Gunnin' down a dream

Machine Gun Preacher attempts to tell the story of how real-life Pennsylvania hillbilly bad-ass Sam Childers got out of jail, became disgruntled by his former-stripper wife’s religious conversion—“bitch found Jesus,” as Sam puts it—and hit rick bottom. He bullied his family, hung out in bars where sleeves are frowned upon, robbed and assaulted some dealers, ingested buckets of drugs and alcohol, and stabbed a hitchhiker multiple times before tossing him out of his car. Then Sam himself finds Jesus, gets sober, turns suspiciously nice, gets into roofing, and builds his own church where folks listen to shitty music and Sam’s improvised sermons. Sam also goes to Uganda and Sudan, where he builds an orphanage in the middle of a war zone and occasionally takes up arms and wreaks bloody vengeance upon the Lord’s Resistance Army. He spends a fair amount of the film’s last third or so desperately trying to raise funds back home to buy a new truck for the orphanage, and I’m thinking, Dude, you could probably get some decent cash for a couple of those RPGs...

Not that that was the first such question I found myself asking while watching Machine Gun Preacher. The film, written by Jason Keller and directed by Marc Forster, who isn’t especially good with crafting spatially coherent action sequences—or, for that matter, spatially coherent garden parties—strains to impose a through-line on Childers’ larger-than-life endeavours but builds neither a strong narrative arc nor a persuasive study in unlikely redemption and radical altruism. Though presumably well-intentioned, the filmmakers—I refer not only to Keller and Forster but also executive producer/star Gerard Butler—seem stumped by the very questions that Childers’ thorny biography demands reckoned with, questions, for example, about the mightily messianic hubris involved in trying to clean up someone else’s civil war. Instead, the film offers a precariously sentimentalized depiction of child soldiers, a very thin portrait of what must be a near-impossible marriage, and eight varieties of bluster from Butler, including shaking, eye-bulging, and sweating. Childers is without a doubt one hell of a character. Probably too much of a character for this kind of plodding Hollywood treatment.

The war against forgetting: Salvador Allende

Patricio Guzmán has devoted much of his career to navigating the foggy history of his native Chile, particularly those few jubilant and turbulent years marked by the unprecedented non-violent ascension of its democratically elected socialist government and that long trail of dark years marked by terror, torture, order and oppression, by ostensible prosperity and cooperation with imperialist foreign powers, that followed. There’s this notion that Chile’s elder populace (those who didn’t, like Guzmán, go into exile), thinned out along its peculiar narrow stem of diverse topography, have constructed their national fog by way of a collective willful amnesia surrounding those aforementioned years. This amnesiac fog is invoked in the very title of Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997). I wonder if the process inherent in journeying through this fog, unable to apprehend a view of what’s ahead or behind, hasn’t contributed to that special wandering, uncharted feeling that accompanies some of Guzmán’s finest, most personal films.

This feeling is certainly among the most compelling elements of Guzmán’s Nostalgia For the Light (2010), a masterpiece essay film that traverses the Atacama Desert in search of distant stars and bones of the disappeared. Yet this feeling can even be found in the more conventional documentary Salvador Allende (2004), now available on DVD from Icarus. After repeatedly encircling the Allende enigma, most famously in the three-part, Chris Marker-produced The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Guzmán took this project as an opportunity to take direct aim at Chile’s controversial fallen president, about whom there remains a conspicuous paucity of commentary. Yet there’s nothing especially direct about Salvador Allende. It finds its path as it proceeds.

Guzmán narrates Salvador Allende, emphasizing the first-person approach, while his soft voice can also frequently be heard off-camera posing questions. Guzmán was in his early 30s when Allende came into power (and passed 15 doubtlessly despairing days of detainment in the National Stadium following the coup) and is able to cull a healthy portion of Salvador Allende from his own archive of footage, shot between Allende’s 1970 inauguration and 1973, the year of that other September 11, when US-backed military forces ousted Allende’s government (a day Guzmán hauntingly evokes with repeated images of flames consuming the Palacio de la Moneda following the aerial bombing). Early in the film, Guzmán explains that he wants to get to know the Allende beneath the icon. He travels to Allende’s native Valparaiso, where the city’s former mayor persuasively insists that Allende (who received support from Cuba, but not from the USSR) was neither Marxist nor Leninist but libertarian, having received his first political education from an anarchist Italian shoemaker. But as the film goes along this effort to focus on Allende the man quietly dissipates, replaced by a more straightforward chronicle of Allende’s pre-presidential political career, conveying his charisma and popularity, highlighted by memorable images such as the one of gleeful rural children chasing his departing campaign train.

Later in Salvador Allende Guzmán details Allende’s difficult presidency, his agrarian reforms and nationalization of the mining industry, the hostilities directed at his policies, and his outspoken contempt for US interference and multinational corporations. A notable, revealing interview with former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry confirms Nixon’s explicit commands to get rid of Allende by any means necessary. Yet, appropriately for a film about a politician devoted to workers and the poor, Guzmán finds many of his strongest sequences by giving the floor to ordinary Chileans. He documents a lively debate between several former UP militants about whether or not Allende should have defended the government and properly armed the militia. This debate also pries open the thorny question of Allende’s suicide, undertaken just as the army was about to take him prisoner, an event which only compounds the mystery of his life. One could argue that Salvador Allende falls short of its ostensible goal in that Allende is virtually as enigmatic a figure by the film’s end as he was at its start. But the fortitude of this enigma is also, it seems to me, the film’s point. Allende, though revered by Guzmán as he is by millions around the world, is a truly singular, enduringly contentious figure—so singular that very few have made significant attempts to tell his story. The value of Guzmán’s film is that even in its limitations it makes an enormous contribution to a conversation about Allende that needs to be maintained. In Guzmán’s films the personal inevitably merges with the political, and the articulated memories of the filmmaker and his subjects continue to wage a non-violent war against the perils of forgetting.

Carlos and the body politic: a conversation with Olivier Assayas

He blows something up and then retires to a quiet room to admire his handsome and chiseled naked figure in a full-length mirror. We see him seduce a colleague by placing a grenade between her teeth. “Weapons,” he explains, “are an extension of my body.” Revolution turns this guy on—or is it simply the promise of spectacular violence undertaken with whatever sort of justification? He committed acts of terror, including murder and hostage-taking, on behalf a people located half a world away from his native Venezuela, and attained a very peculiar and confused sort of celebrity doing so. The celebrity would eclipse the revolutionary until confused celebrity was all that was left. He donned a Che beret. He smoked cigars from Fidel Castro’s personal reserve. He stockpiled weapons, gave orders, made threats and lived all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Saddam Hussein was supposed to have been a big fan. “You’ll be hearing my name a lot,” he ensures us, though he’s referring not to his given name of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, but rather to his more austere nom de guerre: Carlos.

Carlos is also the title of Oliver Assayas’ 333-minute bio-pic, made for French television, starring the tireless and valiant Venezuelan-born actor Édgar Ramírez, and is now playing, with two intermissions, in cinemas. It opens today in Toronto at Bell Lightbox. With its focus on action, its frenetic post punk soundtrack, its jump cuts that jump just a few frames forward, as though our storyteller is at once impatient and doesn’t want to miss a thing, the film unfolds over an engaging and surprisingly fleet-footed five hours-plus. Assayas is working in a mode entirely divorced from the complicated familial exchanges, subtle emotional nuance and passages of pastoral tranquility that characterized his previous film, the masterful and heartbreaking Summer Hours. Like its eponymous central character, the flamboyant terrorist who came to prominence in the 1970s and would eventually be dubbed “Carlos the Jackal,” Carlos is a corpulent and muscular work, carefully tracking the evolution, or rather devolution, of the mind and body of a figure that is, as Assayas explains below, both utterly singular and representative of certain ideological shifts that erupted in the wake of 1968.

It was my great honour to interview Assayas, whose body of work is so prolific and diverse, and contains a couple of my favourite films of the last 15 years or so. Slim and electric, Assayas is like a wire. We met at a Toronto hotel. He wore a smart little cardigan over a T-shirt emblazoned with the cover art for Sonic Youth’s Goo. He’s 55 and there remains something boyish about him. But his nervous manner of speaking is countered by his confidence and convictions, his volubility countered by the precision of his answers, even when delivered in his second language. A former critic and editor of Cahiers du cinéma, Assayas has no trouble talking about movies. What follows is longer than I’d planned, but if you’ve seen Carlos or know something about Ramírez Sánchez’s life you might find the initial exchanges interesting. If you haven’t seen it or don’t know his story, you might want to scroll down just a little.

Assayas on the set of Carlos

JB: You’re only a few years younger than Carlos, which would have put you in your late teens and early 20s when he first became active. Do you retain memories of him from that period?

Olivier Assayas: The Rue Toullier killings were for me very striking, as they were for any Frenchman at the time, because of their brutality and mystery. No one knew what had really happened or why. It was like lightning striking. It was very close to home in that it occurred in the Latin Quarter, which is where all the universities were, and I was a student at the time. I would walk those streets every day.

JB: Had you formed any opinion at the time about his activities?

OA: You couldn’t have an opinion because you had no idea who he was. He was from Venezuela. He wasn’t a Palestinian militant. So who was this guy? Why was he shooting French cops? There was no apparent rationale. There was no way of feeling close to whatever the cause was because the cause was unreadable. He was a cop killer. As a teenager, you know, maybe you’re not fond of cops, so you stupidly think it’s kind of cool that he killed three of them.

The real Ilich "Carlos" Ramírez Sánchez

JB: Between that period in the 1970s and your being approached with this project, had you kept track of him?

OA: Only as much as anyone who reads the newspapers. He had been again in the news in France later, when Magdalena Kopp was arrested and with the series of bombings that followed, supposedly done with the intention to set her free, though in reality it was more connected to the ongoing war between France and Syria. But at the time this was all a blur, because it was not established that Carlos was involved in the bombings and it was not widely known that Magdalena Kopp was his wife. There were just these Germans who were arrested in connection with a car bomb. We knew that they were arrested in the parking lot, that there was supposedly weapons in the car, that they tried to escape and to shoot the cops. All of a sudden Carlos sends this menacing message saying those guys are part of my group and I want them free. We didn’t know if it was the real Carlos or what his connection was to these two. Carlos would not say at the time that Magdalena was his wife. No one knew, because if they had she would have been interrogated. They would have never let her go. So I read about these actions, but the reports available rendered them completely blurred, full of contradictions. Carlos was just a bogeyman.


JB: Did this project seem to offer an opportunity to explore and perhaps critique a political ideology?

OA: To me there was a broader arc that concerned the story of a generation, this question of whether or not to be involved in the armed struggle. After 1968, people really believed that revolution was imminent. But the years passed and nothing happened. You had unrest and activism, but ultimately this revolution did not seem like it was coming. That was when militants started asking questions. Maybe they lacked the right approach. Maybe the solution was to take up weapons, as had been done in third world countries, or in Europe in the distant past. In France the conclusion was that no, it wasn’t a good idea. But in other countries, like Germany, Italy or Japan, that was the route they chose. Carlos was just one step ahead. When he was 19 he had a gun in his hand. He was fighting with the Palestinians in Jordan. He was militant and active at a very young age. So in a sense, he went faster and further than anyone else of his generation, but acted in the background of the political mainstream of the time. So I realized how emblematic his story could be of a particular idea that this generation had lingering in their minds. He is, of course, a very unique character with an exceptional fate, but somehow I realized how connected his fate was to the story of his time.

JB: A significant part of Carlos’ story is told through the body of your lead actor, Édgar Ramírez. His is a marathon performance and required a truly exceptional commitment. Did you have to use different tactics with him than you’d used with actors in the past?

OA: Frankly, Édgar was pretty much on his own. His input in this film goes way beyond embodying Carlos. He was a partner in creating this film. He had a vision of Carlos. He understood exactly what was going on. I kind of helped him and we discussed things, but these discussions were not frequent.


JB: Were you aware from the start of just how fundamental the link would be between Carlos’ shifting physicality and his shifting philosophy, between his sense of sexual potency and his desire for violence?

OA: It was always essential. For me, the film, or at least one layer of the film, was, as you say, the story of the body of Carlos. It’s a layer that’s nourished by historical fact. It’s highly relevant that at the end of this story everything falls apart, including his body.

JB: Did it require a great deal of negotiation to find the right ways to photograph Édgar’s body?

OA: Édgar was 100% open to basically anything. He went all the way with every scene, without blinking. Sometimes it was very tough on him.

JB: I understand he underwent therapy afterwards to deal with the trauma of playing Carlos.

OA: I only discovered this when I read the interview he gave for the press notes. I was surprised. But I understood. You know, the one thing that kind of disturbed me when I started working on this film was this question: Was I ready to spend a year and a half of my life with Carlos, who’s basically a very unpleasant character? Do I want to be in touch with the darkness of that character? I did not have any kind of easy answer for that. But meeting Édgar was key to solving the problem because, frankly, he was going to take over Carlos. He was going to lift that burden from my shoulders. I was in a better position because I was able to witness Édgar struggling to make sense of Carlos, to absorb the unpleasantness of the character. I think he did an extraordinary job, but I can understand why it’s been very hard on him. He had to think like and be like Carlos, which involved damaging his own body in the process, for a very long time, much longer than what’s typically demanded of actors.

demonlover

JB: Your earlier work demonlover has certain affinities with Carlos, being an international story and a political thriller, but what I find very interesting is that demonlover is very much characterized by the absence of connective tissue—it’s inherently elliptical—while Carlos is all about the fortifying of connective tissue. Did this aspect of the project excite you? Did it intimidate you?

OA: Basically, I like to do in movies the things I’ve not done before, so the more I feel intimidated, the more stuff I have no idea how to handle, the more exciting it is. That’s what keeps you alive. It puts you in danger. You have to reinvent your ways of approaching scenes, actors, and so on. The thing too is that the connectivity you’re describing is sort of what those times were about. There was this notion of collective action, of connection through ideals. Carlos can only function through organizing a group. Demonlover comes from another age. It tries to grasp at something that was going on 20, 25 years later, a time when people are becoming more involved in their private, imaginary worlds, when ideology and collectivity is replaced by disconnection, when economic logic overwhelms the logic of ideals. Demonlover is about a world where politics are not relevant anymore, where the fluidity of money is more important than any political ideal, where real power is bestowed upon corporations rather than politicians. Which is pretty much what the modern world is about.

JB: The formal structure of Carlos is obviously hugely ambitious. Did you have any models that inspired or encouraged you? Was Steven Soderbergh’s Che useful to you?

OA: Yes, it was. It’s a completely different film, but it was inspiring in the sense that, first of all, I enjoyed watching this four-and-a-half-hour film. It could have gone on and I would have been game. But in terms of the texture of the film, here is a movie that uses a mythical character—that uses the star power of this character—to deal with some very interesting issues. Che is a case study in guerilla warfare, how it can be used to win a war and lose a war. The first part is triumphant, it’s about how you move from the bush into the villages, how you win over the peasants, how you enter the city, how you negotiate an urban guerilla situation, how you then move onto the capital and eventually win the war. The second part in Bolivia shows you exactly the opposite, how you never convince the peasants, how the terrain can be unfavourable, how the local politicians don’t support your actions, how the enemy has grown stronger because it’s come to understand your tactics, and so on. So it’s really a study in strategy, and this is something very few movies can deal with because it simply requires time. Strategy is about complexities, about small details, about understanding the connection between ideas and reality. The length of the film allowed it to deal with issues that shorter films cannot. Che gave me the conviction that I could shoot for something like that.

JB: Hm. It strikes me that, in a way, Carlos is really Che Part III, in that you’re now looking at what becomes of revolutionary actions after the precedents of Cuba, after Bolivia, and going from Latin America in the ’50s and ’60s and into the Europe of the 1970s.

OA: Absolutely. That’s a very interesting way of looking at it. It’s like that famous phrase about how history repeats itself in the form of a comedy. It’s about how Carlos uses the image of Che at a later historical moment for his own ends. You have Che, who, whatever you think of his ideas, was kind of a hero. He was a theoretician and a revolutionary. He was involved in internationalizing the Cuban Revolution. He was ready to put his life on the line and wound up dying for his ideals. He was also a good writer and left a lot of reflections on his life and times. Carlos, by contrast, is a soldier. He’s not a thinker. He’s a guy who executes missions. He was very aware of his media image and knew it was beneficial to connect it to Che’s image, but it’s somehow pathetic.


JB: Was it always obvious to you how you wanted to end Carlos?

OA: It was pretty clear that the film would end with his arrest. His story really does end where we end it. He’d already been surviving himself for years at that stage. He’s become irrelevant.

JB: Kind of a ghost.

OA: Precisely—he’s a ghost of himself. So once he’s finally arrested, it was like something that just had to happen. He hardly even resists it, and no one will help him out, not even the Sudanese. I think even Carlos knew that this was the end of the movie.

Machete: Knives out, but not much cutting edge

“There’s an interesting face,” Jessica Alba says upon her first glimpse of Danny Trejo in Machete. It’s an observation that’s surely followed Trejo around his whole life. The beloved ex-con, boxer and character actor is 66 now and has been in well over 100 movies, yet, if we don’t count Champion, the documentary about Trejo’s life, Machete marks his debut as a lead. Trejo’s always been a welcome presence wherever he turns up, that distinctively weathered and initially frightening face that masks a terrifically deadpan sense of humour. He’s exactly the sort of perpetual background player film-lovers long to see promoted to the spotlight, yet thanks to largely half-assed conception, Trejo’s star moment as Machete’s eponymous ex-federale hero may just constitute the least interesting performance he’s given.

Written by Robert Rodriguez and his cousin Álvaro, and directed by Rodriguez and his longtime editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is the fitfully entertaining extrapolation of a trailer featured in Grindhouse, the exploitation homage collaboration between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Predictably, Machete plays like a convoy of trailers, united by a plot crammed with corrupt Texan politicians and underground revolutionaries that’s more busy than it is cohesive or even coherent. The lack of narrative elegance is of course part of the movie’s ostensible charm, but what starts out as prankish plot holes and playful implausibilities increasingly feels like lazy screenwriting. What resembles button-pushing political commentary rapidly reveals itself to be flamboyantly irrelevant. Rodriquez uses pastiche as an opportunity to rest on cliché. Clichés can make marvelous tools when animated, but Rodriguez frequently seems content to simply prop them up as platforms for yet another set piece.

Bereft of anything like emotions, ambitions or conflicts, Trejo is left mostly with one-liners, some of them quite deftly delivered—I especially liked “Machete don’t text.” Converted to the side of the desperate migrant workers she used to deport, Alba’s immigration cop becomes the resident cheerleader: “There’s the law, and there’s what’s right!” The rest is one-joke stunt casting: Robert De Niro’s an ultra-right wing senator; Don Johnson, in aviator shades, cowboy hat and shark fin sideburns, is a cop who slaughters Mexicans for sport; Lindsay Lohan stretches out to play a rich girl with a drug problem and a hunger for publicity; Steven Segal’s a drug lord with an absurd toupee. Cheech Marin’s a priest with a penchant for weed.

Machete’s most inspired, or at least liveliest bits arrive through a creative attitude toward the human body—a lady retrieves a telephone from her vagina. The killing is gleefully rampant and mercifully cartoonish, with fountains of digital splatter and everything that vaguely resembles a sharp object eventually impaling somebody—kudos to whoever thought of the meat thermometer. Thing is, Machete’s funniest display of violence is decidedly non-lethal, with Trejo warding off a bodyguard by slapping his wrists with a weed whacker. I suppose he could have just chopped his arm off or unspoiled his intestines like he does in so many other confrontations, but in a movie that thrives on excess it’s amazing how far a little restraint can go to win you over. When Trejo and the bodyguard finally part ways the latter is left caged to a wall with pruning shears, no doubt happy just to be alive. He never knew what hit him.

The American: tight-lipped, by contract

It is good for a film actor to have a face that remains interesting to observe even when doing nothing, but it’s better to have a face that’s never doing nothing, even when it seems like it’s doing nothing. George Clooney’s handsome, sun-beaten visage conveys an awful lot of worry in The American without much dialogue and without any ostentatious gesticulation. He’s always thinking, while trying not to transmit what he’s thinking to those around him, while somehow always transmitting just enough of what he’s thinking to the camera to keep us captivated. The American is itself a captivating, quiet, slow burn of a thriller, and Clooney’s face, the face of a genuine star and a genuinely talented film actor, is integral to its effectiveness.

The script is Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman, though this being the second feature from rock photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn, much of whatever was good or bad in Joffe’s script has been rendered invisible by Corbijn’s continual emphasis on sound, image, place, and behaviour. The American follows Clooney’s character, a professional assassin or gunrunner, from the snow-covered woods of Dalarna to the hillside villages of Abruzzo, and Corbijn’s favoured image when introducing these locations is that of a very wide landscape with tiny figures or a car traversing the absolute bottom of the screen—the movement is often so low in the composition that if you sit behind a tall person you might miss it. These images occur throughout the film and imbue it with a steady blend of beauty and dread. We feel our protagonist’s vulnerability, being so out in the open. We know from the first scenes onward that there could at any moment be a stranger hiding somewhere, probably wearing ugly pants, waiting to kill.

Clooney’s character—he goes by Jack or Edward, depending on company—is as taciturn as any of the antiheroes of Jean-Pierre Melville, yet is far more expressive, unable to disguise his nervousness. It seems there are some Swedes after him, so he keeps a low profile in Castel del Monte, where he gradually prepares a package for a mysterious woman. We see a tattoo of a butterfly on his back but learn virtually nothing of substance of his background. Still, we follow him closely enough to glean something of his tendencies and desires and weaknesses. He visits a beautiful prostitute with an unnerving gaze named Clara, played by Violante Placido, with whom he develops a peculiar rapport. He has some largely one-sided conversations with an aging priest, played by Paolo Bonacelli, who may or may not know something about his line of work—Clooney claims he’s a photographer, even though it’s obvious the priest doesn’t buy it. When in doubt Clooney simply says nothing, and sometimes it’s these refusals to respond that say he most.

It’s tempting to compare The American to The Limits of Control. Both films feature an enigmatic killer with a disliking both for small talk and modern devices, biding his time, visiting out-of-the-way European locales, doing exercises alone in a room, taking meetings in outdoor cafés, trading cryptic messages with people he probably can’t trust. Both also happen to feature memorable shots of a woman’s naked behind. But The Limits of Control is on another plane, concerned with philosophy over action, groove over structure. The American is more grounded, more familiar, moves steadily toward an end, deals openly in suspense, and reveals palpable stakes. What fundamental elements it does have in common with its recent predecessor is a knowingness about the potency of simple bits of business, the pleasure of watching George Clooney seated at a table, piecing together a rifle. It also, much more than your average tough guy thriller, understands the value of withholding information, of playfully and shrewdly managing ambiguity, of old-fashioned silence as the most seductive method of pulling us closer, and deeper, into story.

"Life takes its own turns..." A conversation with Dolph Lundgren about crossovers, comebacks, and that killer instinct

I met Dolph Lundgren on the roof of Toronto’s Thompson Hotel, which features a swimming pool, bar, and bevy of women wearing bikinis and heels. Lundgren was undistracted and quite honestly just wonderful to talk to, warm, humble, funny, and utterly candid about his life both on and off screen, as both a father and a son. Fully cognizant of his peculiar career as star and occasional director of countless low-budget actioners, he’s good humoured yet remains genuinely ambitious. He has plans to make a period drama in his native Sweden, and hopes that his memorable role in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables will help him re-enter the mainstream.

Universal Soldier

One thing that became clear in our conversation was the depth of Lundgren’s affection for Stallone, an expression of long-term friendship that much more endearing when you consider that Lundgren put Stallone in intensive care for several days during the making of Rocky IV. This was back in the mid-1980s, when the multilingual black belt had abandoned a life in sciences—he was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship to get his PhD in chemical engineering at MIT—to get into the movies. He was dating Grace Jones and debuted alongside her in A View to a Kill before landing the part of Rocky’s Russian nemesis Ivan Drago. But thanks to the ballooning video market a niche was opening up, one tailor-made for the likes of he and Jean Claude Van Damme, with whom he co-starred in Universal Soldier. Lundgren has never been out of work since, but he hasn’t had a theatrical release in 15 years. Until now.

Rocky IV

JB: You have an enigmatic role in The Expendables, playing this guy who’s drowning in drugs and sadism and turning on his friends. Gunner seems like a villain but proves to be something more complicated.

Dolph Lundgren: One reason I wanted to do the film—other than Stallone asking me, which is something you don’t think about twice—was the fact that Gunner is such an interesting guy. I was surprised he was so complex. In fact in the original script there was more drugs and Gunner was totally nuts. I’ve done bad guys before, but someone like Gunner is appealing because, being a kind of bridge between the bad guys and good guys, he offers something very specific to play, instead of coming on set and just trying to look tough.

The Expendables

JB: You’ve occupied the director’s chair several times now. Are there things you’re still able to learn from watching someone like Stallone work in that capacity?

DL: Anyone making an $80-million dollar picture with all these people, locations and big set-pieces in it at his age—there are only so many people in the world who can pull that off. So as long as I can be there next to him I’m checking out everything he does.

JB: While the action scenes are fairly cutty, there’s actually a lot of camera movement within many individual shots, which is unusual these days.

DL: That’s a good point. Stallone originally had a younger DP before hiring Jeffrey Kimball. Jeffrey’s an old-timer, he lights very old school, and wanted to shoot the character stuff as simply as possible. Even in the action, as you said, he likes to show more of what’s happening. Of course people are used to quick cutting, so you’ve got to give them some of that, otherwise they get bored. It can be funny nowadays to watch older action movies where you see a guy running and running and here comes the explosion… and still he’s running and it seems to go on forever. The funny part is that’s only 15 years ago. [Laughs] Things change.

with Grace Jones

JB: You possess a very particular kind of celebrity, one that doesn’t often promise much in the way of theatrical release yet attracts hordes of passionate fans. You even have a drink named after you! It’s a kind of celebrity that didn’t really exist before the 1980s—when you started out—and the development of this enormous specialty market for action thrillers on home video. Has this aspect of your career surprised you?

DL: I never knew what to expect from my career. When I was training for Rocky IV, I’d just done this Bond movie with Grace Jones, who was my girlfriend at the time. I remember Grace saying to me, “Forget the Bond movie. You’re going up against Rocky. This is going to be with you forever. This is huge.” I didn’t really know what she was talking about, but then your life takes it’s own turns. I became kind of famous, but I ended up doing a lot of smaller movies, some big ones, but a lot of small ones that went direct to video. I hadn’t expected that, but I never expected to direct either. You’re probably right about that difference in celebrity, because now that I’m back on the big screen, I mean, I wouldn’t say it’s like Mickey Rourke’s comeback, but you can’t help but feel there’s something similar going on when you’ve been around for so long and you get that groundswell where everybody kind of knows of you but you need to be in that big movie for people to rediscover what you’re all about. It’ll be interesting to see what happens. Now when I do these premieres I’m sure there’ll be people whispering to themselves, “Shit, he’s still alive!” [Laughs]

Johnny Mnemonic

JB: Are you actively looking for projects that fall outside the genres you’re known for?

DL: Always. What it is John Lennon said? “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Things seem to run away from you sometimes, but then you arrive at these turning points in your career. I do feel like maybe this is one of those times when all these hours I’ve put in to making these weird movies all over the world might add up to something. For instance, I’d like to direct this period piece in Sweden. If I can pull it off it would be a transition from action to drama. Not an easy transition but there are those who’ve done it, like Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner or Clint Eastwood. I’m not in their league but I’m trying to do something similar.

The Shooter

JB: Have you tried to work in Sweden?

DL: I’ve been offered things but they’ve been very stereotypical. I figured if I was going to run around with a gun and shoot people I’d do it in Hollywood. But two years ago I did an episode of this summer radio show where you sit down and talk about your life and play music for 90 minutes. I talked about my dad and my childhood, because all the Swedes just saw me as this big, dumb blonde guy who lives in Hollywood and loves violence and doesn’t give a shit about Sweden. That went over pretty big, and then last year they approached me to host the Eurovision Song Contest. I had to do some singing and dancing, and it was quite well received. So I hope I might be a position now to do something different because they’ve glimpsed another side of me.

Masters of the Universe

JB: Did you watch a lot of Swedish cinema growing up? I confess that virtually the only Swedish films I know from the period of your youth are probably all Bergman.

DL: Sure, we all did. Bergman included, of course. It was very artsy in those days, but all of that’s in me somewhere. I still love Fanny and Alexander.

JB: Last year your home in Spain was broken into. I understand they tied up your wife, which must have been terrifying. Is it true they fled after seeing a photo of you and realized they were robbing Dolph Lundgren’s house?

DL: They didn’t really flee. They were there, stealing stuff. They were probably Eastern Europeans because they spoke bad Spanish. My wife and eldest daughter were there—my little one was asleep—and my daughter says to them, “If my dad were here you’d be in trouble!” Right at that moment they saw the picture of me and said, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re big fans of his movies.” [Laughs] My daughter asked them how they could be doing this if they like my movies and one of the robbers said, “Well, I suppose you can have a few things back.” The whole thing was like a Saturday Night Live sketch. Bizarre. Anyway, I was filming The Expendables at the time and couldn’t leave the set, so I really went nuts. I called some people I know in Bulgaria and asked them to go find these guys and have a word with them. Of course nothing came of that. The good thing is that my kids now know there are bad people in the world. I have a good security system and armed guards now, so I hope it never happens again. I suppose there was a slight advantage to being famous in that situation, but then I started to think these guys might come back and try to grab one of my kids or something. That’s why I beefed up the security. You never know with these people.

in the karate pants

JB: You’ve devoted a large part of your life to martial arts. Have you found yourself in situations outside of the movies where you’ve had to use those skills?

DL: Very few times. I rarely get in a fight because I’m quite big, so most people don’t want to mess with me. But when you do martial arts you’re not typically an aggressive person. You learn to brush things off. I think the only times I’ve had to use those skills outside of movies was when I worked as a doorman in Sweden or Sidney or someplace when I was 25. I’ve fought a lot of people in a dojo, but that’s completely different.

JB: Was a part of your original motivation to learn martial arts to defend yourself?

DL: I think part of the motivation was that my dad was physically abusive. It was very tough, you know, him beating up on my mom and me. Dealing with that is very difficult for a child. It makes you feel inadequate, so you look for something to help you feel confident. I played ice hockey for a while, did some boxing, but it was only when I took up karate that I felt stronger, like I could defend myself, and I found some of that inner harmony you get from studying martial arts. Of course, I also become a good fighter. Something kicks in and you get that killer instinct. That’s something that happens when a person’s been hurt when they’re very young. I think all great fighters have something like that in them, some kind of scar. You need a little bit of an evil part to your character to be able to knock somebody out. It all happens very quickly. You don’t even know what you’re doing until it’s over.

A review of The Expendables will be posted this Friday.

Get Low: Putting the fun back into funerals

Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) is resident the boogeyman in the woods, taciturn, bearded and ornery, living alone outside some wintry Midwestern town in the cabin he built 40 years ago, shotgun at the ready should any varmints need a fright. We’re between world wars here, not that the affairs of the world cause many ripples in Bush’s hermetic existence. Bush hires former Chicago car salesman-turned-funeral home director Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) to arrange his own funeral-party, a stab at realizing the universal fantasy of hearing what the bastard-hypocrites say about him when he’s gone without having to actually depart. Everyone is invited.

The cast is pretty great across the board. As Quinn’s protégé, Lucas Black is charged with the task of playing straight man to Murray, not necessarily an enviable position when you consider that Murray’s approach to comedy is unfailingly deadpan—he’s already his own straight man—and though sometimes at odds with the uneven tone of Get Low as a whole, Murray’s performance, watchful, allusive, and bristly as his John Waters moustache, is about the closest to understanding the real strengths of the material. Fortunately Black holds his own just fine. He plays the action, letting the comic moments simply breathe, grounding himself in his character’s moral fortitude and genuine ambition to do right by Bush.

Duvall cultivates Bush’s enigma scene by scene. He’s very comfortable here and in fact very good, unconcerned with what the others are up to since Bush is holding all the cards in every scene—in keeping with the trickstery nature of his preemptive death rites, he’s always one step ahead of everybody else. Even when Get Low ushers him onto the climactic podium to spill his guts, Duvall understands that his vulnerability is to displayed but in no way is it to be challenged, the whole death trip steering us not toward an open forum but a one-on-one between Bush and his maker—and, okay, the wonderful Sissy Spacek with her glowing eyes—that the public is merely allowed to be present for.

Herein lies the problem with Get Low. Based on a true story that grew into something of a folk tale, molded into a screen story by Chris Provenzano and Scott Seeke, scripted by Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell, and realized by Aaron Schneider, the film ultimately betrays what was fun about its premise. The first act is filled with the promise that everyone has a story to tell about Felix Bush, yet when the funeral party finally happens and the whole town turns out not a single speaker shares the mic with Bush and Quinn. They just huddle some distance from the outdoor stage and rhubarb discreetly. The open stage turns into a one-man show, banking everything on the big reveal that by this point has pretty much already been revealed in piecemeal though a number of twists as predictable and ornamental as the story’s basic premise is intriguing. The sense of Get Low’s straying from its own path is further solidified by Schneider’s overly solemn and ominous direction, which, from the fiery opening flashback onward, too often anticipates what’s to come, and by Jan Kaczmarek’s over-used score.

There are nonetheless pleasures to be had in Get Low, which seems at heart to want to be a humanist comedy. The slight modulations in Duvall’s expressions alone are worth the effort, and his one extended sequence with Spacek has a rhythm and a certain grace to it that would be difficult to locate in a film that would not allow for such unhurried gentleness between veteran actors. In this respect Schneider should be applauded. Duvall, now 79, seems like one of these actors who could just keep going forever. It’s been over a dozen years since he made The Apostle, a major career highlight, and I wish he would direct again. In the meantime, I’m happy to see him find young directors who know how to stand back and let him do his thing. And I’m happy to see a director smart enough to let Spacek do just about anything.

"You feed off other peoples emotions and they don't even realize it!": Chloë Moretz on Kick-Ass

When I meet with Chloë Moretz at Maple Pictures’ room in Toronto's Park Hyatt, she immediately jumps on the bed and performs a back-flip. When I start my tape recorder she throws down some human beat-box into the microphone. When I ask her about what sort of training she did to prepare for her role as the murderous, foul-mouthed, 11-year-old costumed vigilante Mindy Macready, alias Hit-Girl, in the movie Kick-Ass, she launches into a mechanically detailed explanation of the differences between real guns and movie guns—Chloë Moretz knows more about guns than anyone I’ve ever met. She recently turned 13, is a girl of multiple talents and abundant energy, and has already assmebled a resume that includes supporting roles on the shows Desperate Housewives and Dirty Sexy Money, and in movies such as (500) Days of Summer and the remake of The Amityville Horror. She recently wrapped a remake of Let the Right One In, the title compressed for the attention-impaired to Let Me In, in which she plays the androgynous pubescent vampire.


JB: What initially got you excited about Kick-Ass?

Chloë Moretz: When I first read Kick-Ass it was, like, I had to be Hit-Girl. It was a role that was challenging, unique and breathtaking.

JB: The role has you doing some pretty horrific things to other people. Did that ever make you uncomfortable?

CM: I wouldn’t be doing the movie if it made uncomfortable. I wouldn’t even participate in it.

JB: There was never a moment when you suddenly thought, “Whoa, I’m playing a sadistic psychopath”?

CM: I definitely wouldn’t call her a psychopath. She’s an innocent girl that got brainwashed. It’s something she can’t really control. She thinks she’s in a John Woo movie.

JB: Speaking of John Woo, how cool was it to have Nicolas Cage be your dad?

CM: Working with an amazing, excellent, very trained professional ups your game. It makes you a better actor to be able to feed off someone else’s emotions. It’s much like interviews, where if I have a very hyper person who’s happy I’ll be more energetic, where I have someone more laid-back who just wants the facts, I’ll still be energetic but not over-the-top.

JB: You minimize the back-flips.

CM: Exactly. You feed off other people’s emotions and people don’t even realize it!

JB: Could you describe your first meeting with Cage?

CM: It was in some country villa outside London. Matthew, the director, was looking at a bunch of different guns and knives and stuff to figure out what Hit-Girl should use. Then Matthew asked, “Chloë, what do you want?” I picked one I thought was dainty, but not heavy metal. It was this Glock, a Special Ops gun. It helped me figure out that my character’s the kind of girl that knows what she wants, and gets what she wants. Then I met Nicolas Cage and talked about the role.


JB: Did Cage suggest anything that might have changed your approach?

CM: I told him who I wanted Hit-Girl to be and he thought it was very interesting. We talked about his character and he told me he was going to do an Adam West-type thing. He already knew all the lines in his head, and I knew all my lines, so we started to do a scene. He did it in his Big Daddy voice, and from then on I knew it was going to be a fantastic movie.

JB: For an 11-year-old, Mindy comes with a lot of heavy emotional baggage. Her dad’s an ex-con. Her mother died giving birth to her. Did you feel like you had to imbue your character with all this?

CM: In the end scene, when I have my guns up beside my face, if you look in my eyes you can see that I’m terrified and guilty. I’m like, “I’ve got to do this, because I’m finishing what my dad started.” I’m praying that Kick-Ass will come for me, because if Kick-Ass isn’t there, I don’t know what to do. But he saves me in the end and it all works out. So I tried to embrace the whole dad aspect and the mom dying.


JB: I understand you did a lot of training. Is it true you can assemble a rifle?

CM: I can take apart a gun and put it back together—but don’t test me on that.

JB: I actually don’t have any firearms on me.

CM: I had to be able to do it with my eyes closed. That’s how they train marines!

JB: Wow! Had you ever used or even seen guns before?

CM: I shot at the range with my dad when I was younger. He wanted me to know how it feels to shoot a gun, to not be afraid of it, but to know it’s a lethal weapon. To know that if anyone comes to the house and no one’s there, I need to know how to protect myself.

JB: That’s really interesting, because in a sense you’d already experienced with your real father some version of the father-daughter relationship Mindy has in Kick-Ass.

CM: Exactly.

JB: You’ve been acting for a long time. Is it fun? Does it feel like work?

CM: The minute it becomes work is the minute I’m quitting. When I’m on set and I’m acting, it brings me joy.

JB: Do you imagine ever pursuing other interests?

CM: I still do ballet and gymnastics, and hang out with my friends all the time. If my acting career doesn’t work out I want to be a pilot. Even if my acting career does work out I still want to be a pilot, so I can fly airplanes and act at the same time. Maybe act while flying airplanes.

Voy a explotar: hazardous hormones

It starts, rather misleadingly, with Román’s interior voice, a diary entry-cum-psychic yawp addressed to a mass of “Hijos de puta.” It’s Román’s aberrant fantasy we then watch play out, the one where he enters a classroom and blows away both of the trembling religious instructors before turning the gun on himself. This fantasy is what got him kicked out of boarding school and sent into the arms of destiny. Then it’s Maru’s turn, it becomes her voice that we hear express similar inner turmoil. Like Román she’s an exhilaratingly alienated teenager, anxious to rebel without a cause, her face and body alternately resembling those of a young woman and a four-year-old boy. It’ll be Maru’s voice that we stick with for the remainder of Voy a explotar (I’m Gonna Explode). She describes Román’s sudden appearance in her life as a sort of revelation, a phenomenon, this sleazebag politician’s son riddled with uncontainable angst. He does a presentation at the school talent show called ‘See You in Hell’ that falls miserably flat but manages to catch Maru’s attention nonetheless. “A perfect accomplice, a twin,” she calls him. Román is both real and a being conjured by Maru’s dreamy desperation. Maybe that’s why, despite young Juan Pablo de Santiago’s perfectly capable performance, Román leaves less of an impression, why Maru seems so much more the fully realized of the two central characters. In any case, she’s our heroine, and Voy a explotar marks an auspicious debut for Maria Deschamps, the young actress who surrenders completely to Maru’s fascinated abandon, and does so with a remarkable, individual humour.

The French New Wave is a half-century old but for Mexican writer/director Gerardo Naranjo the tropes and techniques are still buzzing with freshness and audacity, still useful tools. Voy a explotar is an unabashed homage to the Jean-Luc Godard of the early to mid-1960s, Pierrot le fou (1965) especially, with its delirious romance juxtaposed with cool formalism, its breathless, lovers on the run narrative, its flurry of jump-cuts and playful dissonance of image, voice-over and music, some of which is the work of composer Georges Delerue, ripped directly from Godard’s own iconoclastic interjections in the aforementioned film. Naranjo’s third feature, the follow-up to Drama/Mex (06), may look backward for its modus operandi, but the material this approach gives birth to feels perfectly contemporary, an irreverent reflection of Columbine culture and other recent manifestations of adolescent nihilism. It’s imbued with what might be a uniquely Mexican cynicism and some terrifically black humour. It also departs radically from other similarly themed movies, like say, Badlands (73), and from Godard’s Pierrot le fou casting of Anna Karina and Jean-Peal Belmondo especially, by using actors who really look like little kids, youngsters not fully grown into their bodies, a fact which doesn’t fail to inject the proceedings with an unnerving sense of the real.

Set in Naranjo’s native home of Guanajuato, Voy a explotar offers a portrait of the picturesque colonial city, with its houses that climb the surrounding hills, as seen from the central rooftops and subterranean tunnels that Román and Maru traverse in search of the feeling of escape as much escape’s actuality. They, and we, see Guanajuato from above and below, a sly visual strategy that mirrors the kids’ mischievous plan, to pretend that they’ve fled the city when they’re actually camping out on the roof of Román’s family home, hiding in plain sight, fumbling their way through sex or snatching booze and junk food while everyone else is asleep or out, while their parents, either lazily indifferent or hysterical and useless, go about their negligent search. (Román’s father is hilariously played by Mexican veteran Daniel Giménez Cacho, probably most familiar to Anglophone viewers as a disembodied voice—he was the anonymous narrator of Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu mamá también (01).)

I saw Voy a explotar at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and have since been patiently wondering when it might resurface. The film played the New York Film Festival that same year, and eventually returned to NYC screens last summer. It never received any theatrical release anywhere in Canada that I know of, but at least, unlike a number of other equally worthy recent Latin American films, it’s now been granted a DVD release from Paradox/E1 in a no-frills package but featuring a decent transfer. The film was co-produced by Canana, the Mexican company overseen by Y tu mamá también’s stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna. They recently re-teamed for Rudo y Cursi (08), which was kinda fun but not nearly as exciting a film as Voy a explotar. It did however get some limited Canadian distribution, presumably in the hopes that García Bernal and Luna’s allure could result in another art house hit. (It didn’t.) I don’t know that Voy a explotar could have generated the sort of box office that potential distributors require to justify such a gamble, but with any luck its appearance on DVD will help to keep viewers alert to the fact that, ten years after Amores Perros (00), Mexican cinema is still very much alive and kicking and ready to explode upon the international scene.