WHY SHAME BOTH IS AND ISN'T EVERYTHING YOU'VE HEARD IT IS

First unveiled at the Venice Film Festival and then at Toronto, where it was acquired for distribution by Fox Searchlight, Shame arrived in theaters this month the subject of a great deal of conversation. As the followup feature to British director Steve McQueen's Hunger, where Michael Fassbender—who also stars in Shame—turned in an eye-opening performance as Bobby Sands on his hunger strike, Shame had people going, “oh, yeah, far out, those guys, cool.” But mainly, the thing people were talking about was the sex.

Anytime anyone makes a picture with sex in it America freaks the fuck out. And Shame not only had nudity but dudity: Michael Fassbender's penis was apparently all over this motherfucker, and it was big, too. When McQueen sold the picture to Fox Searchlight, apparently one of the terms was they had to release it as an NC-17 if necessary, and Fox Searchlight, to their credit, not only did but did a bit of dick-swinging of their own about how they were going to wear the NC-17 as a badge of honor and fuck y'all and all kinds of nice, swaggery stuff. Of course, with all this talk about the NC-17, people who hadn't seen it yet started getting the sense that Michael Fassbender's 14-inch throbbing erect member was the entire subject of the movie, if all the talk was to be believed (Ed. Note: it's not 14 inches, nor is it throbbing or erect, and really isn't on display all that much). And, inevitably, despite the best attempts of many to maintain and not bug out about all the sex, Shame ended up becoming either the “Michael Fassbender's penis” movie or “the NC-17 movie.”

What I found, when I finally saw it yesterday, is that it actually is both of things. And isn't. McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan present the audience with very few specific details, which would be maddening if it was an accident, but not very long into the picture I started getting the sense—reinforced by everything that happened for the rest of its running time—that what they were up to was creating something whose meaning would be provided by each audience member's individual interpretation of it, kind of a cinematic BYOB party. So, what follows may say more about me than it does the picture. Or not. If your interpretation of the picture is that everything is spelled out and so forth, then I'm wrong. (Ed. Note: I'm never wrong. Fucker.) (Further Ed. Note: past this point be mild spoilers, be thou warned.)

Michael Fassbender stars as Brandon, a really good-looking guy with a (surprisingly realistically) really nice (if a bit cold) apartment with some kind of unspecified yuppie day job that keeps him in reasonably though not ridiculously luxurious creature comforts. His boss, David (James Badge Dale, who's secretly becoming one of the best character actors alive), is married but tries incessantly (and ineptly) to fuck every attractive woman in sight; Brandon doesn't even try and all the women his boss tries to fuck approach him. But, because he's not terribly proactive, Brandon relies mostly on porn, hookers, and webcam girls for sexual gratification. Mostly on porn, though: dude's got a fucking ton of it.

Still, whatever, don't knock a dude's hustle (as I'm sure Gautama Buddha would have said). His life's going okay. He charms some random suits into doing some random deal that his non-specified company is up to (it doesn't matter what the company does, because it doesn't matter to Brandon, it's just his job). He may need to go to the office men's room to fap multiple times a day, but who among us is without our quirk(s)? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If fapping three times a day at work and getting picked up by women in Audis who have you fuck them against a pillar under the FDR drive and maintaining the porn library of Congress isn't getting in the way of your everyday existence, it's not a problem.

But then, his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up. And literally everything that can go wrong does. I'll leave the story, such as it is, here, because the whole rest of it is Brandon's shame spiral anyway. His carefully ordered existence comes apart, and he's led to question whether any of it has meaning. You know, no biggie, just all that shit.

The main thing I think a lot of people missed with this picture is that Brandon's shame thing doesn't originate from sex. The way he relates to people (gender ambiguity intentional) sexually stems, as I read it, from his inability or unwillingness (or unwillingness that begets inability) to relate to other human beings besides himself. The initial sequence in the picture, a series of shots of Brandon either alone on the subway or alone at his apartment or at the office or out drinking with co-workers but at arm's length physically (and certainly emotionally) from them show us: this is what he wants. He's won. He has a spiffy high-rise apartment with his vinyl records and his porn-glutted computers and hookers to come over and shtup him (notably, the one non-hooker he connects sexually with in this sequence is driven, successful, and is aspiring to be all that Brandon outwardly is, naturally making her be like, “I want to fuck that guy.” While we're on the theme of projecting one's own interpretations onto blank slates and shit.)

Sissy's arrival throws this all into disarray precisely because what she represents is a connection and obligation to something other than Brandon's self. She's everything he's tried to leave behind: vulnerability, disorder, emotion. She makes out with and then fucks David, for whom Brandon feels contempt for his ineptitude with women, for his having “fallen victim” to marriage/kids, and yet somehow being the boss in spite of all this. So on top of everything else she's attracted to things Brandon loathes. And he envies her, as well, quietly: she's a singer, and while no Maria Callas or anything she does a slow, mournful cover of “New York, New York” that harmonizes with the movie's emotional tone and outsider's perspective on New York City quite nicely, as well as evoking the kind of unrehearsed emotional response from another human being that Brandon either can't or doesn't know how to. The end provides a (very) faint glimmer of hope that Brandon at least recognizes the cause of his anhedonia, and that having so recognized he may find some kind of fulfillment. But, again, that's what I read into it. It could have been an affirmation that he's fucking doomed.

As for the fucking, there is a bit. Michael Fassbender's penis makes an early and prominent appearance in the picture, and while big is nonetheless not noteworthy for anything other than being a penis, which about half humanity has. For the most part the sex is shot in a way that highlights the impersonality of the act for Brandon. Either all we can see is a tit or a belly button or the side of a hip or the back of a head or an ass, rather than a whole human being he's connecting to (with the one notable exception of the one encounter when he can't get off; in that instance it's not even necessarily that he can't get it up, because he doesn't really try, it's that he's afraid of what'll happen if he does: I mean, fuck, it could lead to a relationship and an emotional obligation.) Carey Mulligan's much-discussed—and, frankly, rather lovely, despite the awkwardness of the scene—nude scene is shot through a mirror; Sissy, as Brandon's sister, is verboten to him sexually, so there's that added level of remove, but she still does look good naked, so he doesn't leave right away either. It's all a giant goddamn fucking mess.

The movie itself is not. Steve McQueen knows what to do with a camera. On a budget of about $8 mil, he makes New York come alive. The geography makes sense except for when it deliberately doesn't (something only a New Yorker would give a shit about, but take my word for it, it's good.) The acting is all terrific in an ever-so-slightly-heightened naturalistic mode, which is the best thing about the movie as a whole: it's about a guy whose sex life is on a scale few civilians are even capable of contemplating and fucked up in a way that requires a bit of abyss-gazing experience to process without shutting down, and yet it never rings false. The movie is not, as many reviews have said, about sex addiction. Brandon's not an addict. It's not his compulsive pornography and one-night-stand habits that are at the root of his problem, it's that those habits come out of his inability to process anyone else's worth as equaling his. That is his shame: his complete, hermetically-sealed, absorption with self.

Being a picture whose apparent point is to challenge the audience to determine what is actually in the movie and what is their own projection onto it, and being that the notion of reciprocal projection takes a fairly bright synaptic spark to sort out, Shame is not a popcorn picture (Ed. Note: keep in mind, the dude telling you this happily noshes away and periodically goes “Ha ha! Fuck yeah Delphine Seyrig, get it girl” while watching Last Year at Marienbad) but that shouldn't be taken to mean that it's “too difficult” or intimidating or any of that horse pucky. Shame is a challenge, but it's a challenge well worth meeting. The fact that by the end of the movie, I was deeply empathetic toward a rich guy with a big dick who gets laid effortlessly and is a brutal asshole without cause to the one person who loves him should be taken as a sign that this is a very good movie indeed.

Carey Mulligan: the loveliest fifth business in the history of narrative

I DON'T CARRY A GUN....I DRIVE

All right, ladies and gents, time to get down to the serious business of discussing Drive. Its director, Nicolas “The Long And” Winding Refn, won Best Director at Cannes this year, and pretty much ever since every critic who's seen it ends up getting the first sentence of their review—usually “holy shit that was awesome” or some variant—before tipping over due to their massive boner. Now, I'm a skeptical fucker, but I'm also a total sucker for sparse, crisply directed noir-influenced pictures with taciturn heroes and skillfully executed, surprising scenes of violence. So I was torn. This morning, I finally saw Drive after months of anticipation, and am no longer torn. Drive fucking owns, and needs to be seen by absolutely every last sentient being on Planet Earth.

Well, okay, not everyone. People who don't like violence should sit this one out, because there are at least five scenes that would give them nightmares. I totally respect where they come from; my aunt Susie and uncle Mike, for example, totally rule and they're good progressives and all and they love movies, but I couldn't recommend this to them. The ownage scenes in Drive are so intense I cringed. And you had best believe that is a powerful testament to how fucking good said ownage scenes are, because lemme tell ya. I done seen some shit in my day. But I never seen someone get the top of their head turned into a slow-motion brain cloud by a shotgun, or get killed by having someone razor blade the artery in their forearm lengthwise from elbow to wrist, that much I can tell you, and those scenes are not soft-pedaled at all. The more standard people-getting-shot stuff is also done really powerfully, with EXTREMELY loud sound mixing (the sound is fantastic in this). Basically, I'll leave it at this: people who don't like violence are advised to see something else this weekend, but those who do, or even those who are neutral, ya gotta fuckin see this, dude.

Second disclaimer before proceeding further: don't mistake the breathless critical response (including, admittedly, my own) for an implication that Drive is somehow perfect, or the cinematic embodiment of the Christ or any shit like that. It's just a really well-directed and acted noir story with really good action scenes. But, that being said, it's a really, really well-directed and acted noir story with fucking off-the-chain ludicrously dope action scenes. And now, on with the review:

Drive is the story of a movie stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a wheelman for entrepreneurial sorts who need to evade cops. We open with an extremely tense sequence where two knuckleheads knocking off a warehouse somewhere in Los Angeles hire Gosling, and in a display of both top-notch driving and extreme intelligence—the details have to stay vague, but if you pay attention to the sound, the resolution of this sequence is just breathtaking—Gosling pulls it off. Roll opening titles, with dope synth-pop song.

(That's another thing: not only is the soundtrack fucking awesome, it's incredibly of the current cultural moment. You can't swing a stick in 2011 without hitting some group putting records out that sound like the Miami Vice soundtrack. This, in case there is any confusion, is a very very good thing, not in the least because there's no Phil Collins to get all conflicted about “arrrrrgh why the fuck do I like this????” and shit.)

So, Gosling, in spite of being an incredibly buttoned-up and closed-off dude, falls head over heels for next-door-neighbor Carey Mulligan. Which makes perfect sense, if anyone's a Girl Next Door it's Carey Mulligan. She's got a young son who bonds almost instantly with Gosling. She's got a husband in prison. She's got eyes for Gosling.

Gosling works at a garage, for Bryan Cranston (in a terrific performance as the classic noir sad sack wiseass), who has ambitions to start a stock car team with Gosling driving. In order to do so, he needs to borrow some money from the kind of people who it's not good to borrow money from. You know, badass gangsters. Like Ron Perlman; shit, he was Hellboy, he fuckin runs SAMCRO, fer fuck's sake, you don't fuck with Ron Perlman. And Albert Fuckin Brooks, motherfucker, you don't fuck with—wait, Albert Brooks?

Yeah, that Albert Brooks. He plays the more reasonable and personable of the two gangsters (Perlman would be the muscle no matter who the fuck the other dude was, believe), which gives him plenty of opportunity to say funny Albert Brooks-esque stuff. And, I don't want to say too much, but because you will never see it coming in a million fuckin years let it suffice to say Albert Brooks owns a couple of dudes worse than just about anybody has ever owned anyone in any movie. Ever. The fact that it's fucking Albert Brooks doing it makes it all the more awesome. Mark him down for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. In ink. Call it the Christoph Waltz slot.

So, anyway. We know nothing good is going to come of Bryan Cranston getting in bed with Albert Brooks, and that eventually Ryan Gosling is going to end up getting caught up in something. Only thing is, those two end up (kind of) being separate, because before anything else, Gosling has to deal with Carey Mulligan's husband (Oscar Isaac, who by the way is majorly blowing up, he's been in everything the last couple years) getting out of prison. Because he may be out of prison, but he's not free. If ya know what I mean.

I'll leave the plot there, not just because when Christina Hendricks shows up as Oscar Isaac's stripper criminal associate there's a shot of her ass that almost made me lose consciousness, but because that's when things start getting twisty. Also, this is not a movie where the plot is anything revolutionary. All the above description of the narrative is standard-issue noir. Part of the fun in Drive is cataloguing all the “this reminds me of that” moments, which when you look at the list afterward you see some seriously fun shit on the list: Walter Hill's The Driver (from back when he was Walter “Motherfucking” Hill), To Live And Die In L.A. (in a good way), early-mid-80s Michael Mann like Thief and Manhunter (and Miami Vice, with which Michael Mann was closely involved), and, confirmed by the director himself when asked, Steve McQueen's Bullitt.

Of course, it's what he does with those influences that's the important thing. And Drive sees a very skilled director with a terrific eye for detail in full stride. Nicolas Winding Refn tells in a pair of shots what most contemporary directors take twenty-five minutes of endless stupid dialogue scenes to convey. That economy and a terrific, stylish sense of what's cool make Drive one of the best action movies in years, one that puts most contemporary American action movies—besotted with their shakycam and having forsaken choreography for the clusterfuck—to shame.

That might be part of what's caused the ecstatic critical reaction: it's the kind of movie that for some reason doesn't get made as often anymore. While, even in their heyday, low-key noir-ish thrillers weren't often as well-directed as Drive, there nonetheless was a time, twenty-some years ago, stretching back to around the release of Bullitt, when there were enough of them so that when one came out, critics were like, “hey, not a bad little thriller.” Whereas now, with the American action movie going through a prolonged decadent phase, something like Drive drops and people flip the fuck out. Make no mistake: Drive's fucking great and I loved it and even if it had more contemporary action pictures on a similar scale for comparison, it'd still be right up near the top. But part of the reason it seems this good is because circumstances have rendered it almost unique.

Let's not end on a low or even equivocal note, though. Let's end with a parental advisory: Drive is rated R for scenes of intense and fucking awesome ownage, as well as a scene where a bunch of extremely stoic strippers watch Ryan Gosling wreak fucking havoc. It's a movie so fucking good it turned Albert Brooks into a badass (enough of one to almost qualify for the crowded North American group stage of the Badass World Cup, no less). Go see Drive this weekend. Do it for great justice. And also so we can talk about the ownage scenes I can't spoil here, because holy shit do I want to talk about how awesome they are with you.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 4: DARK STAR, AN EDUCATION, & THE INFORMANT!

In this modern age, there's so much to keep track of. I started tweeting (follow me!), there's baseball; and good God have I been getting annihilated at fantasy baseball, this clip is a perfect visual metaphor—

—there are pretty girls to talk to, movies of my own to produce (details forthcoming), theater to see. With all this (and I'm not complaining, except about the fantasy baseball) I've been falling a bit behind on those little red envelopes. These things happen, since even at the best of times the shit on my queue tends to be the kind of thing I've been “meaning to see.” Things I really want to see I see. There isn't all this fucking hesitation that crops up when I'm watching an Oscar also-ran, or something I saw when I was high years and years ago, or some overtly “experimental” picture by a talented yet mercurial and aloof auteur.

But there comes a time when even the most neurotic among us have to man up and deal with our eclectic taste in cinema and get those fuckin' Netflix sent back. Because erudite, profane crankiness loves company, I share the experience with you:


Dark Star (1974) dir. John Carpenter

I saw this years and years ago and remembered it as being goofy and fun. Upon rewatching, it was goofy and confusing. While there are some priceless bits—the 2001-satirizing existentialist conversations trying to convince the cheerful bomb not to blow up, the beach ball alien, having the crew of the spaceship being a bunch of devil-may-care bearded longhairs—trying to listen to the poorly-recorded sound to follow what was going on gave me a headache, so I ended up self-medicating and getting nicely buzzed (strictly legal!) for about the second half of the movie, improving the experience greatly.

This leads to a very important point, that I would like to make as a Movies By Bowes ™ public service announcement: only watch Dark Star if you're high. It thus joins the following restricted list (as in, blaze first at all costs):

Head
Buckaroo Banzai
The Room
Barbarella
Roland Emmerich's entire career (Expert Level)


An Education (2009) dir. Lone Scherfig

Watching this basically on a double feature with Dark Star was an interesting experience, and probably made me like this a whole lot more in a weird way. An Education tells the story of Jenny Millar (Carey Mulligan) a smart, intellectually and culturally ambitious 16 year old in early 60s England who's being pressured by her dad (Alfred Molina) to ascetically pursue her studies so as to get into Oxford.

Jenny meets an extremely charming older man (Peter Sarsgaard, not only rockin a top-notch Brit accent but appearing heterosexual, impressively) who soon sweeps her off her feet and introduces her to a world of parties, and concerts, and cocktails, weekend trips to Oxford and Paris . . . and no small amount of shadiness and criminality. Peter Sarsgaard and Dominic Cooper are sort of like the Kray twins as co-written by Scott Fitzgerald and Christopher Isherwood, so they're not dangerous or anything, but Jenny still doesn't entirely approve.

Impressively (and kind of implausibly), Peter Sarsgaard also seduces Jenny's parents (not in the biblical sense, but in a “wow, our daughter's older boyfriend is awesome!” kind of way), to the point where when Jenny finds out Peter Sarsgaard is married, Alfred Molina is just as brokenhearted as she is.

Over the course of Jenny's seduction, she's drifted from her academic ambitions, growing to see devoted, severe teacher Olivia Williams (whose character I want to drink tea and hold hands with) as dead inside and headmistress Emma Thompson (who is fucking hilarious in this) as a fascistic twat. But, after she splits with Peter Sarsgaard—having dropped out of school before taking her A-levels—Jenny tries to get back on the plan, only to have Emma Thompson tell her no, and it takes Olivia Williams getting excited in an extremely British way (oh, Olivia Williams, I want to quote Coleridge to you . . . ) about getting Jenny back on the path to see that Jenny gets the titular schooling, on the literal level.

But, “an education” works on a secondary level too, to wit the kind of knowledge and life's wisdom one can't glean from books. Losing your virginity in an anticlimactic way. Learning that glamorous people are often shallow. Learning that many art collectors are in it for art's value as a commodity rather than the love. Learning that when you're a kid you should be a kid (and, in Jenny's case, appreciate the awkward boy who worships her more) rather than aspiring to be an adult (and have Rosamund Pike get excited on your behalf that you don't have to read books anymore now that you've dropped out of school).

An Education is an example of the kind of movie that's completely insufferable when Americans try it but for some reason the Brits hit all the notes just right, and although it's totally formulaic it still manages to involve the audience emotionally. Part of that, in this movie's case, is that Carey Mulligan is so unbelievably good as Jenny. Apparently she never acted before, which is astounding, and makes An Education a companion piece to Billy Elliott, which although a much better movie, also starred a novice in the lead, and is also one of those paint-by-numbers Rembrandts the Brits crank out once or twice a year.

Hopefully, Oliver Stone doesn't torpedo Carey Mulligan's career with Wall Street 2: Are You Fucking Kidding Me, because wow.


Oh, and on a random note, fuck Nick Hornby. YOU KNOW WHY, NICK.


The Informant! (2009) dir. Steven Soderbergh

“Four guys in suits meeting in the middle of the day? That's not a business meeting, it's a crime scene!”

—Tony “Buster Bluth” Hale

And, rounding out our trilogy of the long unwatched, we have evil white guys in suits! Hell yeah. Directed by Steven Soderbergh in full-on ironic detachment mode! Ah, shit, Steve, do you have to . . .?

Ol' Steve's a tough nut to crack. After he dropped the one-two blockbuster combo of Erin Brockovich and Traffic, he's spent the last decade alternating between Ocean's movies and seemingly deliberately off-putting experimental pictures. Some of them, like Bubble, work (because, amateur cast aside, Steve kept it simple and told a fucking story). Some of them, like The Good German, are hideous. Others, like The Girlfriend Experience, are total head-scratchers (making a movie starring Sasha Grey without any sex in it is kind of like putting Arnold in a Woody Allen movie).

The Informant! actually didn't need a ton of help from Soderbergh to be weird. The guy Matt Damon plays in it, Mark Whitacre, is fucking crazy. He spent years lying to the FBI, taping people, trying to hide his own embezzlement by ratting out his bosses, watching Tom Cruise movies, hiring and firing lawyers, and ending up getting tossed in jail for three times as long as his evil white guy bosses.

Matty Dames lets it fly as Whitacre. His narration goes way past “unreliable narrator” into a whole new category; Matty spends the whole fucking picture yammering at us about Japanese perverts, The Firm, and fictional-sounding exploits while driving the FBI's blood pressure into the 200/160 range and amusing the living shit out of his bosses.

It's a fairly interesting story, but does kind of drag a bit. The whole “corporate shenanigans as comedy” schtick was done a lot better in Barbarians at the Gate, because Steve kind of overdoes it with the jokey-jokes (just about everybody in the supporting cast is a stand-up comedian) and the Marvin Hamlisch music and the 70s-textured images—even though the movie took place in the 90s—and all.

One stroke of absolute genius, though, was casting Clancy Brown as Matty's evil white guy boss' lawyer. Clancy Brown walks into boardroom. Commands respect. Tells you what the fuck is up. Leaves. Possibility for resistance: nil. It's Clancy Brown. Now that he has white hair, he can be the lawyer, where when he was younger he was the guy with the gun, but it's good to see that badass is a growth industry.

Scott Bakula and Joel McHale are both really good as the Feds Matty Dames drives nuts, even if they don't get much to do other than reaction shots like “is this motherfucker serious?” about the increasingly bizarre shit Matty pulls on them. And the woman who played Clooney's sister in Up in the Air is really good as Matty's wife.


You know, as insignificant a thing as it actually is, there really is a sense of accomplishment about finally getting through those damn Netflix that have been sitting around since May. It'd be so much easier to sit around watching movies by myself if I didn't lead such an interesting life . . . grumble grumble . . .