Spiritual vacancy

The fantasy is hardly new, but there’s a novelty to its veneer that holds a certain initial thrill. The hero, a murdered cop raised from the grave, exists beyond death. The villain, too, is invincible. There’s the suggestion they could fight for all eternity, like Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, with no limit to the cartoony extremes of meaningless violence they can exact on each other. The women are uniformly astonishing objects, every one untouched by age, imperfection, gravity. Even the rookie cop wears a uniform revealing luscious cleavage. There’s a climactic four-way showdown in some part of town called “the projects,” yet not a single person seems to live there. So we have a world without poverty, pain or unattractive women. Or death. Or even, it would seem, colour, beyond red. Yet there’s no limit to the diversity of weaponry, so rest assured we get plenty of noise. Yes, it’s beautiful in its limited way. But is that enough?

I suppose The Spirit, written and directed by Frank Miller, inspired by Will Eisner’s comic, shot on the same digital backlot that produced the stylistically akin Sin City, represents the future, or maybe just the sluggish-to-catch-on present, of movies. But I dearly hope it’s not the only future, this hermetically sealed world that eschews what some of us love about movies: actual places, sunlight, spontaneity, interaction, evocations of sensual experience. The titular super hero (Gabriel Macht) is a ghost of sorts. Fittingly, he inhabits a city where everything’s the vaguest suggestion of something that might have once breathed. It’s a twist on the texture of film noir, but this twist squeezes out all of noir’s pathos and sweat.

“My city needs me,” the Spirit soliloquizes. “She is my love. She is my life.” There’s no mistaking this for anything but unabashed melodrama, and that’s fine—there’s plenty of room in the movies these days for alternatives to the standard of supposed naturalism. But characters speak exclusively in shopworn hard-boiled patter, expository monologues, or declamatory statements that extinguish subtext. There are flourishes of visual expressionism: an automaton created by evil genetic scientist the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) commits ritual seppuku, and the background’s consumed with the blood-red rays of the Japanese flag; characters swim in waters so murky they could be drifting through gaseous portals in space. But all the eye candy, from the misty skies of fluttering snow to Eva Mendes’ immaculate ass, begins to wear as the story proves itself bereft of feeling. The characters are stereotypes. Their stories get very boring.

There’s not much point in talking performances here, though Jackson seems to have a good time. And I am kind of fascinated by the Octopus’ emphatic dislike of eggs, which seems counterintuitive given that, besides being a beloved breakfast staple, eggs are a symbol of rebirth, and Octopus is singularly obsessed with immortality. And they’re luminescent white, one of few colours Miller permits. They’re also as thin and fragile as Miller’s story, which threatens to grow into a franchise where hero and villain just keep beating the, er, living shit out of each other in the presence of fawning babes, against a backdrop of absolutely nothing.

Soul Men: Reunited, and it feels, well, okay. Sorta.

In the 30 years following the break-up of Memphis-bred soul trio the Real Deal, singers Louis Hinds (Samuel L. Jackson) and Floyd Henderson (Bernie Mac) watched their former front man Marcus Hooks (John Legend) go successfully solo while their own thornier paths strayed out of music altogether and into jail time and the car wash business respectively. It’s only with the news of Hooks’ untimely demise that Louis and Floyd, both of them now residing on the West Coast, are given an opportunity to reunite for a posthumous tribute at the Apollo—should they be able to squeeze into the old satin outfits, patch up old grudges, keep Floyd’s green El Dorado running, get in a little on-stage rehearsal on the motel circuit, get busy with a few hungry women, and still make the gig on time.

Scripted by Robert Ramsey and Matthew Stone, Soul Men is a comic road movie that brakes for all the usual clichés. As helmed by Malcolm D. Lee (Undercover Brother), it is from start to finish a little too comfortable, too willing to settle for mechanical gags and wrote mediocrity, and it isn’t hard to imagine a more imaginative, rigorous director taking the same material, however meager, and injecting a little more urgency and emotional truth into its realization. Fortunately, what heart and soul there is to be found in Soul Men is frequently left to its stars to conjure, and there are some enjoyable, genuinely sweet scenes that feature Jackson and Mac chewing each other out, beating each other up, and even lighting some little spark of the old magic. This is finally a movie of largely verbal pleasures, whether arising from Mac’s whispery rants, blubbery coos or surprisingly fine falsetto or from Jackson’s imposing boasts, his casual citations of Lao Tzu, or that soul rap he does in the final big number. The music they make isn't much to get excited about, but the enthusiasm goes some distance. 

Admittedly, it’s not without some sentimental bias that I managed to find a few high points in Soul Men, as in recent months we lost not only Mac, only 50, and undoubtedly with better movies ahead, but also the one and only Isaac Hayes, who has a small but stately cameo here. There is a definite lack of death’s shadow in this story of aging showmen trying to taste some fleeting hint of past glories, and that lack is one of the things that make the jokes and contrived reversals less involving. But, watching it so soon after Mac and Ike’s deaths, some flickering melancholy strikes certain moments from beyond the movie’s immediate frame, allowing us to savour another glimpse of these talented artists as they give a little extra class to these shopworn goods.

The good neighbour policy: Sam Jackson does a little creative gardening on Patrick Wilson's white ass in Lakeview Terrace

The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace feel like Marxist propaganda, the last third like capitalist propaganda, the whole thing like some sort of distinctly American nightmare, with some surprisingly curious politics and one hell of a dunderheaded narrative. Abel (Samuel L. Jackson) is old school LAPD, a widower with two-kids, a humongous piece of carefully manicured residential property and a chip on his shoulder the size of Plymouth Rock. He’s a hard-ass with a knack for intimidation as well as flights of charm and manipulation. (The movie’s got plenty of good cop/bad cop—in the same cop!)

Abel’s also got some serious issues with racial integration and cultural appropriation—in a memorable early scene, he menacingly reassures his new next-door neighbour Chris (Patrick Wilson) that he can listen to hip-hop all night long if he wants but when he wakes up the next morning he’ll still be white. More importantly Abel’s stridently territorial—at one point he even hires some slob to piss in Chris’ shirt drawer. Chris and his conspicuously fetching black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) are thus shamelessly sullying Abel’s suburban enclave, practically asking for the full brunt of our man Jackson’s wrath—which apparently is precisely what the very loud, obnoxious but nonetheless jovial audience at the sneak preview I attended came to gobble up. I felt like I was at a wrestling match. These guys actually talk to the screen.

Though I was initially surprised to see Neil LaBute credited as director, it’s actually not that hard to see what attracted him to this material, which, incidentally, was dreamed up by David Loughery, the guy who brought you Money Train and Passenger 57. Right from his earliest films—In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors—LaBute’s fancied himself something of a moralist and provocateur, though the results have dwindled to the point where his last movie was the outlandishly dumb remake of The Wicker Man. Yet Lakeview Terrace shares with The Wicker Man a gleeful immersion into an essentially closed community lorded over by those who would shape it into some sort of fascist paradise, and the fires consuming Southern California and creeping toward Abel and Chris’ pissing contest carry a certain apocalyptic portent that no doubt agreed with LaBute’s natural pessimism.

Of course it all goes nowhere. At least nowhere all that interesting. The prickly marital squabbles that burble up in the midst of the war-like neighbourly ones feel lazily tacked on, and Chris’ paranoia being surrounded by pushy, Alpha Male Negroes doesn’t build up to a confrontation worthy of the concept. There’s a lot of motivational overkill—like the monologue about the deceased wife’s carrying on with her whitey boss—perhaps to help us understand Abel’s little attitude problem, but in the end he still goes down in a hail of flamboyant nonsense instead of prompting further intrigue or audience implication, and—hooray!—property ownership and vague liberal values rule the day.

(For something more substantial on suburban angst, check out Gary Burns and Jim Brown's Radiant City.)

Drinking, fighting and redemption round the toxic sump: Drunken Angel on DVD

I can think of few filmmakers whose very name holds the same promise of a great time like Akira Kurosawa’s. I can sit down to watch virtually any of Kurosawa’s films, whatever niggling individual flaws each might possess, and feel confident that I’m about to be treated to all the fundamental things that make movie-watching rewarding, to be entertained in the highest yet broadest sense of that troublesome term.

Yet with every Kurosawa film, no matter how ingeniously crafted, there’s always at least one moment that seems to have wriggled away from the dictates of sheer craft, something that breathes, that betrays ostensible perfection, that has funk. These more spontaneous moments make the films better, setting the obvious gems of technical precision and good taste in striking relief, pushing them up from the ranks of the very good to the singularly great. In Rashomon (1950), there’s the inordinate amount of time spent hiking through the woods with the woodcutter, as though the sheer pleasure of those woods deserves its own little movie. In Yojimbo (61) there’s that image of the dramatic mountain offset by Toshiro Mifune’s ronin protagonist ambling into frame not to strike a heroic pose but to yawn and scratch the back of his head –and that’s the opening of the movie!

Newly released on DVD by Criterion, Drunken Angel (48) was the first film Kurosawa felt he could truly call his own. It also happened to be his first collaboration with Mifune, the actor that will forever be associated with Kurosawa’s cinema. Though Drunken Angel is keenly focused on the uneasy friendship between a tippling doctor and a dying gangster, the sort of narrative detours mentioned above are already finding their home in the eager-to-impress young director’s palate. The film trades in brawling, in crime, in seedy ghettos, mafia-rule, drinking and prostitution, and pays off with every one of these elements. But many of the things that makes this more than just a taut, well-made populist film are its playful insertions of incidental moments most other directors would likely cut out, such as when the doctor makes repeated attempts to do nothing more than prop open a door, or when the restless gangster ostentatiously wiggles his ass to a rousing song (with lyrics by Kurosawa!) performed in a dance hall.

Central to Drunken Angel is a sprawling sump into which locals toss their refuse, a toxic bog crawling with disease and clearly representing the morass of post-war Tokyo, a city in search of some new sense of self but mired in chaos and cynicism. The titular doctor –played with caustic appeal the other actor most associated with Kurosawa, Takashi Shimura– lives and works around this sump, battling all the filth rising from it. Though his drinking and bitter mood convey his unhappiness with the state of things, his deep-seated optimism can be located in his desire to cure even the most resistant patients, such as the arrogant young yakuza, played by Mifune, who the doctor discovers has tuberculosis. Their relationship is fraught with conflict –and the guys literally fist fight all the time– yet perhaps because of these conflicts, their attempts to understand each other is that much more profound, and fun.

Though Kurosawa had yet to distinguish all the elements of his formal style, the film features numerous inspired set-pieces, such as that dance hall scene and a tremendous climatic fight involving white paint, a device that imbues the action with layers of meaning even as it thrills us, finally resolving in a traveling shot that moves elegantly from Mifune’s collapsed figure and back out into the neighbourhood swamp. These scenes are further enriched when you later listen to Donald Richie’s enormously interesting audio commentary, which benefits not only from Richie’s position as the West’s foremost representative of Japanese cinema but from the fact that he was actually on set during the film’s making.

The book accompanying Drunken Angel, handsomely illustrated with inky impressions of the film’s imagery by somebody called Jock, features a short essay by cultural historian Ian Buruma that helps flesh out the dramatic polarities of post-war Japanese life, placing special emphasis on the idea of the nation’s inability to find an individual or institution upon which to place blame for its defeat, shame and humiliation, and, especially intriguingly, on the lineage between soldiers and yakuza.

Buruma’s essay is followed by two superb excerpts from Kurosawa’s Something Like an Autobiography, in which he describes the varied elements that fed into the development of the film and more generally on the phenomena of Mifune. But anyone even slightly interested in Kurosawa should do themselves a huge favour and just go out and get the whole book, which, with its breezy, humble, anecdotal tone, is among the best memoirs on life in the film industry ever written.