From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.


Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.

When you're this big, they call you Mister (with a little persuasion, anyway)

It’s the middle of the night in the middle-1960s, and a handsome black stranger materializes in some backwater on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line right around the time a wealthy white industrialist is murdered. The scene seems set for a drama in which the undereducated but quietly noble negro escapes being chewed up in the wheels of injustice with the help of, say, a crusading white lawyer charged with the task of convincing the townsfolk to look past their racist presumptions. But In the Heat of the Night (1967), based on the first of John Ball’s Virgil Tibbs novels, does something much more interesting: it makes the black stranger a well-paid, nattily dressed homicide detective from Philly whose innocence is swiftly established and who winds up cracking the case the local crackers couldn’t. It was an ingenious reversal of expectations, with Mister Tibbs elegantly embodied by Sidney Poitier, probably the only actor who could have pulled it off. The film is screening at Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend, following Poitier’s Thursday night speaking engagement at the Jube.

It is no slight to say that In the Heat of the Night—one of Canadian director Norman Jewison’s earliest feature credits and still among his best—plays out like a very good cop show elevated by sociological innovation. (That’s why the film was eventually made into a cop show.) The murder mystery is something of a MacGuffin, making room for richer themes of tolerance, respect, professionalism, alpha-male competitiveness and the painfully protracted spread of the Civil Rights Movement. We keep watching not so much to find out whodunnit as to see how the unflappable Tibbs will finally find his way out of Sparta, Mississippi and make something like peace with its ornery, lonesome police chief Bill Gillespie. Gillespie’s played by Rod Steiger, who chews gum as a way to hold off from chewing up all the scenery—mastication keeps Steiger from shouting all the time, though this too becomes overly indicative and irritating in its way. Steiger won an Oscar for this part, despite the fact that Poitier’s cool approach—not to mention that of Warren Oates as a bumbling patrolman—seems to offer such a seductive, more intriguing alternative to Steiger’s bullishness in nearly every scene.

Historical significance and varying performance styles aside, I think that much of what keeps In the Heat of the Night fresh and worthy of repeat visits has to do with the many wonderful details that pepper the film: the plastic Jesus on Oates’ dashboard; the Dr. Pepper sliding between a young woman’s ample breasts as she lingers naked by her kitchen window; the masking tape repairs on an old vinyl-upholstered chair; or the positioning of the corpse discovered on a Sparta side street. The dead man lays on the ground like he was in middle of trying out a new dance—let’s call it the doggie paddle. There’s also sensitive editing from future director Hal Ashby, inventive shooting from Haskell Wexler, scoring from Quincy Jones, and a title tune sung by Ray Charles, an especially inspired choice to ease us into the picture. If Charles couldn’t get Americans of every colour to root for a black hero, no one could.

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.

Amacord: Send in il buffone

The title of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) derives from the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect spoken in the Northern Italian village where the writer/director was raised. It supposedly means “I remember,” though if this is true it’s probably safe to assume that the Romagnolian memory is more heavily imbued with fantasy than the average. Episodic, bawdy, cyclical, and at every point flamboyantly exaggerated, Amarcord, newly available on Blu-ray from Criterion, is a group portrait of Italian village life during the rise of fascism, a threat that seems to have no significant effect on humble provincial matters. It’s less a narrative than a vast mural that gradually reveals itself over the course of a couple of hours. Chronologically, a year has passed by the film’s end, but you can somehow imagine all of the preceding events simply repeating themselves once the last fade-to-black closes.

Caricatures of all types inhabit Fellini’s village, as do the deformed and the purely symbolic. The men are mostly salacious while the women are fantastically voluptuous, a collective homage to the corset. Some resemble drag queens, others are the closest thing to living embodiments of Robert Crumb drawings that this world will furnish. Families talking to each other in such blustery tones you worry the elder, heavier members could go into cardiac arrest at any moment. There’s a crazy uncle who pees his pants, carries rocks in his pockets, and climbs a tree in the middle of nowhere so as to declare his melancholy horniness to a nearly unpopulated landscape. There’s a teenage boy nearly smothered by massive breasts, each of them larger than his head. There’s a dwarf nun. And of course there’s sweet, red-haired Gradisca (Magali Noël), an object of desire that just wants to be loved, and an ideal frame upon which to display Danilo Donati’s costume designs, Gradisca’s favoured outfit being a dress and beret combo of a scarlet that hums on the screen as though radioactive, a sort of sex-force, not clothing but some kind of form-fitting energy field designed to ceaselessly prompt in viewers the urge to see its wearer naked.

So Fellini’s memory/imagination has rendered the world of his childhood a series of broad comic sketches. At times you get to feeling like you’re watching Benny Hill with millionaire production design. I confess my patience with the more cartoonish aspect of Fellini’s work, especially in the later films, those modeled on the circus and likely the source of all that’s most tiresome in the films of Terry Gilliam, has its limits. But the rewards of Fellini’s obsession with scale arrive in the inspired heights of artifice, the unabashedly fake and fragile-looking images, and the dream-like extremes of atmospheric conditions. Weather regularly turns his village into a fabulous theme park. The fog sequence is extraordinarily beautiful, as are those colossal mounds of snow that transform the village centre into a labyrinth. And because behaviour is typically so larger than life the rare moments when a character delivers a line with a straight face are that much more striking. Despite (or because of) all the fart jokes and pee jokes, nothing in Amarcord made me laugh as hard as a scene where an older patron leaves the village cinema and, when asked what she thought of the movie, looks directly at the camera and says without any inflection: “It was beautiful. I had a good cry.”

Piranha 3-D: Beach blanket bloodbath, barf-bags may be required

Alexandre Aja’s third horror remake kicks off with Richard Dreyfuss getting sucked into an astonishingly lame-looking computer-generated whirlpool before being gobbled by two-million year-old killer guppies. Dreyfuss’ cameo is meant to remind the amnesiacs in the audience of Jaws, though wouldn’t it have been more in keeping with the monumental crassness of Aja’s Piranha to somehow digitally resurrect Roy Scheider and shove him into this innovative new product for inducing vomit? That’s not hyperbole, incidentally—there are at least two acts of vomiting in the movie itself, and only one is performed by a piranha.

Wasn’t the first third of Saving Private Ryan supposed to be a comedy? Apparently that’s the sort of “high-concept” that gets green-lit these days, resulting in this brazenly cynical, simultaneously tedious and upsetting beach blanket bloodbath, quite possibly the only summer fare that includes both Academy Award-winning actors and porn stars in its cast, not to mention the chubby kid from Stand By Me. Funny thing is, I’m not sure which camp gives the worst performances. At least valiant Elizabeth Shue looks like she’s trying, and Christopher Lloyd is nearly amusing in the Sam Jaffe expository scientist bit, though he doesn’t have to work as hard as Sperm Overload 3’s Gianna Michaels, playing a topless parasailing appetizer.

Scripted by Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, the story’s at once risibly sentimental and utterly heartless, winkily aware of its own irritatingly idiocy yet idiotic nonetheless. It concerns Sheriff Shue trying to evacuate an Arizona resort upon discovering swarms of hungry cannibal piranhas released from captivity while some mannequin who’s supposed to be her teenage son absconds from babysitting duties to hang on a boat with Jerry O’Connell’s insufferable moron with a movie camera, who’s supposedly making pornography. Of course Shue can’t get those pesky spring breakers to exit the water, and soon enough all those dozens of young women Aja worked so hard to get out of their bikinis are ripped to shreds, not only by piranha teeth but also the outboard motor of some scumbag foolishly trying to escape the massacre. After seeing Piranha you may want to undertake hypnosis to get its images out of your head.

It strikes me that O’Connell’s would-be director is actually a pretty obvious stand-in for Aja. While he’s clearly no match for Aja in the sadistic misogyny department, all O’Connell wants for the first half of Piranha is to shoot naked tits, yet his most vivid expression of amazement occurs when he sees one of his honeys consumed by piranhas, who possess the showmanship to penetrate her from below and exit through her mouth. Soon after O’Connell’s back on his boat, half-mutilated, paraphrasing Eric Roberts in The Pope of Greenwich Village. “They took my penis,” he gasps, as though he wasn’t impotent to begin with. But he’s impotent in 3-D! Feeling entertained yet?

The road to parturition: Away We Go

A welcome entry into the surely under-explored subgenre of the bulgingly pregnant road movie, Away We Go begins with considerable brio, its first act’s chain of clipped, zingy, well-sculpted scenes just bouncing along, unburdened by preciousness or ponderousness. There is, initially, so much here to like. The dinner scene featuring a fizzy Catherine O’Hara as doting hippy grandma-to-be and a hilariously over-boisterous Jeff Daniels as the absent-minded old dad who’s really big of affirmative adjectives. The warm, inviting photography, courtesy of Ellen Kuras. The final line in the establishing scene of comic cunnilingus, which begins “From what I’ve read about vaginal flavour…”

As Burt and Verona, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are exceptionally relaxed, lived-in, and appealing as the shaggy thirtysomething couple setting out via plane, train and rusted-out Volvo on a slightly loopy quest for an ideal family upon which to model their impending one, for a new place to call home, or, shit, maybe even a new country. Their first stop is Phoenix, where Allison Janney sparkles as Lily, Verona’s old workmate, recently condemned to middle America’s desert suburbs with her shrunken, paranoid husband and pudgy, tormented children. Loud, crass and funny as all hell, Lily, in an especially memorable scene, completes with the PA at the dog track to describe how her children slowly drained the life from her once tremendous tits. I believe “old man’s hairy nut sack,” was how she described their current state. But Janney’s brief appearance in Away We Go finally constitutes, however prematurely, all that’s best in the film. She offers both its comic peak and its most elegantly rendered moment of pathos, a wordless exchange where she lingers too long over a goodnight kiss to Burt. The moment billows with sad desperation in the arid Arizona night, playing out beautifully in a single, uncut wide-shot. From here, it’s all downhill.

Janney, to be sure, gives a broad performance, but she still manages to bring specificity and nuance to a stereotype. Despite some valiant efforts, the same cannot be said of the grotesque Wisconsinite New Age shrew and her sniveling pony-tailed husband played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton. Their characters are so simultaneously imbecilic and condescending that it’s all too easy for us to go along with Burt when he finally explodes and insults them. There’s no real tension building in the scene because nothing’s at stake. Things get only worse when our errant heroes visit old friends now living in Montreal, a handsome, happy couple with a gaggle of adorable and conspicuously adopted tykes running free in their warmly messy house. Everything seems peachy until the four adults go to amateur strip night at some hipster joint and, in what must be the most dreadfully gag-inducing scene of the year if not the decade, the barren matriarch of the clan suddenly takes the stage to perform a painfully mopey pole dance while her husband explains to Burt how devastated the couple feel because she can’t seem to bear children. All of this to the decidedly unsubtle tune of ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin.’’ (You remember the one, the closer both to Loaded and the Velvet Underground’s career? The one where Lou Reed sings “She ain’t got nuthin’ at all” about 90 times?) And she doesn’t even strip!

This is probably a good time to mention that Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes, who even when helming material far breezier than the likes of Revolutionary Road or The Road to Perdition still manages to display a heavy hand, one made more leaden still by his irritatingly reverent use of songs by Alex Murdoch, which sound like they were designed for long distance commercials and sap the juice from scene after scene by turning it into some lame-ass precession. I had to rush home and slap ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’ on the turntable just to squeeze the stuff out. It’s hard to know whether to lay more blame for the film’s weaker passages on Mendes or his screenwriters, novelists/spouses Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, though its easy to imagine how another director less inclined to pomp and more trusting of his actors to carry a scene could have kept things relatively buoyant. Either way, Away We Go winds up frustratingly uneven, a patchwork of some nearly sublime humour and some genuinely touching moments laced with too many clichés for its sometimes superior air and to many scenes that are facile and over-explanatory.

Assault and batteries: Crank: High Voltage

Having been mortally poisoned at the start of Crank, which ends with his falling from a helicopter and landing with a cartoon splat on the asphalt, we could be forgiven for assuming we’d seen the last of Chev Chelios, the indefatigable adrenaline junky and hired killer played by Jason Statham. Yet, taking implausibility and audacity as its chief criteria, Crank: High Voltage elevates Chelios from mere super-sadist to something virtually indestructible, the Terminator with a hard-on, an electric Lazarus raised from the dead to wreak havoc upon Los Angeles once more.

Chelios wakes to find himself in some seedy Oriental massage parlour. He’s had his heart ripped out and replaced with an electrical one, so, after squeezing some information from a fat thug who’s gaping anus he shoves a tar-smeared rifle into, Chelios steals a car and begins the hunt the baddies in possession of his second-most vital organ for what nefarious purposes we can only imagine. But Chelios needs fuel to stay alive, so he must regularly recharge via booster cables, Tasers, defibrillators and transformers, his hunger for juice providing ample opportunities for creative hedonism, including feats of imagination such as sexually assaulting an elderly woman to generate a little body contract friction.

More of a remake than a sequel, Crank: High Voltage essentially revisits the same territory of its predecessor but with even greater absurdity and even less focus. There is the revenge narrative that takes us on a colourful tour of the LA scumbag underground. There’s a reunion with Chelios’ beloved Eve (Amy Smart), who’s apparently become a stripper in the three months since Chelios’ ostensible death and is thus able to pass some action sequences wearing only pink hotpants and duct tape on her titties, and there is another scene of them having public sex, though this time not initiated as an act of rape. There is the open hostility to minorities, homosexuals, women and the sex trade, not to mention EMS workers and gentle gardeners. Yet because Crank: High Voltage has moved into the realm of full-on bananas, its crudity and misanthropic aggression to all beings below Statham on the food chain is somewhat tempered by pure silliness, for better or for worse.

Returning writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor still can’t seem to make a movie so much as a fidgety mash-up, heavily dependent on freak-out guest appearances, spastic editing, a strained, self-conscious grindhouse aesthetic and the dumb, fleeting rush of video game nihilism. But there are vaguely inspired and entertaining bits, including an unexpected homagette to Belle de jour and a picket line of porn stars protesting low wages—surely the most implausible episode in a movie driven by implausibles. “Do you want me to fuck this car?” one of these impoverished performers asks. It is arguably a sign of the filmmakers’ subtly discriminate taste that amidst such mayhem such a potentially spectacular feat of autoeroticism fails to occur.

Backflipping to a theatre near you

Ready? Okay. Two horny jocks ditch football practice to go to cheerleader camp and fish in a sea of chicks. Has this been done before or does it just feel that way? I confess to an unwillingness to do the research necessary to answer this question, and in any case Fired Up! is hardly concerned with innovation, save perhaps the ushering of male characters to the forefront of what might be deemed the cheerleader comedy sub-subgenre, one that’s now officially gone meta: the movie features a scene where all 300-plus of the participants in hot pants attend an open-air screening of the proto-pom-pom-com Bring It On and chant along with every line of dialogue.

The first scenes of Fired Up! raise provocative questions. Why do these high school seniors look old enough for doctorates? Who is this mysterious screenwriter with the suspicious moniker of “Freedom Jones”? Shouldn’t Philip Baker Hall get a new agent? Could they, ie: “Freedom Jones,” not think of a better running gag for Baker Hall’s Coach Byrnes than having him say “shit” a lot? And, with all due respect to the great PBH, isn’t 77 a little old for a football coach? More pertinently, is it just me showing my age, or do each of the stars of Fired Up! not seem eerily modeled after older famous actors? There’s the new Ralph Macchio, the junior Kate Hudson, and this strange, troubling hybrid of Owen Wilson and Jim Carrey. Where do they breed these kids? What do they feed them?

Such questions do not distract for long however, because Fired Up! is actually fairly diverting. Seriously. Director Will Gluck displays no special finesse with the camera—unless you’re deeply impressed by spiraling crane shots that allow us to take in a maximum number of teenage tits in tight tops without cutting—but between Mr./Ms. “Jones” and the admirably game leads the dialogue often zips quite nicely. An affection for screwball comedy can be felt in these rapid-fire gags and goofball non-sequiturs. Especially in the second act, things move along very fast, and I laughed. Not one bit of the plotting felt even slightly inspired, but the repartee helped the robotic story breeze along. So perhaps it’s safest to call Fired Up! an above average teen sex comedy, which still makes it a fundementally mediocre movie, but of a sort that you can’t really feel too depressed over. I have to defer to Manohla Dargis, who pretty nailed it in her New York Times review: “kind of dumb but also kind of smart-about-being-dumb.”

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.

High-minded themes fall disappointingly flat In Delgo... not that anyone noticed

With their natural resources evaporating, the winged Nohrins immigrated to Jhamora, the country long settled by the lizard-like, mystically inclined Lockni, and were initially welcomed warmly. But the Nohrins got greedy and took more than their share and things got ugly, ending only when the Nohrin evil schemer Sedessa was banished to some awful place inhabited by gargoyle-like creatures with digestion problems. All this is relayed in the swiftly paced prelude to Delgo and, though parallels to real life histories of colonialism—including recent misadventures in the Middle East—are admirably conveyed, the deluge of exposition may prove a bit much for the little ones to absorb. Me, I had more trouble keeping the goofy names straight. Who comes up with this stuff?

The exploration of the perils of empire, the inclusion of a character with a gambling addiction, and the forbidden interracial romance that drives the narrative give Delgo some nice, timely shading, but I’m not certain if that all these efforts finally play out to any great effect. The first third intrigues well enough, but once the action starts the character development essentially stops and there’s an awful lot of over-long fights and chases that lack excitement. It doesn’t help that several characters are drearily flat, while potentially more dynamic characters are either shelved early on or suffer deeply uninspired vocal performances from the Freddie Prinze, Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt or especially Chris Kattan, who voices the hero’s grating fop sidekick.

The best thing in Delgo is in fact the worst thing in Delgo, at least in moral terms, which is to say the villain predictably steals the show. Anne Bancroft may have died three and a half years ago, but her sultry voice makes one final and highly pleasurable contribution here as Sedessa, by far the most eroticized creature on display in this otherwise largely neutered fantasy realm. In one scene she slinks about in a crimson, skin-tight, crushed velvet dress and some sort of corset, or at least a push-up bra. In another she dons thigh-high boots and ass-hugging pants. She uses her sexuality to mystify and manipulate those whom she figures can advance her plot to provoke a new war between the Nohrins and Lockni on false terms in yet another unspoken link to the invasion of Iraq. Again, I wonder how much a six-year-old will respond to such undertones, but for parents a little taste of Mrs. Robinson should help to pass the time.

As I post this I've just learned that Delgo now possesses the unhappy distinction of having experienced the worst wide release opening ever, earning only half a million bucks on over 2000 screens on its first weekend. Can't say I was shocked to learn this since I watched it in a theatre with one adults and two kids. It is by no means a great movie of any kind, but it makes you wonder just how hopeless it is trying to put a kid's cartoon out these days that doesn't have the stamp of Disney or one of its imprints on it. 

"It is not possible to talk about history without real human beings": A conversation with Jiri Menzel

Hunger for monetary gain is a mainstay in movies, yet there are scenarios in which mere greed falls short of supplying the motive. Jan Díte, a diminutive, good-natured Czech of plebian background, decides he’d like to be a millionaire. He regards it as a vocation, something to work toward, like learning how to build a log cabin or becoming a better tennis player. He studies the science of it. Jan also wants to make love to beautiful women, and this too he pursues with a sort of honest diligence. He goes into the hotel business. He bears witness to tremendous spectacles of decadence while quietly showering ladies with gentlemanly adoration, seducing them with modesty and sincerity and paying homage to their beauty by decorating their naked bodies with fruit. His actions read as essentially harmless, if indifferent to the world around him. That is, they would read as harmless, were Jan’s career not contemporaneous with the rise of the Third Reich.

Based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England is a very dark comedy rendered with a very light touch. Tracing Jan’s unintentional development as a Nazi collaborator—he falls in love with a German who can only screw with a picture of Hitler beaconing down at her—the film warns against the perils of political apathy, yet Jan remains essentially serene in his attitude, even oblivious. Rather than feel the burden of having been a collaborator, as he looks back on his life, he seems largely burdened by nostalgia. Told mostly in flashbacks rife with wordless comic sequences that are equal parts Buster Keaton and Busby Berkeley, Jan is played as a young man by the nimble Ivan Barnev, while the older, penniless Jan is played by Oldrich Kaiser. The actors do not look especially alike, but the dual casting is inspired. The balance of similarities and differences provide the film with a rich sense of time and fate’s weathering of the body and spirit.

Jiri Menzel is probably best known for Closely Watched Trains, which won the 1968 Oscar for Best Foreign Film. It was Menzel’s debut, and the first of several adaptations of Hrabal. He was only 28. I Served the King echoes Closely Watched Trains not only in theme and tone—the conflict between one’s seeking of love and sexual fulfillment and one’s duty to one’s job or one’s country—but also in poetic gesture. Re-watching Closely Watched Trains, I had to smile as the young hero foolishly ran after a departing train he has no chance of catching up to—something we see happen twice in I Served the King, the second instance being especially grave in its implications. Hrabal and Menzel worked closely on all of Menzel’s adaptations until Hrabal’s death in 1997, the younger filmmaker always regarding the elder author and his ideas with reverence. Menzel, now 70, is in fact an exceedingly humble guy, looking back on his extraordinary, prolific career as a director, writer and actor as one long stroke of good luck. Yet, despite his rusty English, he speaks eloquently about what defines his approach. “It is not possible to talk about history without real human beings,” he explains. We spoke over the phone, he in Prague, me in Toronto. His bone-dry humour cracked me up repeatedly. We had a good time. I’ve tried to tidy up his responses enough to read fluidly while still giving a sense of his particular cadence.

JB: What drew you to this material? Why now?

Jiri Menzel: I have been very interested in Czech history, in the nature of the Czech character. And I found that we Czechs we are very flexible. We adapted to the Austrian Empire, to the German occupation, to the Russians. We seem able to collaborate with anyone. It’s a bad thing. We need to reflect on our history, on who we are. Mr. Hrabal’s work is an education in this. For many centuries now, we Czechs are heretics. We believe in nothing. We are skeptics. Our goal is only to survive. This is not good.

JB: There is here, as elsewhere in your body of work, a striking juxtaposition between the sweeping events of history and those of an ordinary individual’s daily life.

JM: If I could understand everything you say, I would agree.

Both laugh.

JB: Okay, let's try this one. Would you describe yourself as politically active?

JM: No, I’m not political at all. To be that way you need to be very concentrated, very strong. I’m not so strong. No.

JB: But your films have prompted strong responses from those who hold political power—and from those seeking political commentary.

JM: Yes, but I would like the viewers of my films to leave the cinema without feeling that their minds have had political statements imposed on them. Probably later, the viewer can locate some political connections in his mind, but I don’t like to approach these things directly. I just want to wake up the questions, of morality, of relationships with others, of responsibility. I want only to wake up the questions, not give lessons.

Menzel and Hrabal

JB: This is your sixth adaptation of a literary work by Bohumil Hrabal. Is there something special you can trace in these books that speaks to your sensibility as a filmmaker?

JM: I like his work, as you know, but this film happened simply because the studio owned the rights and offered me the job. I was happy to have the chance, but it was not my initiative. Hrabal for me is very close because of his humour, and he is for me one writer who can describe man with all his weakness and better qualities and can do so without anger. Even the worst qualities in man he can describe with such elegance. Hrabal is not angry like much modern literature, which tends to be very pessimistic. Mr. Hrabal is full of humour and love.

JB: There is in your films an emphasis on work and, in several cases, how to avoid it—did you ever have ambitions to do something other than work in film and theatre?

JM: You are suggesting I have to look for another appointment?

JB: [Laughing] No. Honest. No, I was just wondering if you ever had other ambitions for your career than those you pursued. If you ever wanted a different job.

JM: I wanted to be a journalist because my father was a journalist. But when I was 15 I started to read the newspaper regularly and found the job was not for me because the newspaper was full of lies. This was the communist paper. So I escaped this fate and flew off to the theatre. From 15 to 20, I wanted to work in theatre as a director but I wasn’t accepted in theatre school for a lack of talent. I tried to work in television, which I thought might need new workers that didn’t have so much talent. I applied to the school for film and television and was given a chance there.

JB: Are there particular films that made an impression on you when you were young?

JM: In my high school, I had a chance to regularly attend screenings of many classic movies. In one week I could see all of Chaplin’s movies, in another, all of Renoir’s. I was able to see many great movies made during the silent era, movies from France, Germany and the United States, and they became part of my aesthetic. I was lucky to have that time because in film school I was not able to see many movies from the West.

JB: Have you felt like you’ve been able to make the sorts of films you wanted to make?

JM: I took it as my profession. I have never had the feeling to be an artist. I have respect for the man who takes his work as his profession. I don’t like art. Many artists are very far from ordinary people. My duty from the start, my decision, was to do everything for my neighbours. My father, you see, was a very educated man. An intellectual, very wise. My mother was a tailor. She was an ordinary woman. So I decided to do films for people like my mother, but at the same time, they needed to be films that I would not be ashamed to show my father. It’s not so easy.  

JB: Have you found filmmaking to be a radically different experience during the communist and post-communist periods?

JM: For me, nothing’s changed with regards to what I choose to do. I don’t see a big difference between the films I made in my youth and those I make now. Politics have had no influence on the content. The only difference now is that financially it’s not as easy as before. Now there is no ideological censorship, but it’s harder.

JB: I guess now you have economic censorship.

JM: Exactly.

JB: The performance style of I Served the King seems indebted to silent comedy and physical theatre. I think Barnev gives a truly amazing performance, but is it difficult to find film actors who can embody this style?

JM: No. I probably have a good feeling about personalities. I prefer that films convey information without words. It may be because in my youth I saw many foreign movies without subtitles. I tried to understand just from the eyes and movements of the actors as a way of reading what’s inside. To this day, I don’t like too much talking in film.

JB: I Served the King is often characterized as bittersweet. I read a quote from you somewhere recently I really liked: “It is bitter because it is Czech.” I wonder if you could elaborate on that.

JM: [Laughs] Well, thanks to this film, I know our character better. It is not very sweet. I mean, I am happy to be Czech. I have to be proud to have this nationality. But I think any man has to look at himself with different eyes. And it’s the same for our country. It’s good to read books about what the Germans think of Czechoslovakia, or the French or the English. It’s important to not be blind to our history, and I tried to get a little bit of it in this film.

JB: Of all the great Czech novelists of the last 50 years or so, Milan Kundera, whose novels are nothing if not at once bitter and comic, seems to be the most enduring as an international figure. Have you ever considered adapting his work?

JM: [Laughs] I asked him many years ago. One of my colleagues wished to make a film from one of his books, and, because Kundera was my teacher, I was in contact with him. But after The Unbearable Lightness of Being he decided that no more films would be made form his work. I asked him nice, but he was very determined. “Even you cannot do anything from my work,” he said. So I said to him, “I will wait for the moment when you need money.” He said, “So long as I’m alive, I won’t need that much money.” He is funny, but I like him. He’s a very nice man. He taught us comparative literature. He was very clever. He taught us what is the difference between Czech literature and that of other countries.

JB: You never considered being a novelist?

JM: Nah. I’m lazy for it.

JB: [Laughs] But making a movie is really hard work, no?

JM: Well, yes, but you are surrounded by people who work with you, who help you. Like a team. You just tell them what to do and they do it. You know, it’s kind of nice, actually.

Knocked Up: Keira Knightley strives for something more than bad sex, nice hats and male babies in The Duchess

Near the start of The Duchess, Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley), newly wed to the deeply dour Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), critiques a long-winded dinner party speech made by Charles Fox (the wonderful Simon McBurney), declaring dubious his rhetoric about freedom in moderation. One is or isn’t free, Georgiana counters, it is not subject to degrees. It’s one of those movie moments seemingly designed to convey the precociousness of the protagonist, yet, in an interesting reversal of the convention, the next hour and a half of The Duchess will pretty much sink that theory of hers to the bottom of the ocean: Georgiana herself will indeed know the taste of freedom, but it will never be open to her fully.

Based on Amanda Foreman’s biography, Saul Dibb’s The Duchess is a smartly constructed, only slightly overcooked historical feminist tear-jerker, ushering Georgiana into dreary wedlock with one royally cold fish. The Duke’s exclusive interest in producing male progeny requires him only to comfortably house his wife and stick it in every now and then like some devout if lifeless gambler mechanically plugging so many coins into the slots. Like any prudent gambler—and closet rapist—he also circulates the room and tries his hand at other suitable receptacles, eventually taking as his live-in mistress one Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell), a homeless aristocrat and battered woman both more bosomy than his wife and bearing a solid track record for birthing males. (And in one especially splendid little boudoir scene, Bess also proves herself a trusty sexual therapist for the whole family.) This same courtesy is not extended to Georgiana, whose affair with future prime minister Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper) ends prematurely in some nasty blackmail orchestrated by the Duke and reinforced by Georgiana’s own mom (Charlotte Rampling).

Bouncing between a public persona as celebrity political campaigner and formidable fashionista and a private life of sexual frustration and emotional neglect tempered only by her embracing of motherhood, Knightley really is quite impressive here, embodying both sassy poise in a delicious array of hats, chokers, wigs and gowns, and frailty veiled by the same opulent wardrobe, her delicate figure slowly collapsing before our eyes as the manor walls close in. Fiennes on the other hand is an altogether different sort of presence in the film, certainly more static. His casting’s hardly imaginative and his masterful way with eliminating all signs of human warmth gives him almost nowhere to go. Yet even within the confinements of his role there’s considerable nuance to enjoy, and I suppose its Fiennes’ extremes of reserve that make his final, very subtle truce with Georgiana oddly affecting. Okay, like, really oddly.  

Dibb’s particular framing keeps certain otherwise purely functional sequences engaging, often observing Knightley in profile so as to better trace the gradual wearying of her spine, while clearly favouring Cooper’s hunky physique in their scenes of intimacy. He doesn’t fuss too much over royal pageantry and even throws up the final series of what-happened-later over well-chosen images instead of over the usual drawn-out blacks. Dibb also has the good sense to leave all similarities to later beloved English roses also named Spencer who were also tragically thrust into loveless royal marriages entirely up to the deductive powers of the audience.