But it’s hard to feel anything but impatience when the workingman-versus-the-corporate-creeps subplot kicks into full gear, mostly because rather than reflect something of the experience of real working people—which, yes, even a comedy with a happy ending can aspire to—we get a sham dreamed up by people who seem to have no idea what either factory or white-collar life is like. As we sink ever more into recession, this is just what we need, a bogus fairy tale.

Los Angeles plays itself, as do Sean Penn and Bruce Willis, in What Just Happened

Ben’s typical day involves a great deal of driving and talking on the phone—he’s an Angelino, don’t you know. He visits ex-wives and drops kids at school. He visits therapists. He speaks with agents, actors, directors, editors and studio higher-ups and exudes a reasonableness with each of them that stands out favorably in a milieu riddled with tantrums, neuroses and stumbling twelve-steppers. He does lunch. He placates, boosts, councils and consoles and when his back’s against the wall, which is often, he negotiates. He also dyes his chest hair, but that hint of desperate inner quirk he does in private. He’s presumably in his 60s, but looks pretty good. He works in the movies, and for all his outer calm, he’s barely hanging on.

Based on a fairly balls-out memoir of long-term mastication within the capricious dental work of Hollywood, What Just Happened finds prolific producer Art Linson, a.k.a. Ben, embodied by prolific actor Robert De Niro, who, as it happens, has starred in numerous Linson-produced projects, including The Untouchables, Heat and Great Expectations. The film also features an “as himself” cameo from Sean Penn, who also starred in several Linson projects, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Casualties of War and We’re No Angels, which co-starred De Niro. Penn’s spouse, Robin Wright Penn, plays De Niro’s ex-spouse and the person he’s still closest to. Catherine Keener, who recently starred in Linson’s Into the Wild, which was directed by Sean Penn, plays De Niro’s boss, a woman of such chilling authority she need never raise her voice. Does it go without saying that Linson produced the film, as well as adapted his own book?

There’s a long, thick history of self-castigating Hollywood comedies featuring actual Hollywood people playing themselves and intermingling with Hollywood actors playing semi-fictionalized Hollywood people. This strategy supplies Sunset Boulevard, to name a particularly sublime example, with some of its richest, most delicious intertextualities. That term sounds highfalutin, but it serves to remind us just how populist postmodernism can be when dealing with household name cultural icons. It also speaks to a cultural segment still sufficiently movie-obsessed to happily pass hours playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. But is this segment obsessed enough, and large enough, to constitute a substantial audience for What Just Happened?

As directed by Barry Levinson—who gave us a far more outrageous self-castigating Hollywood comedy with Wag the Dog—the film probably isn’t castigating enough, or funny enough, or scandalous enough, to reel in the masses. And it’s kind of a shame, because while What Just Happened fizzles in its final act, while many of its satirical targets, no doubt based in actual events, finally feel like clichés, it has many nuanced observations, some terribly, amusingly sad scenes of personal meltdown, and a very well gauged performance from De Niro, who has a knack for playing containment that doesn’t just read as mere resignation. His Ben is a welcome twist on the notion of the all-powerful producer. He is man required to juggle many balls at once, and who might just care about art, too. (Just scan Linson's filmography and you'll see a commitment to less-than crowd-pleasing projects.)

He has a director, played by Toronto-bred Michael Wincott as a manic, strung-out Keith Richards wannabe, who won’t remove a scene of a dog getting shot in the head from his final cut, despite scathing audience previews. “My wife is still crying, asshole!” reads one of the cards. Another simply reads “FUCK YOU!” He has a rabid actor, Bruce Willis, playing himself, who refuses to shave off a burly beard despite threats by the studio to pull the plug on a picture days away from production. The beard thing—will Willis shave? will he at least go down to a goatee? a moustache?—is the film’s main source of suspense. I guess that might not have you gripping your armrests, yet, you know, there’s something sobering, something perversely fascinating, about just how pivotal the presence of the absence of a beard is on the outcome of a multi-million dollar business venture and numerous careers.

Best westerns: Man with the Gun, Day of the Outlaw exude the brutality and grace of the genre's transitional period

Richard Wilson began his career under the auspices of Orson Welles, working in various capacities—producer, writer, actor—for The Mercury Theatre before following the leader to Hollywood in 1940. By the time Wilson was helming his own projects Welles was already lost in the wilderness of his unruly career, and perhaps this prompted Wilson to choose a more modest course. Man with the Gun (1955), Wilson’s directorial debut, in no way attempts to mimic Welles’ stylistic flamboyance. Rather, it’s an unfussy, well-crafted genre picture, the sort of work that doesn’t announce he arrival of a magnificent prodigy but does in fact hold up extremely well with age—and with any luck will reach a fresh audience with Fox’s new DVD release.

The story of a lone gunman hired to bring peace to a small town ruled by thugs, Man with the Gun, which arrived in theatres the same year as The Night of the Hunter, finds Robert Mitchum giving an unusually brooding performance as “town tamer” Clint Tollinger, dressed in head-to-toe gray, his face looking flat and cold—that is until the news about his estranged family he’s been searching for is finally delivered and he flies into a rage, unleashing his wrath upon the town saloon. Mitchum’s is a brilliantly measured, never ingratiating performance that only reveals all it needs to in the final scenes, making no apologies for Tollinger’s brutality.

In the first scene a man rides into town and gleefully shoots a dog. Later a whiskey seller perches on a front porch to enjoy the gunplay in the main street with a twisted smile while the local prostitutes seem increasingly aroused by the bloodshed. Violence in Man with the Gun is never excessively sensationalized nor simplified, with Wilson wisely and subtly building an atmosphere of dread rather than terror. The use of Alex North’s music creates striking juxtapositions, sounding eerily wistful in a scene where Tollinger tells the story of an unarmed man being slaughtered, or dream-like and droning during the build-up to the film’s climax. The result of such balance and elemental interplay is a bracing example of the transitional western at its best.

A blizzard slow engulfs a pioneer settlement as a pair of ranchers traverse the blank valley where a charcoal smear of trees line the horizon before distant mountain peaks give way to a flat, forbidding sky. One of these ranchers, Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan), is coming into town to kill a man, ostensibly for putting up fences on a landscape intended for open grazing, though the fact that he’s in love with the man’s wife (Tina Louise) may have something to do with it. Messy, violent death looms as an empty bottle rolls across a bar in the wintry silence, its imminent crash intended to signal gunfire. The crash is interrupted however by the arrival of a former US military captain Jack Bruhn (Burl Ives), on the lam and here to take siege of the town with a band of bush-crazed, horny degenerates. Bruhn can barely control his men, and what’s more he’s got a bullet in his chest that will likely kill him within a matter of hours. Everything seems geared toward something absolutely awful. I guess it’s just like Blaise tells his beloved Helen early on: “You won’t find mercy anywhere in Wyoming.”

It takes a hell of a movie to follow something as good as Man with the Gun. Fortunately Day of the Outlaw (59), also newly on DVD from Fox, is an even bolder, bleaker, more distinctive work, a western wrapped in bad weather, hardship, cold death and repressed longing. Maybe it has something to do with the cast and crew’s collective background in film noir (yes, there's even a part of Elisha Cook Jr.). Screenwriter Philip Yordan—Dillinger (45), The Big Combo (55)—honed Lee E. Wells’ source novel to a taut three acts of savagery, desire, desperate invention, moral realization and fatalistic suspense. Ryan’s in top form with a role very much in keeping with much of his best work—Crossfire (47), Act of Violence (48), On Dangerous Ground (52)—while using the now tangible accumulation of time and age upon his voice and visage to deepen the pathos. He’s at once frightening and deeply sympathetic, sick to his guts with heartache, a sense of futility and a suicidal urge toward pointless destruction.

Day of the Outlaw is also further evidence of the oft-forgotten mastery of André De Toth, the Hungarian-born director who pumped out a formidable stream of genre films in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s. His manipulation of time, space and sound elevates several sequences toward the cruelly sublime: letting scenes play out entirely in master shot before closing in on a character’s face just when he’s about to undergo a radical shift; allowing the violence to become more uncomfortable by letting only the whistling wind provide the score; allowing the farewell between the youngest, nicest of the degenerates and the town’s young maiden to unfold with tenderness, humour and transitory ache. It’s the kind of work that should rightfully draw even moviegoers uninterested in genre films, and deserves this advice: even if you don’t normally go for westerns, see Day of the Outlaw.

The forgotten ones: the gradual emergence of Buñuel's Mexican films on DVD

It’s long frustrated me that Luis Buñuel, one of history’s greatest filmmakers, is often considered so solely on the basis of his spectacularly scandalous early shorts Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Âge d’or (30) and late-career European co-productions like Belle de jour (67) and the Oscar-wining The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (72). The vast bulk of Buñuel’s filmography is actually comprised of films made in Mexico between these periods, but, due to a number of issues –distribution, rights, the absence of international stars, the stylistic range and of the material, and, one suspects, a dismissive attitude toward the Mexican film industry– most of these films have failed to reach their rightful audience.

The uniformed consensus on Buñuel’s Mexican films usually insists that, often produced quickly, often melodramas, and sometimes employing Buñuel more as a gun for hire than canonized auteur, they’re compromised works ill-representative of the director’s mischievous disposition and Surrealist roots. Such assumptions ring false for several reasons, not the least being that melodrama is in fact a genre highly conducive to exercising Surrealist philosophy. The period has its lesser titles to be sure, but it’s nonetheless a body of work characterized by invention, provocation, sensuality and economy.

The good news is that in recent months these films have started cropping up on DVD shelves, including two very different titles paired together by Lionsgate in a set imaginatively titled Luis Buñuel 2-Disc Collector’s Edition.

Gran Casino (47), his first Mexican film, admittedly comes closest to being “Luis light”: frivolous, generic, with few traces of anything especially “Buñuelian.” Yet it’s entertaining and far from without interest, concerning a couple of likeable charros who venture to Tampico to find lucrative work in the oil fields. They find more than they bargained for after befriending an Argentine oilman who represents the last holdout in a region otherwise monopolized by a German-owned company using any means necessary to eliminate competition.

The film lucidly evokes its rowdy, anarchic setting, dominated by elitist corruption and riggers eager to relinquish their earnings in the local casino with its luscious female entertainers. The plot features murder, masquerade and plenty of music, and while Buñuel’s contributions are largely workmanlike, he does enhance the proceedings with his distinctive attention to objects –a face reflected in an ice bucket, a stick dragged suggestively through crude oil in the midst of an otherwise tepid love scene– as well as to Mercedes Barba’s impressive thighs jiggling beneath a curtain of sheer fabric in her initial dance number.

More deeply satisfying, The Young One (60), an English-language, US/Mexico co-production, is an unfaithful, utterly inspired adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s story ‘Travelin Man,’ a chamber piece set on an island off the Carolina coast, a fecund locale that serves as a confluence of contentious attitudes toward race, sexuality and identification. It begins with black clarinetist Traver (Bernie Hamilton) arriving alone and desperate in a small boat. Cries of rape jarringly explode over the soundtrack just before we’re treated to an exhilarating series of jump cuts that flashback to the events that brought Traver to his current state. This is followed by the introduction of Miller (Zachary Scott) the island’s white gamekeeper, seen killing a rabbit, who, like Traver’s boat, will enjoy the distinction of actually being shot up twice before the film’s through.

Death and transformation abound in The Young One: animals are hunted and consumed, an old man expires, and the pubescent Evalyn (the remarkably unguarded Key Meersman), at least in the eyes of Miller, her guardian, goes from being a girl to a woman. Amidst these transitional states, the story’s central irony is writ large: while the charismatic Traver must run from lynch-hungry whites happy to assume he’s guilty of a rape he probably didn’t commit, a forced sexual relationship erupts between the middle-aged Miller and the disarmingly innocent Evalyn.

All the signifiers of socially conscientious middlebrow pap are in place –one can imagine the material resting cozily in the hands of say, Stanley Kramer. But Buñuel, who developed the script with Hugo Butler, creates something far more complicated and full of juice. The Young One implicates the viewer fully into the process of Evalyn’s loss of sexual innocence, playfully juxtaposing the trappings of her ostensible newfound adulthood with her girlish manners, as in her final scene that finds her hopping childishly along a boardwalk in oversized heels.
Likewise, the film constantly draws overt parallels between the two men, even while exposing the grotesque aspects of Miller. And in the memorable last scenes, it is in fact Miller who undergoes the greatest, strangest changes. The whole process is conveyed through elegant, fluid camerawork by Gabriel Figueroa and Buñuel’s compelling habit of lingering on images of people at work, of food and, of course, of Evalyn’s legs, which he neither grossly fetishizes nor denies their immaculate beauty.

Lionsgate’s release is in some ways rather clumsy –the two discs are mislabeled, the songs have no subtitles– but the transfers look great, the audio commentaries accompanying both films have their distinct merits, and above all they got the material back on the market in a very affordable package.

Race, Class and American lyricism: Killer of Sheep and My Brother's Wedding on DVD

When Charles Burnett’s extraordinary feature debut Killer of Sheep (1977) received its first-ever proper theatrical release last spring, I, like so many others, felt instantly as though I’d found my new favourite movie. Burnett’s idiosyncratic method of capturing incident, play and struggle in the Watts district of Los Angeles, his marvelous eye for off-kilter composition, his empathy for diverse characters, his irreverent drawing out of the comedic aspects of even the most dire scenarios, his light touch with social commentary and wonderfully fluid use of songs by the likes of Paul Robeson and Dinah Washington –one of the main reasons the film was never released was its plague of music clearance issues– his necessary utilization of ultra-low budget production values as an aesthetic and even moral choice: all of these things made Killer of Sheep feel like a revelation, a movie as artful and arresting in its depiction of the marginalized classes as Los Olvidados (50).

Yet accompanying all the praise given to Killer of Sheep was this constant, melancholic undercurrent, a lament for a great, raw talent largely wasted all these years. Numerous senior critics implied that in the 30 years since the film’s completion Burnett had never matched the vitality of his debut, or, To Sleep With Anger (90) excepted, even came close. After having gone through all of Burnett’s work featured on Milestone’s new Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection, I beg to differ. The two-disc set contains four shorts by Burnett –half of which are brilliant, while the other half merely warm, smart, inventive and funny– and Burnett’s feature My Brother’s Wedding (83), which, particularly in its new director’s cut, is an absolutely worthy follow-up to the preceding masterwork.

There are doubtlessly ardent fans who might resent the simple fact that My Brother’s Wedding is a more emphatically narrative film than Killer of Sheep. But just because it has a clear story is no reason to see My Brother’s Wedding as any sort of compromise toward commercialism, nor does that story prevent Burnett from inviting his characteristic digressions into comic mishaps, amusing ephemra, or pure character development.

The film follows 30-year-old Angelino Pierce Mundy, played with unmannered sincerity by Everett Silas, who, sadly, seems to have never made another film. While doing little aside from working listlessly in his mother’s dry cleaners or helping to care for some elderly relatives, Pierce is simultaneously confronted with two inevitabilities that illustrate the socio-economic polarities that define his attitude. On the one hand, his elder brother, a successful doctor, is marrying a lawyer from a middle-class black family, much to the delight of Pierce’s working class parents and the seething hostility of Pierce. One the other, Pierce’s old pal Soldier returns home from a stint in prison, looking for good times and trouble. Both of these scenarios reach a crisis point that demand Pierce’s attention and force him to make allegiances, though in the end his inability to satisfy either party is what brings the story to its enigmatic conclusion, an image that solidifies Pierce as the unwitting representative of a community’s conflicted soul, a community at once desirous of positive change and doomed by its tendency to prey upon itself.

Burnett imbues the film with a lively, mischievous spirit, with scenes of Pierce and Soldier play-fighting in a stranger’s yard, singing doo-wop in a stairwell or using the dry cleaners as an impromptu love nest, scenes of customers who can’t claim their clothes because they can’t remember their aliases. He conveys the complexities of classism with much wit, such as in the scene in which Pierce’s nouveau riche in-laws-to-be show off their Mexican servant, taking pride in their acquisition of the accoutrements of the class that once oppressed them. And he delivers moments of wondrous lyricism, such as the one in which Pierce’s Bible reading dissolves dreamily into an ill-fated drive along a tree-lined avenue. A rough cut of My Brother’s Wedding was screened at festivals in Toronto and New York but prompted only lukewarm reviews and, in what was becoming a despairing tradition, failed to receive distribution. The rough cut ran at 118 minutes. Burnett’s new director’s cut clocks in at 81 minutes. You can’t say the man doesn’t appreciate concision.

Burnett’s first short ‘Several Friends’ (1969) is very much a stand-alone work as well as a sort of gearing up for Killer of Sheep, riffing engagingly on running themes of animal slaughter, fleeing pleasures, and broken machinery that never seems to get fixed. A child watches her father collapse in an alley. A parking lot fight is overseen by people both in cars and –in a typically goofy visual non-sequiter– on horseback. Hens are slaughtered and then plucked using some medieval machine. Two guys work on a car while a friend visits to show off his white girlfriend, a pivotal strategy in his attempts at upward mobility. The whole possesses an easy, compelling rhythm.

‘The Horse’ (1973) features eloquently composed rural landscapes in its tale of several men waiting in the mid-day heat for someone to come and facilitate the killing of a horse. One white guy sits on a shady porch, working on the crease in his pants as another lays flat and flicks a knife into the ceiling so that it dangles like some tiny sword of Damocles over his head. All the while a black boy sits mourning in the sun-beaten dust with the condemned horse. It’s a strange, curious, sad and beautiful little film.

The final highlight of this package I want to mention here is Burnett’s commentary track for Killer of Sheep. I was able to interview Burnett for Vue last July and was happy to find that same warm, humble and unassumingly insightful character speaking of his filmmaking experiences here. Most memorable for me among his comments was his feeling that people he knew back in the 70s were always telling him he needed to speak for the black community. Burnett found this idea absurd. Instead, he tried to simply show people in his community in enough situations that felt were truthful to his and their experience, and in doing so, let the black community speak for themselves.

Charles Burnett on Killer of Sheep

One of the most simultaneously acclaimed and unseen works in American movies, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep is finally making its proper theatrical debut 30 years after its completion. Its scarcity was partially due to licensing difficulties resulting from the film’s expressive use of music from the likes of Paul Robeson, Rachmaninoff and Dinah Washington, whose rendition of ‘This Bitter Earth’ supplies the emotional clincher for two of the film’s most memorable, stark and heartbreaking scenes.

Not that Burnett needed any assistance with regards to the film’s lyricism. Set within the crumbling buildings, dusty rail yards and rundown homes of Watts, Los Angeles, Burnett’s images of children roof jumping, wearing masks or playing with rocks, families assembling on front stoops, and its protagonist, Stan, accumulating work hours in an abattoir are imbued with an aching visual poetry –not to mention a terrifically funky sense of humour. These two elements frequently conspire to provide the film with its most pointed moments, such as the scene where Stan explains why he doesn’t consider himself poor. “I give things to the Salvation Army sometimes,” he says.

Stan’s occupation also forms a poetic, if dire, link with his private disorders: Stan’s an insomniac, thus he not only kills sheep but counts them, too. His wife craves his affection desperately, but he’s a million miles away. When not working, Stan throws himself into less emotionally demanding projects, such as acquiring a motor for a friend’s jalopy, a mission doomed to comic failure. The closest thing to conventional heroism on display here is simply Stan and his wife’s ability to endure an existence that promises precious few opportunities at advancement with their humanity in tact.

Social context aside, the singular, striking images of Killer of Sheep seem informed by the photography of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. And these images have gone on to deeply influence other films, most notably David Gordon Green’s George Washington. Burnett himself seems perpetually surprised by his film’s impact however, claiming that he never intended it to be seen outside of activist or social science screenings. His family moved to Watts when Burnett was just entering kindergarten, and he felt that Killer of Sheep was basically just a reflection on where he was from. He spoke to with me from his current home in a different section of Los Angeles.

JB: I heard you first studied electronics.

Charles Burnett: Yeah, I was thinking about becoming an engineer. But I started looking at other people who were going into it, listening to their comments and jokes, what they expected out of life. It just didn’t seem interesting to me. Their jokes weren’t funny. They were looking forward to job security, buying a Winnebago, all that junk. That didn’t sound too inviting.

JB: Was being a filmmaker too far out a notion for you then?

CB: It was more a matter of my not being aware of it. When I was a kid I always wanted to do something with a camera, but had no clear ideas. Then I went into electronics, got disenchanted with that. Then I started going to movies a lot, and wondering how you make these things. And I discovered UCLA’s program, which was dirt-cheap at the time.

JB: How was your experience at UCLA?

CB: It was a chance for discovery. I remember taking this documentary class with Basil Wright that was very instrumental in my deciding which way to go.

JB: In the sense that you saw the documentary elements within fiction films?

CB: It was more that when people would talk about fiction films, you never heard them talk about the importance of treating the subject in a human way. Being honest and respectful, that kinda stuff. It made me look at films differently.

JB: Did you always intend to make a film about race, class and community?

CB: Well, I was certainly aware of race, being from Mississippi. And L.A. was worse somehow, divided and Apartheid-like in many ways. In my neighbourhood two or three of us couldn’t walk down the street together without being harassed, being sent to jail for the least thing. They wouldn’t give you a chance. Lots of kids thought it was funny going to jail, a rite of passage. So I think that my social conscience just came from growing up in that environment.

JB: It’s interesting to consider Killer of Sheep in the context of its period, particularly how it contrasts the blaxploitation films popular then.

CB: Many of us were getting into film to create our own narratives, to counter what Hollywood offered. So when these blaxploitation films came, initially they were exciting simply because a black person was the centre of attention. The negative side became apparent later on. But my thing was trying to reflect a situation where the audience would be able to ask themselves how they might help these people. And I didn’t want to romanticize things with regard to the working class.

JB: Did the story come to you in an ordered way?

CB: It did actually. But I wanted it based in the day to day. There’s no single thread that moves it, just the things that happen as you continue trying to eke out a life.

JB: Music is unusually vital in Killer of Sheep. Did you have a precise idea how the music would interact with your images?

CB: Yeah. A lot of it is blues, music I grew up with. I associate it with that environment. And with blues you have to grow up to really understand it. I had the good fortune to speak with August Wilson many years before he died, and he was saying how these same songs somehow generated images for his plays. That’s how it worked for me.

JB: Looking back after 30 years, how has Killer of Sheep changed for you?

CB: Seeing it now just makes me think how the neighbourhood’s changed. It was a much better life back then, before crack hit. People could still own their homes. There was a sense of community. Parents these days don’t want their kids going out for fear they might get shot. Back then kids could go anywhere. People used to say that if you wanted to better yourself just get a high school diploma. Now they’ll just tell you to get up and get away from here.

JB: Are the things that were important to you when you made Killer of Sheep still important to you now?

CB: I think the core is still there, the whole idea of why I got into film in the first place. The problem’s just that you can’t do the film you want to. With money comes however many compromises, and you need to constantly put things in terms that money people understand.

JB: Any chance this new wave of acclaim for Killer of Sheep might help you do what you want?

CB: Nah. People want films to make money. Folks’ll just look at me as an art film person. And art can be a dirty word in this business.