The Eagle: Fatherless son searches for a standard in a savage land

The expository titles that open The Eagle emerge from a haze of computerized mist, a figurative fog that envelops the ancient history about to be conjectured upon. Inspired by the legend of the Ninth Spanish Legion, the words tell of how in 120 A.D. 5000 Roman soldiers journeyed into uncharted Northern Britain and vanished without a trace, along with their beloved standard, a silver eagle whose loss seems to have grieved Rome far more than that of its troops. But our story really begins 30 years later, with the arrival of centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) at a remote, dilapidated garrison not far from the dreaded northern frontier. It seems an undesirable post, but Marcus Aquila has his reasons for being there: his father led the aforementioned ill-fated, now infamous, expedition.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, The Eagle may be set in Roman-occupied Britain, but its trajectory most closely resembles that of a revisionist Western, with its hero, devoted to his flag yet fundamentally an individualist of stoic integrity, traversing hostile terrain rife with primitive yet fierce aboriginal warriors in the name of some grandiose colonialist project. After an act of bravery lands Marcus Aquila a damaged knee, a medal and an honorable discharge, he hears rumours of recent Eagle sightings up in the Highlands and vows to retrieve it, with only Esca (Jamie Bell), his noble native slave, as companion and guide. So this lone ranger and his Tonto go behind enemy lines, off the map, and into the vastness of Scotland’s murky glens on what is surely a pointless quest, a journey into the heart of darkness for a hunk of metal, not even a person, though perhaps the real goal is to apprehend some obscure truth about a long-lost father and vindicate his tarnished legacy.

Reuniting Last King of Scotland director Kevin MacDonald, scripter Jeremy Brock, and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, The Eagle is transporting and richly atmospheric, pulling you in on the strength of its storytelling and gorgeously rugged images, some illuminated only by flickering candles. A moonlight fight is more brutal for its gloom, as is the vision of barbecued invaders resembling rabid hippies and fighting like wild dogs, crazed with the rage of the colonized. Later on the Pict tribes are introduced, the tables turned, Marcus Aquila becomes the slave, and there’s something transfixing in seeing this hulking hero kneel before lanky warriors who decorate themselves so as to look like they literally emerged from the surrounding stone, cold sea and hardscrabble. MacDonald refrains from any fashionable indulgence in gore, but reveals a deft understanding as to how to cultivate our anticipation of violence with close-ups of sharpened spikes spinning on the sides of cartwheels, or a knife about to plunge into a knee to perform surgery without anesthetic.

Brock’s dialogue however is often dry or simply too on the nose. Donald Sutherland turns up for a nice supporting bit, and there’s a scene where he provides amusingly colourless colour commentary to the coliseum fight that introduces Esca: “Look at that. Look at that!” But what’s spoken in The Eagle is secondary to what transpires, and the story itself is fascinating. At least for the first two-thirds. The film’s last act is disappointingly stupid, though in hindsight isn’t hard to see coming. I suppose says something about how all of us, oppressed and oppressors both, are capable of heinous acts and old soldiers never lose their fire. If only the story didn’t reward its genocidal Romans by feeding their vanity and idolatry. You can’t help but imagine the alternate version where Marcus Aquila finds the lost eagle but it’s been consigned to life as a rusty anvil or paperweight, or collecting dust in some closet where later humans will store forgotten bowling trophies and unwanted crock pots.

Organic Milk Better For You?

I'm not convinced. Generally, I'm skeptical of anything having to do with organic-this, or artisan-that. That's not to say that some studies haven't shown differences, but more studies have shown benefits in the other direction. Generally, no difference is found, but especially regarding produce, those nasty, industrial, chemically grown fruits and veggies are more frequently better for you than their organic counterparts.

I'm often proven right because organic food has little to do with actual health and everything to do with damning the man. Just because a hypothesis seems right in your head doesn't mean that it's going to be borne out in experiments. And when your primary motivation is moral and social, your scientific sense is going to be clouded.

As it is with this study. I can think of one big thing and that is that organic milks are almost always pasteurized by the ultra-high-temperature process. Anyone who's done a taste test between milks knows that UHTP changes the flavor of the milk significantly, and anyone who's ever tried to steam milk for espresso knows that the chemical changes are significant enough to make it annoyingly difficult. That means that major chemical changes are happening in UHTP milks in comparison to standard milks. Was this controlled for? I don't know, but I'd like to know. Did they include control milks? Those that are produced on gigantic scales but are not organic, like Parmalat?

Again, without details, I won't say this is bunk, but I'm suspicious. I find it especially laughable that the lead researcher recommends that everyone switch to organic. For one thing, has she noticed that organic costs TWICE AS MUCH as excellent non-organic, and three times as much as standard Wal-Mart milk. To say that people should just triple their spending on one of the Western life's staples is ridiculous. And what about milk-steaming, espresso fiends like me, huh? What of us?!

Organic milk is better for you, say scientists

2012: Not with a bang but a protracted groan

The planets will align, the sun will burp fire, the earth’s surface will start to slide all over, and it’s all happening faster than expected—unless of course, you use the Mayan calendar, read New Age books, or watch this ridiculous movie. It’s two-and-a-half hours of earthquake, flood, fire, and fun for the whole family. The apocalypse becomes a theme park ride, yet again, in the hands of Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich, never one to do anything as rash as stray from the flabbiest of formulas. There are idealistic heroes and grotesque villains, family reunions, teary goodbyes, countless near-misses, blatantly sexist divisions of labour, reams of dopey but relentlessly portentous dialogue, and rampant death and destruction. There’s also a Paris Hilton impersonator, replete with valiant chihuahua. Amanda Peet holds hands with a Tibetan lady. Woody Harrelson plays himself. They don’t call them disaster movies for nothing.

John Cusack plays a novelist and chauffer who wrote a book about Atlantis dismissed by critics for its “naïve optimism”—his words—but beloved by Chiwetel Ejiofor’s mercilessly micromanaging humanitarian geologist and advisor to US President Danny Glover—among the prophesies espoused in 2012, apparently a full term in office is really going to add some years to Barack Obama. Cusack stumbles onto Harrelson’s paranoid—but 100% correct!—apocalypse watcher and gets from him the map to the mountainous Chinese hiding place of the secret super-arks being developed by a committee of global politicians. Cusack packs up ex-wife Peet, the two kids, and the ex-wife’s new boyfriend, who thankfully knows how to fly a plane, and runs for it. They make it to China with the help of some unsavoury Russians, but will they get on the ark?

There’s lots going on in 2012, though little of it amounts to anything besides constant regurgitations of the same stale sub-Spielbergian sentimental schlock and suspense scenarios spruced up with the latest CGI scenery. What’s most annoying is that Emmerich and co-scenarist Harald Kloser don’t even make use of the more interesting items they themselves conspicuously plant in the story, such as all those wild animals being hustled into the ark, ready to make lunch of some hysterical humans, or the fact that Cusack’s seven-year-old still wets herself and has to wear diapers. A filmmaker willing to fess up to his own lust for visions of Armageddon would surely have made something more genuinely spectacular and provocative with all this—my vote would be for Paul Verhoven—but Emmerich, ever the conservative, doesn’t go all the way with anything, not the familial reconciliation story nor the gallows humour nor the horror nor the millenarian pseudo-science. You would think that a movie about the collapse of civilization might, you know, have something to say about civilization, and you'd be wrong. Not the end of world, of course, just an astonishing lack of imagination.

But you want to know what really pisses me off about 2012? All through the film everyone keeps talking about how the Mayans warned us. But take a look at the faces of those who make it onto the ark at the end—not one fucking Mayan! So much for NAFTA.

A few good mentalists: Men Who Stare at Goats

US Journalist Bill Wilton’s wife leaves him for an older guy with a robot arm. Wanting to prove himself during a spell of self-doubt he gets his employers to send him to Iraq, where he hangs out in a hotel and sees no action—until he meets fellow American Lyn Cassady, enigmatic, handsome yet lacking style, charismatic yet over-sensitive. And psychic, it would seem. Cassady’s the one-time star member of an elite, non-lethal, mentalist military unit formed in the 1980s. He claims to be in Iraq on special assignment, and Wilton tags along. That we get to colourful Cassady by way of the shambling, moping, ordinary Wilton seems a perfectly good starting point for the movie. The problem is that Wilton’s apparently convinced the filmmakers that the movie is actually primarily about him.

Wilton’s a stand-in for Jon Ronson, whose 2004 book The Men Who Stare at Goats provides the source material, adapted for the screen by Peter Straughan. As an exposé of the secret history of bizarre American paranormal defense research and its connection to interrogation techniques currently used in the War on Terror, placing Ronson at the front of the book’s narrative makes sense. As a movie however, one based on ostensible facts but staged as fiction, the focus on Wilton feels like a major dramaturgical miscalculation, and not only because of the almost palpably uncertain lead performance from Ewan McGregor.

The directorial debut of Grant Heslov, who co-scripted Good Night and Good Luck, The Men Who Stare at Goats frustrates because it’s sitting on a mountain of comic gold it rarely bothers to fully burrow into. George Clooney was in two movies at the Toronto International Film Festival this year and he was the best thing in both of them. He valiantly embodies Cassady as a boyish man of bruised affectations, wearing a moustache for extra confidence—everybody in this movie wears moustaches for extra confidence—his social skills and general maturity stunted after devoting his adult life to advancing himself in an discipline almost no one can believe, much less appreciate. Clooney’s conviction as he practices “remote viewing” by meditating to Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling’ is a thing of beauty. Jeff Bridges plays Cassady’s mentor Bill Django, a Vietnam vet and New Age Lebowski whose once grandiose iconoclasm has slowly dissipated through petty rivalries, the gradual loss of confidence on the part of the military upper echelon, and middle-age drug burn-out. Kevin Spacey plays Larry Hooper, another psychic warrior so irked by Cassady’s superior talents back in the day that he successfully conspired to oust his competition and command the “First Earth Battalion” himself. It’s ideal Spacey material, Hooper’s childish condescension the perfect foil for Cassady’s oddly touching earnestness and Django’s shaggy, mellow optimism.

When turned loose, the Clooney/Bridges/Spacey trio effortlessly produce brilliantly silly entertainment, but they’re inexplicably upstaged by the Wilton A-story and by Straughan/Heslov’s decision to take material rich in historical resonance—the experimental goats being Iraqi surrogates—and turn it into a humdrum variation on Mystery Men, an utterly inconsequential, middle-of-the-road, lightly eccentric, feel-good comedy about guys who can’t seem to grow up, replete with limpid score and dumb fantasy ending. Not a bad time by any stretch, but a notable waste all the same.

Tripping over clues, while dreams go up in smoke: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Speaking of the end of the sixties (see preceding film review)... When we catch up with the Southern California counterculture at the start of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (Penguin, $35) the rust has already started to eat away at the carburetor. It must be early 1970 from the sound of things. Manson’s going to trail. Cambodia’s getting pummeled. Drugs are getting uglier. Funkier Los Angeles is well on route to becoming a grid of massive real estate developments. Permanently groovy Gordita Beach private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, meanwhile, is getting a visit from his past that will prove more tumultuous than a mere flashback, however extended. His ex-girlfriend Shasta appears at his door one night with something like a job, something about a billionaire named Mickey Wolfmann who she appears to be in love with, who takes a lion’s share of the responsibility for the aforementioned real estate development binge, and who might just be about to get kidnapped. The whole thing makes Doc instantly nervous despite his wealth of first-hand experience with danger. “Doc had outrun souped-up Rolles full of indignant smack dealers on the Pasadena Freeway, doing a hundred in the fog and trying to steer through all those crudely engineered curves, he’s walked up back alleys east of the L.A. River with nothing but a borrowed ’fro pick in his baggies for protection, been in and out of the Hall of Justice while holding a small fortune in Vietnamese weed…” But still. If hippy telepathy counts for anything he’d better steel himself for some unusually not-so-good vibrations, a process which, like every other process in Doc’s daily doings, generally involves getting high. Perhaps a horoscope will be consulted.

Two related movies. In director Robert Altman and screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s iconoclastic and satirical adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s greatest novel, The Long Goodbye (1973), private detective Philip Marlowe finds himself transplanted from the 1950s to the 1970s, where his once unshakable code of ethics dissolves in a post-hippy haze. In the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (98), a wildly imaginative pastiche that leans heavily on Chandler’s legacy, a pothead bowling fanatic and relic of the 1970s who actually calls himself the Dude finds he’s roped into playing private detective after the theft of his favourite rug during the 1990s. Pynchon’s Doc exists in a curious realm somewhere between these two film-based-on-literary protagonists. He lives in nearly the same the milieu of the former while guiding his actions by what feels like virtually the same philosophy as the latter. Unlike either he’s not an anachronism but is rather perfectly in keeping with the spirit of his age, and that spirit and its sticky residue are to a considerable extent the real subject of Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s first and, to say the very least, irreverent attempt at the mystery genre. From what I could keep track of in my reading the mystery plot does basically hold together, but it’s gleefully obscured by a tangled web of cultural observation and critique manifesting in near constant digressions. It’s pleasantly meandering, obsessively detailed, probably over-written, at times poetic, and quite often extremely funny. Funny in that zany, busy, baffling, conspiracy-laden, pop culture-crazed Thomas Pynchon kind of way. (If you’ve read him—greatest hits include V. and Gravity’s Rainbow—you know what I mean.)

The elusive Mister Pynchon, circa a hell of a long time ago

Doc covers a lot of ground, not only in Los Angeles but Las Vegas, too. He visits a massage parlour called Chick Planet, where queries about certain sought after figures are responded to with counter-questions such as “Far out. Does he eat pussy?” He patronizes several disparate restaurants where the servers seem always to be warning their customers against eating the food. He visits his cousin Scott Oof, drummer in a band called Beer, and a friend who’s on the verge of discovering the internet in its nascent form. He visits a luxury home with lighting design by James Wong Howe. He gets into a car driven by an insane young woman named Japonica he was once paid to find and is pulled over by cops belonging to a special squad called Cultwatch. He enjoys a rare sighting of the Golden Fang, a schooner that miraculously survived the Halifax Explosion, was later purchased by a blacklisted Hollywood movie star, was later still used for anti-communist activities in the Third World. All the while there is this ongoing tension with regards to Doc’s autonomy—is he picking up clues or simply being led along a path designed by unseen agencies? Of course Doc’s paranoid, but often with reason. He’s a private dick—not a gumshoe but, as one character suggests, a “gumsandal”—and thus a natural outsider, and maybe a pawn of the LAPD, who’ve taken to farming out their dirty work. In any case, Doc’s being perpetually adrift in fogs both literal and figurative is the running joke of Inherent Vice, but it’s also the meat of it. As Endless Summer turns into endless bummer Doc slowly emerges as a lonesome, damaged emblem for a generation whose dreams of fun, freedom, tolerance and respect for privacy, however wishful or misguided they may be, are exploited and finally dashed altogether by the rise of corporate power and ubiquity. Pynchon has a great old time poking fun at Doc’s lifestyle and philosophy, but under all the farce lies a genuine melancholy nostalgia for a time when such dreams could even by conceived.

By the end of Inherent Vice, even mellow old Doc might be getting hardened to the way the tide is turning. “I should trust only good people?” he asks his pal Denis (pronounced, incidentally, to rhyme with penis). “Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.” But Pynchon at least mercilessly leaves Doc in a state of meditative suspension, of unknowingness that’s relatively comfortable, driving in yet another fog, singing along to ‘God Only Knows’ on the radio, with more than a half a tank of gas and an almost full pack of Kools, feeling ready enough for whatever might happen.

Caught in the devil's bargain: Taking Woodstock

Would-be interior designer and might-be abstract painter Elliot Tiechberg (Demetri Martin) gets starved out of New York City at the start of a very un-groovy summer of ’69. He heads back to the Catskills, where his folks run a fleabag motel and self-described resort that even at eight bucks a night can’t draw customers. Though he’s in his mid-30s Elliot looks younger. Though he’s secretly a less than straight arrow under his polyester suits he looks sufficiently trustworthy to his elders, or at least those who aren’t openly anti-Semitic. Elliot’s the youngest-ever president of the local chamber of commerce, a thankless gig whose greatest benefit is a free pass when it comes to getting permits approved. But permits and sheer desperation are all Elliot needs to help grease the wheels of history and ensure that Woodstock happens after the festival gets booted out of its original location. Elliot’s acting as middleman between the locals and the organizers also saves his family’s business and gives him an opportunity to finally break away from a vicious circle of codependence and repression. So everybody wins. At least until Altamont comes in December and bums the whole universe out.

Taking Woodstock is based on the memoir by Elliot Tiber. I’ve been wondering why his name was altered here to sound more explicitly Jewish. I can only assume it has something to do with justifying the wildly over-the-top characterization of his mom Sonia (Imelda Staunton, no holds barred), whose knee-highs, horn-rimmed goggles, incessant nagging and permanent lunge make her the most extreme overbearing Jewish matriarch the movies have seen in years. It may very well be an accurate portrait of this most unlikely midwife of one of the hippy generation’s crowning achievements, but it also makes for some broad and rather uneven comedy, which is not the strong suit of director Ang Lee, who along with his screenwriter/producer James Schamus was probably more attracted to the story’s mixture of sexual awakening and dissection of a pivotal moment in American culture. You could say Taking Woodstock is a little Brokeback and a little Ice Storm, but you wouldn’t quite do justice to the film’s own distinctions—or to the richer rewards of Brokeback Mountain or The Ice Storm, both of them movies with more focus, insight and emotional punch.

Better to just say that Taking Woodstock is a reasonably good time, with some nice details, lots of nudity, heady nostalgia, more than a handful of freak flag clichés and a paucity of actual music, the idea being that those who in attendance who actually heard the bands were in the minority. Elliot never quite gets near the stage but he does strike up an alliance with amiable neighbour Eugene Levy, get some solid advice from a ass-kicking transvestite played by Liev Schreiber, crawl into a boogie van for a pleasantly touchy-feely acid trip with Paul Dano, and tumbles out of the closet and into bed with a hippy hunk who is quite possibly the only guy who went to Woodstock that actually likes Judy Garland records. There’s not a heap of narrative dynamics here, but like Titanic we all know how it’s going to end anyway. A psychedelic cascade of split-screen effects followed by one massive, mud-splattered hangover.

Red harvest: Metro Cinema collectivizes the films of Miklós Janscó

With their flamboyant adoption and advancements on some of the most modernist formal tropes of the era, the 60s films of Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Janscó have often come up against accusations of being more concerned with geometries than geopolitics, of being triumphs of design over directive. You could argue that their ostensibly socialist ideology—Janscó joined the Communist party in 1945 and would eventually work under the auspices of the Soviet film industry—was compromised by techniques and aesthetics inspired by the decadent West as celebrated in the Italian, French and American cinemas. For those inclined to read every artistic choice as a political statement—a habit once quite fashionable, lest we forget—Janscó’s work exhibited a troubling schism of form and content.

But from the perspective of one not even born when Janscó’s most renown films came out, only vaguely familiar with the history they invoke, and open to whatever sort of reading, Janscó’s mise en scène—the audaciously long takes and fluid camerawork; the casts of characters whose allegiances are so often impossible to determine, something the regular shedding of clothing only enhances; the willfully cryptic narratives in which opposing forces become indistinguishable across a vast, featureless landscape—constitutes a powerful political gesture in itself. Violence self-perpetuates. The surrender and assumption of power are exchanged until power itself becomes meaningless. Ideology is reduced to pageantry. (Did I mention Janscó was once a law student?) I can’t think of a body of films with a bolder statement on the futility of war and malleability of national or political identities.

It functions all the better for its dearth of exposition or psychology, for our inability to identify with and comprehend characters, something that only grows as you work through these films where the same actors keep reappearing in different roles. There’s a compelling theatricality to these films, not only in their use of a stock company but, in Red Psalm (1971) especially, the sense that everything is staged as a sort of atheist Passion play. Unless you really know your Hungarian history—and, one suspects, even then—to enter into Janscó’s world is to feel like you should really be understanding everything while understanding almost nothing. Janscó drops us into the midst of a struggle without orienting us. What’s on display is “pure” war, or rather the peripheralities of war, the negotiations and executions. All of which is something most of us could stand to consider more carefully as our world slips ever deeper into a global chasm of conflicts whose meanings are never uncontestable.

The best way to get a sense of how all this works is to see these films in a condensed period, something our friends at Metro Cinema are granting Edmonton filmlovers next week with The Films of Miklós Janscó. The selected quartet begins with Janscó’s breakthrough The Round Up (66), which unfolds in a prison camp following the collapse of Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man is accused of murder and the military use him to finger other insurgents they wish to condemn. What follows is a sequence of betrayals and a dismantling of alliances while the circumstances of the supposed murders become increasingly inconsequential. Brutality becomes an end in itself.

The Round Up introduced some of Janscó’s key themes, but the formal distinctions I’ve been describing don’t come into full fruition until The Red and the White (67), shot in the USSR and intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. But the story takes place two years later, with the Communists fighting the White Guard for a hilly plain along the Volga. Territorial lines shift, but any greater purpose for the struggle remains obscure, as does anything resembling heroics. It is the antithesis of a propaganda film. The Soviets were not pleased, while the film was celebrated in the US. Silence and Cry (68), probably the rarest film in this series, revisits the same historical moment, but on a comparatively intimate scale, with a former Red soldier taking refuge on a Hungarian farm regarded as suspect by local authorities. There are moments of what appear to be tenderness and communion, the performances engrossing and nuanced, but everything finally capitulates to the dictates of individual survival. The result is chillingly poetic.

Having seen it just recently, the Palme d’Or-winning Red Psalm—shot in gorgeously saturated colour and, rather surprisingly, with a 1:37 aspect ratio—has become a new personal favourite of mine, though admittedly, hypnotic, erotic, dream-like and seemingly endless—but in a good way!—it may the even more confusing than any of its predecessors. Folkloric and more than a little enraptured with the hippie culture of the time, it centers on a turn-of-the-century uprising of landless agricultural workers, who sing, play music, dance and act out rituals of triumph and slaughter. The camera weaves across faces or hangs back to watch soldiers encircle and open fire upon a ring of peasants. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, though, as with the preceding three films, it makes clear that without Janscó the work of Theo Angelopoulos and Béla Tarr would be inconceivable.

Devil in the details: Margaret Atwood's Payback

Margaret Atwood is nothing if not an irreverent polemicist. In the final days of a federal election so abysmally superfluous, inconsequential and lacking in dynamic options that fewer Canadians bothered to vote than during any previous election in history, Atwood announced her advocacy for the Bloq Québécois, a party that, besides not actually appearing on the ballots of the vast majority of the country’s ridings, including Atwood’s, is fundamentally committed to removing the entire province of Quebec from Canada. The point? At least they gave a shit about the arts.

To be sure, as complimented by her intelligence, curiosity and wit, Atwood’s irreverence is something to be grateful for. Her sounding off on whatever is a welcome element in the national discourse, her particular irreverence speaking to a healthy skepticism not only on the author’s part but also on that of her readers, who are encouraged to consider the merits of each of Atwood’s arguments and arrive at their own conclusion. This is especially the case with the eerily well-timed Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (House of Anansi, $18.95), Atwood’s contribution to the CBC Massey Lecture Series. It is a relatively slim volume, jam-packed with facts, proposals and surprising, insightful connections between extant myths and notions on its central topic. But if it’s final chapter feels a bit slight after all the hearty build-up, I think it’s mainly because the ball has finally been tossed in our court. It is difficult to look at a ball just sitting there, inert and waiting to be picked up.

Payback goes way back. In searching for the origins of debt, of balances and exchanges, Atwood ultimately suggests that it may be primal, citing experiments on monkeys that reveal innate tendencies resembling credit and trade negotiations. With an inevitable emphasis on literary sources however—Atwood is above all a novelist and poet, and she’s ever mindful of the practical uses of literature—she gets the best mileage out of the Devil and the myriad Fausts who’ve accepted his always popular buy-now, pay-later schemes over the years. Mephistopheles has a knack for bookkeeping, it would seem, and a dependence on the sort of binding legalities that’s been mystified everyone from illiterate farmers suffering a bad yield to gambling addicts on the lam to ordinary homebuyers from time immemorial. Debt requires an account, which is to say a narrative, and the accumulation of debt, Atwood posits, is so precariously seductive because it helps give our lives a story. Debt is drama. We are what we owe, and our stories are sometimes defined by the settling and unsettling of accounts. The great body of 19th century Western literature, as Atwood smartly observes, was always very much concerned with money and class, and in a memorable survey of some of its most famous protagonists Atwood declares that Emma Bovary in the end wasn’t punished for sex but “shopaholicism.”

It’s important to note that in exploring the idea of debt in stories, ones often featuring transactions involving spiritual, supernatural or in any case non-monetary properties, money itself is never the real issue. Currency, as the “current” part of that word implies, is fluid and merely representational. Considerations of what items we place fundamental value on are thus duly approached, especially in the final, most problematic chapter, which finds a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge realizing how closely his fortunes, both literal and figurative, are dependent on the dictates of environmental devastation. But Atwood’s engagement with the more shaded characteristics of debt collectors and their clients reaches its most satisfying depths in her analysis of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which takes into account religious and ethnic differences—Antonio, she points out, didn’t charge interest on his loans not because he was a good guy but because as a Christian interest was actually outlawed at the time—and views Antonio and Shylock as uncomfortably codependent in the development of their own stories. Antonio “has projected onto Shylock—as his Shadow—the malice and the greediness that he himself possesses but can’t acknowledge. He’s made Shylock his whipping boy.” It’s a major highlight.

Looming over Payback is the question of debt as sin, and who of the two parties it requires is the more sinful. I’m not sure this is resolved, but the question is most interestingly complicated by Atwood’s discussion of sin eaters, with Christ’s martyrdom embodying one grandiose redemption of the huge Original Sin debt. It takes time, but by the final chapter this does all slowly bring us to the fraught idea of forgiving debts, of social justice, and of one of the most troubling conundrums of the globalized economy. Atwood wastes few words on the issue, directing our attention to the “shadow side” of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose money-lending practices have fostered such abominable overspending by irresponsible leaders, leaving their desperate citizens with a bill they have no hope of being able to pay off. In the end Atwood actually says very little about the big issues we expect, mostly because the conclusions to be drawn from her study are so self-evident.

But many readers will still feel let down by Atwood’s parting tale, that new, corporate Scrooge taken on a magical mystery tour by the Spirits of Earth Day Past, Present and Future. Seriously, Earth Day. The frustrating part of this little revamp on Dickens isn’t that Atwood goes all hippy-dippy on us—her sense of humour remains firmly intact when dryly describing Scrooge’s coveting of hemp suits—but that her only prescription for resolving our economic-ecological crisis lies in dreams of sweeping, rather idealistic social change. The cynicism can be read quite easily between the lines, and our hopes of leveling our massive collective debts are left in danger of feeling all the more in vain. I guess it depends on how you read the last lines, as challenge or resignation: How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?

TIFF '08: Kuroawa, Assayas, Kore-eda and others keep it all in the family

John Cale lives in a hippy commune in Patagonia. That’s really all I needed to know. A friend suggested I see Salamandra and, knowing full well of my special fondness for Cale and the Velvet Underground, he started his hard sell with the above item and I told him just to stop there. Cale’s brief, rather crazed appearances—chomping into glass, toying with a knife, singing in Spanish with a junkyard band, replete with a ragged chicken bone for percussion—comprise several of the highlights in Pablo Agüero’s feature debut, which follows a young single mother, freshly released from some sort of institution, as she uproots her six-year-old son from his established life with his grandmother and whisks him down to El Bolsón to live amongst the unwashed, the heavily bearded and the incense-drunk.

Agüero errs on the side of unimposing, his observational hand-held camera seeming to will precious little into action, counting on our connection to the protagonists, the boy in particular, and the rising absurdity of their deeply dubious attempts at roughing it in this cold, wet and largely unfriendly place to engage the viewer. The images frequently yield layers of metaphor, and the technique overall works well enough, though it’s difficult not to wonder if things couldn’t be pushed a lot farther, if the real hard work still to be done by Agüero wouldn’t involve driving his nervy, New-Agey, curly-haired mom past the point of mere constant nail-biting and deluded nattering. Still, an interesting, and certainly very sensitive picture that offers a glimpse at a most marginal life.

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” so goes the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. Salamandra is just one of many films showing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival that deal in some compelling manner with the grand old theme of family life, a theme that when applied to drama hardly requires the word ‘dysfunctional’ to be placed before it. Happy or unhappy, TIFF ’08 sees a number of families struggle to realize some fresh level of self-knowledge both for its parts and as a whole. And I think the finest—and funniest—example of this that I’ve managed to see came from one of the festival’s most pleasant surprises, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata.

Kurosawa is most famous for his distinctively brooding and image-centered horror films, such as Cure (1997), Charisma (00), Pulse (01), and my personal favourite, the über-creepy Séance (01). As far as I’m aware, Tokyo Sonata marks Kurosawa’s first stab at comedy, and I have to wonder if it isn’t in fact his real calling. His horror films are smart, infectious and remarkably chilling, but they can also be overly ponderous and, in the case of Pulse in particular, simply over-long and limpid. It’s difficult to describe just what a refreshing about-face this new film signals without simply seeing it for yourself. Yet it occurs to me that the film does actually have something in common with Cure: where the characters in the older film are afflicted with a disease that drives them to kill, the protagonists in this new film seem to be afflicted with one that makes them crazy to start their lives over—even the little kid.

The downsizing of Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), the result of his company’s outsourcing to cheaper China, is the catalyst. He goes home that night and begins the familiar charade, not telling his wife and children what’s happened and instead putting on the suit and pretending to go to work everyday. He mostly hangs out at the library and eats his lunch with the homeless. He meets another unemployed businessman who goes so far as to set his phone to ring every hour so can feign business calls in public—even though there’s usually no one around he could possible need to impress. It sounds pathetic, yet it actually impresses Ryuhei deeply. Ryuhei spends most of the movie looking like his head’s about to blow up, and I guess he can’t help but admire the other man’s mood-management.

We soon see that all three male members of the Sasaki clan are deceiving the family for their individual reasons, the quiet 12-year-old Kenji (Kai Inowaki) being the most sympathetic. When he’s suddenly struck one day by the lulling sounds emanating from a suburban piano class, Kenji asks his parents if he can take lessons and is brutishly denied by his newly emasculated dad, so he goes in secret, using his lunch money to pay. Meanwhile his remote older brother is secretly joining the US military just as they decide to send more troops to Iraq, and his over-burdened and under-loved mother is slowly descending into quiet desperation, nearing bottom and its accompanying implosion.

There are characteristically elegant, beautifully composed sequences here, such as the opening, in which papers blow through the empty house during a storm, or the moving finale, which manifests the title as something more than just an homage to Ozu’s classic. But much of Tokyo Sonata is sharply focused on clear, concise storytelling, terrifically goofy comic interplay, and steady character development, each strand of the narrative building to the point where there is a synchronicity of panic boiling over. It goes on for a while, but is never less than diverting and propulsive. There are moments of utter cruelty and hopelessness, yet Kurosawa somehow pulls things together in such a way that the film finally finds itself lighting upon a coda of redemption and new awakening.

If Ozu can be traced in the title and broad themes of Tokyo Sonata, from the intermediary landscape shots on down, he’s positively haunting virtually every aspect of Still Walking, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, a heartfelt, often solemn, but still vivid, sensual, lovingly detailed and warm depiction of familial differences amongst adult children and their elderly parents, most of them irreconcilable. Centered quite simply around a family reunion, this is the sort of movie where no viewer can fail to recognize some fragment of their personal experiences. Kore-eda’s film was inspired by stories he was told by his own mother in the months before she died, and his story is very much informed by the absence of a key family member.

This same sort of near-palpable absence is equally essential to Oliver Assayas’ Summer Hours, which finds three adult and nearly estranged siblings—played by the impressive trio of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier—negotiating their way through what seems an inevitable complete break with the past after the death of their mother, wonderfully played by Edith Scob, the striking actress who many years ago starred as the titular victim of Eyes Without a Face (60). Marred only by a few unneeded scenes of bathetic weeping, Assayas’ survey of the increasingly rapid erosion of artifacts that bind us to our families and our collective history is at times positively biting and all-too resonant. But the film is also brimming with humour and, with its special, loving attention to its younger supporting characters, is equally invested in nurturing a sense of regeneration.

Okay, one last film before I sign off here, and one which brings us back full circle to Latin America. Dioses is Josué Méndez’s second feature, and reveals a genuinely propositive sense of camera placement and movement. Concerning an upper-class Peruvian family that includes a father, a teenage daughter and son, and the father’s new girlfriend—a dead ringer for Halle Berry, should that grad your attention—Méndez takes a series of more or less conventional dilemmas—a party girl with an unwanted pregnancy; an angry young man sick with his sinking into bourgeois rot and in love with his sister; a gold-digger painfully ashamed of her indigenous background—and frames them in such a way that we’re often able to re-examine our assumptions. Ménez has a knack with these slow zooms out and back in he uses, his juxtaposing of music and image in seemingly contradictory ways, and his fun game of having characters move in and out of frame from unexpected places.

The way Méndez conveys Diego’s inner anguish in particular is frequently tender, perverse and hilarious all at once, cutting to Diego’s amusing permanent scowl at inspired moments. The treatment of Eliza on the other hand can feel trite, especially in the very cutty scene that finds her rehearsing inane comments to make when around her new coven of snobby middle-ages wives, but the performance of Maricielo Effio, which shifts in subtle ways, goes a long way to gaining our sympathies. She’s the bridge between the worlds of wealth and poverty in Peru that Méndez seems very keen on imparting upon us, though the handful of scenes with the servants are some of the most telling of all. These women, always present and rarely visible, are in their way members of the family themselves, interlopers into a realm of elitism that, as its portrayed here, seems on the brisk of collapse under its own dead weight.

Fear and Loathing made wistful: Gibney's Gonzo a timid tribute to Thompson (the gentleman ordering up a round of vodka, eight-balls and ammo below)

It would clearly be unwise to expect a gonzo approach to a documentary about the daddy of gonzo journalism. Applying such flights of rambling conjecture, digression, lamentation and outright hallucination as were the benchmarks of Hunter S. Thompson’s distinctive prose to most non-fiction movies of any kind would be inadvisable—unless perhaps they were supplied by Thompson himself. Alas, Thompson’s been dead these three years, and his best work was a good three decades behind him in any case.

But you still have to wonder if the good doctor, a counterculture hero, a lefty with right wing tastes who once represented the very best spirit of Rolling Stone, a container of more drugs than Keith Richards, and author of such iconoclastic works of oddly eloquent political commentary as Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, doesn’t deserve a portrait more provocative, or at least more questioning in spirit than the one delivered by Alex Gibney, director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson may have no lack of great anecdotes and archival material to feed upon, not to mention a head-spinning array of new interviews with ex-wives and ex-US Presidents, but the liveliness of the subject matter and commentary it inspires can’t quite make up for what’s basically a safe, conventional delivery.

“He was my friend. He never paid his rent, broke up my marriage, and taught my children to smoke pot.” Now, if that’s not a tribute… It comes from Thomson’s neighbour and landlord, and it does, for the record, come with a nostalgic smile. Those who knew and loved Thompson tend to feel conflicted about the style of both Thompson’s life and his death, which came from the barrel of one of the author’s many guns one night in his kitchen in 2005, while his family relaxed in the next room. He always said he’d do it that way, and no one seemed too shocked, but it made you question the relationship between bravado and cowardice, an intersection lorded over by Hemingway. “We need his voice now more and than ever,” is something said several times in Gonzo, yet not as many times as admittances that the guy was on auto-pilot for ages, isolated, paranoid, all-too akin to his caricature in the Doonesbury comics, and getting drunk with the likes of Pat Buchanan for god's sake. As Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner puts it, in the end Thompson was “hostage to his own persona.”

Gonzo focuses, naturally, on the good years, the 60s and 70s, when like everybody Thompson went off his rocker and yet actually had some hope. He was handsome, daring, gainfully employed and listened to. He even advocated presidential candidates, invented drugs for their opponents to be addicted to, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado. He legitimized fringe sensibilities in political discourse. But Gibney frames it all like a greatest hits package, replete with predictable, hokey-jokey use of period pop songs and insertions of deeply mannered readings of Thompson’s work by Johnny Depp, who for all his warm intentions just does not get the ribald tone at all.

Cocoa Criscos

I have a confession, I still eat hydrogenated oils. I have managed to purge them, I think, from my life in most areas except for one. One food I can't give up. ONE AREA where I give myself a pass. ONE GUILTY PLEASURE! JUST ONE!

Dunkin Donuts' chocolate kreme filled donut. Oh my... GOHD it's bad for you. It has to be! Just look at it! Oh, I know it's chocolate flavored Crisco. I know it's likely the equivalent of a pack of cigarettes. I just don't... fucking... CARE.

Now, I eat donuts on a decently regular basis. Once a month, I would guess. The Chocolate Kreme Filled donut is pretty much an annual thing, though; even I don't push my luck. And it isn't, somehow, the highest-calorie food in Dunkin Donuts. It's not even the highest calorie donut. It's not even in the top five. No, the donut most likely to kill you is the Chocolate Coconut Cake Donut, at a gut-busting 370 calories per donut.

The second highest-calorie item on their menu is the 760 calorie Pastrami Supreme Sandwich, but that's a sandwich, so it doesn't count. It's actual food. No, the items most likely to put you in a Rascal with diabetes are the Sausage Egg & Cheese Biscuit Sandwich or Triple Chocolate Muffin, with an Earth-shattering 800 and 660 calories respectively. If you're a young woman, that single sandwich, without drink, will cover nearly 50% of all daily calories. Suddenly, a glazed donut at 230 calories doesn't seem so bad. And if you think their smoothies are healthy, just read the ingredients on one of these bad boys.

Now, I'm not one to point fingers. I know most of what Dunkin Donuts sells could be better for me, but I choose to eat it anyhow because it's a taste I can't get any other way and, importantly, I WANT IT. I want it, I buy it, and I eat it. And yet, somehow, I still feel a little guilty afterwards. It's because of those damned hydrogenated oils. They're in EVERYTHING. I mean literally, everything. The shirt you just bought? It was made by some eight-year-old in China by pulling threads from a vat of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.

Breadcrumbs, BREADCRUMBS, have hydrogenated oils in them. And just because the label says no trans fats, don't think you can believe them. If there is .5 grams or less per serving of trans fats, the company can legally put down zero. The key is "per serving." I don't have ANY evidence to back this up, but I suspect that after that law was passed, the serving size on a number of products mysteriously went down. I was able to find one line of products that used hydrogenated oils and actually admitted trans fats, and that's Keebler Cookies. That they actually admitted the amount, ANY amount, means that those cookied must be made almost entirely out of trans fats.

It borders on impossible to find products without that crap in them. Since the revelations about hydrogenated oils like margarine came to light, I have basically stopped buying cookies. I liked cookies. I want cookies. But the number of cookies that don't have any hydrogenated oils can be measured on two hands, and maybe a foot. What do you have? Oh, the entire Pepperidge Farm lineup? How nice? What do I have? Oh, well, let's see, I have Le Petite Ecolier and the delicious array of organic cookies hand-made with wheat grass by real-life hippies in the mountains of Colorado. Yum.

Where was I going with this?