The last couple/few years have seen an atypically high number of awesome thrillers coming out of France. Maybe it's just that I've seen all of them and it isn't actually all that atypical, but Tell No One was great, Point Blank was awesome (unpopular opinion alert: it was better than the John Boorman picture), and now there's Sleepless Night (original title: Nuit Blanche) which is both everything that you'd ever hope to want from a cop/gangster picture and yet one that almost seems like it was made by someone who'd never seen one before. In the best possible way.
Sleepless Night unfolds in a way that renders assumptions about what kind of picture it is and who its characters are absolutely worthless. Apparent stick-up artists turn out to be cops. Friends are covert enemies. Gangsters feel remorse about the dirt they do. People hide in plain sight. Brilliant plans go awry. Utterly fucking ridiculous extemporizing actually works. Pretty early on, you realize the only thing to do is just sit back and bask. Well, if the way you “sit back” is on the edge of your seat chewing your knuckle to keep from shattering glass with high-pitched “what the fuck . . .?”s. Because while it may not follow conventional diagrammatic thriller beats, this shit is fucking intense, dude.
For such a complex and nuanced movie, the basic premise is quite simple: Vincent (Tomer Sisley) and Manu (Laurent Stocker) pull a rip and run on a couple coke dealers, one of whom gets got, the other of whom gets away. Vincent catches one in the crossfire, but tis but a flesh wound and in any case they get the coke. It then transpires that Vincent and Lauren are cops, with an eye out for a mean-as-a-snake Internal Affairs bull (Julien Boisselier, at times bearing an eerie physical and vocal resemblance to Aiden Gillen). Vincent's son (Samy Seghir, who gives an excellent kid performance) busts his balls because all his police work has him a bit distant and mercurial. Vincent barely has time to reflect on how just the ball-busting is before the gangster whose coke he and Manu ripped kidnaps the kid and holds him in his massive demimonde multiplex (I mean, shit, there's a disco, a bar, a restaurant, a pool hall, and a whorehouse all in separate parts of the building under the same roof; if the place wasn't crawling with angry French people with guns I'd totally fucking hang out there). Vincent's task? Bring the coke, trade it for the kid. If you put twenty euros on “there's no way it's that simple” then you backed the winning horse.
Almost the entire movie takes place in that massive club, and after a while, Vincent gets a real feel for the place. In one of my favorite ongoing plotlines, he becomes kind of weirdly friendly with the kitchen workers, even though he never says much of anything to them that isn't yelling or cursing. But there's a bond that forms when you corner a man and demand in Franglais that he help you fill up a couple dozen plastic bags with flour to pass it off as temporarily missing cocaine. I like to think all the kitchen staff looked at Vincent as he had them do that and went, “Wow, that guy's fucking awesome.” And so when he stops back in they're almost like, “Hey, it's that awesome guy again.”
I wouldn't dream of revealing how all this shakes out. The hour-forty one spends with Sleepless Night is a mesmerizing, dream-like time. Director Frederic Jardin is the truth. The action is absolutely top echelon, with copious, brutal, relatively naturalistic ownage abound. The acting's great. The camerawork is killer. It's cut almost perfectly. Actually, there's only one thing wrong with the movie, and it's not anything cinematic. There's one scene where an ostensible good guy goes a little far in getting information out of a woman who's a lot smaller than him, and not one of the bad guys. Granted, the guy in question was under a bit of stress, and to the best of his knowledge the woman in question was working against him, but there was a moment there where it was a little uncomfortable. No “yeah, but” with that either, it's a definite debit.
That said, it's just about the movie's only one. Sleepless Night's highs rank with the best action cinema's seen. Almost the entire picture is a high. Oh man oh man this fucking movie is good. It's an absolute must-see for anyone who likes cop movies, gangster movies, action movies, and who likes it when all the above keep it fucking French. I know it's not just me, y'all.
Oh, I bet you all thought these were over and done with and I'd just flaked. Au contraire, homes, we just gettin started. And now we get to the Big Three in terms of cinema: North America (where my sweet home Estados Unidos is), Asia, and today, Europe. This is not to slight Africa, Central/South America, or Australia, they just don't have as vast and well-funded national film industries as the Big Three. And of course, simple math dictates, more cinema, more potential ownage.
Europe is where cinema goes back the longest, too (fuck you, Edison, I'm Team Lumiere). The Czech Republic (and Slovakia, too, I guess, back when they used to be smushed together as Czechoslovakia) and Poland have produced some great pictures, Spain, Germany, Russia, Italy, France, and England a whole fucking lot of 'em. Some of the greatest directors to ever call action—in whatever language—are European, as are some of the greatest actors. It would stand to reason, by this rationale, that the problem in determining who reps Europe in the Badass World Cup should be sifting through all those badass performances. Right?
Actually, surprisingly, no. European cinema suffers from the same problem as South America and Africa do, on a much larger scale: their art cinema is fucking top-notch, but the ownage content of their shamelessly populist stuff is, percentage-wise, a bit low. The one notable exception to this, historically, has been France, because French people have historically had this massive crush on American B-movies, starting from Truffaut and Godard trying to intellectually justify geeking out like little kids over Don Siegel movies where dudes own other dudes with shotguns, on down to the present day of Luc Besson's EuropaCorp, an institution with the highest respect for le cinema d'ownage.
Despite these most valiant efforts by the French, European cinema remains largely a place where people get their asses handed to them by historical forces, fate, and totalitarian governments, rather than one large man with muscles and/or guns. This makes European movies great to drink a glass of wine to, no question, and that's important. We need movies where people grimly contemplate existence, or have secret affairs wherein their long-repressed passions take flight, or where we just sit there for three hours digging how pretty the Alps or the Riviera or the steppes are. Well, maybe we can trim that last kind, but you know what I'm saying. Ownage isn't the only game in town.
However, it is the subject of this competition. So, without any further ado, the also-rans:
6—Count Orlok, Nosferatu, Transylvania
Remember back when vampires weren't pretty hairless twinks who sparkled in the sunlight? Well this motherfucker right here is fucking old school. Max Schreck was a perfectly normal-looking old German dude, but he got in the room with F.W. Murnau, one of the earliest great duckfuckingly insane auteur filmmakers—and I say this with great reverence, F.W. Murnau was fucking crazy—and suddenly it's all like “get in this makeup, Schreck, we gotta make your ass look fuckin disgusting.” Oh man did it work, too. Nosferatu fucking owns if you can get a half-decent print (a big if these days, sadly, mostly due to Bram Stoker suing the shit out of Murnau for copyright infringement because Murnau decided to just steal the shit out of Dracula instead of paying for it). And Count Orlok is one of the all-time great baddies. He loses out in the Cup largely because a) he's a bad guy and b) he dies. Way to waste your immortality, fucko.
5—Vakulinchuk, Potemkin, USSR.
Vakulinchuk (left), some other dude with a dope mustache (right)
Because we need to shout the Russians out when we're talking about cinema. The great thing about Russians, if I may be permitted a little racism leeway to pay the cats a compliment, is their grim determination to soldier on with unglamorous shit. Thus, in the early years of cinema when everyone was figuring out the best ways to light chicks to make them look hot and messing around with visuals, the Russians were like, “fuck it, we're gonna invent editing.” Everyone else, taken aback, was like “okay, you guys do that, we're going to see if Gloria Swanson will show her tits.” (Ed. Note: the one or two women directors in the world were probably figuring out how to light Douglas Fairbanks' package, for a note of equality). But in '25, Sergei Eisenstein dropped Potemkin and everyone else ever since has been cutting based on the way he showed them how.
Now, the important thing to note with this entry is that the fact that one character stood out in Potemkin is a sign that Sergei Eisenstein fucked up. He was trying, and employing every last theoretical and technical bit of genius in his arsenal, to make a film glorifying the Soviet ideal, wherein each was part of an all rather than a unit on their own. Only problem is, he was such a good filmmaker that in the second episode in Potemkin, he ends up revealing how much the sailor leading the mutiny, Vakulinchuk, fucking owns.
The great thing about Vakulinchuk is that he doesn't spout all kinds of incongruous, fully-articulated Marx (like any number of dudes in Soviet movies), he's just like, “Fuck it, this shit's not right. These dudes running shit are assholes. Let's fucking get rid of them, even if it means our lives.” And Vakulinchuk lets himself get owned in the interest of the greater socialist struggle etc etc etc, leading inexorably to the Leninist revolution, but let's not let the fact that it ended up being for a questionable cause count too much against Vakulinchuk. The fucking guy is really cool, and we need to remember he was non-ideological, he was just engaged in a very simple struggle of “These guys are assholes, I'm not, so I'm going to stop them.” I always award style points for fighting the good fight. If this was college basketball, Vakulinchuk would be that one tiny-ass school with no guys who'll ever play in the NBA but who somehow make it to the quarterfinals every year. He doesn't win, but he endures his defeat with dignity and you'll be like “Hey, remember Vakulinchuk?” for a long time afterwards.
4—Michel, A bout de souffle, France
Okay, now we get to a more conventional portrayal of conventional ownage. You can't be talking about ownage in Europe without talking about Jean-Paul Belmondo, one of the great purveyors of same to ever breathe. Even if, in this, he's out of breath! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! (Ed. Note: fuck y'all, that was funny)
Michel owns a cop, fucks Jean Seberg, smokes a lot of cigarettes, does that awesome lip thing, and when he walks by the Bogart poster, he adjusts his shit to make sure his swag is tight. He's Jean-Paul Belfuckingmondo, people. There really ain't much more to say about the cat other than that he owns in just about the Frenchest way possible, which is ultimately why he's not repping Europe, because owning Frenchly means you get killed in the end, and although he dies one of the dopest deaths anyone ever pointed a camera at, still. Death is a bad move if you want to advance.
3—Bryan Mills, Taken, Ireland
Sure, they say he's American, but Liam Neeson was too busy killing the shit out of everything in sight to meet up with the dialect coach, which is why he gets to fly the green, white, and orange in this Cup. I needn't rehash all the reasons laid out in this post, so refer to that in case you somehow forgot how goddamn great Taken is, and how much ass Liam Neeson kicks in it.
So, you may be asking, why is he not the guy for all of Europe? Because the top two also-rans and the champion are just that fucking cool. So prepare to get your socks knocked off.
2—Jacques Mesrine (“C'est prononcé 'MAY-REEN' vous enculés!”), Mesrine, France
Ah, Vincent Cassel. He fucks shit up in just about everything he's ever been in, playing villains and heroes with equal skill, though he takes particular relish in being bad. Which is probably why he's so spectacular as Mesrine. It took two movies and four hours that were basically just an episodic account of thunderously badass (if occasionally embroidered) deeds, to tell Mesrine's story. Not all of it is pretty—him being a shitbag woman-beater is his eventual undoing in the Cup—but the number of times and ways the motherfucker broke out of prison, it's like he's a French version of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park.
He's more badass in the first part of Mesrine, “Killer Instinct,” than in the second, “Public Enemy No. 1,” but that's largely due to the director having to—I guess—return his tripod to the shop after filming the first part, because there's too much bullshit shaky-cam shit in part two, which suffers from being both more of the same from part one but being darker, since it's when Mesrine confronts his own mortality and decides he wants to be a leftist. Which is fine, I mean heaven knows we could use an actual Left in America, but when you're some dude who robs banks with his dick out and beats his wives, you might want to chill with the insurrectionary rhetoric. Sometimes you're not a resistance fighter, sometimes you just steal shit. And as the cops reminded Mesrine at the end of the picture, by lighting his ass the fuck up in broad daylight, they were in charge.
All that negativity should serve to point up the fact that the fucking prison break near the end of part one must have been tight as fuck (Ed. Note: the fucking prison break near the end of part one was tight as fuck) because that alone vaults him this high in the rankings. Also, he's Vincent Cassel. I like Vincent Cassel.
1—James Bond, various, United Kingdom
The odds-on favorite to win worldwide, 007's shocking upset in the Europe group stage set the cinematic sporting press aflutter, with many hailing this as the most surprising defeat in the history of sport. Or, you know, it would be if this was a real thing.
Whence 007's defeat? Playing him made Sean Connery a star, for which we should all be grateful, made Pierce Brosnan a star, for which we should all be . . . well, not as grateful. And it gave us Daniel Craig, and Daniel Craig fucking rocks. It's not his fault Cowboys & Aliens sucked balls, and that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is probably going to be gloomy whack-off-in-your-hat bullshit despite his and David Fincher's best efforts. But James Bond never has that problem, right? He's always awesome, consistently shaken-not-stirred, always wins in the end, always gets the finest specimens womanhood has to offer . . . right?
Alas, even James Bond has his Achilles heel. In this case, it's the Roger Moore/Timothy Dalton years, which collectively consist of almost half the franchise's duration. During those years, Bond was a fucking dick (the Moore years) and a pussy (the Dalton years), the Bond girls were bland, and Bond was a fucking asshole to them. Let's break it down:
Connery—old-country chauvinist, but only hit women when they tried to kill him. Lazenby—goofball, kind of the Ringo of the Bond franchise, but props for landing Diana Rigg. Brosnan—charming cocksman, more of an ex-boyfriend than anything else. Craig—tortured romantic, comparatively progressive though still quite the horndog. Dalton—eunuch Moore—psychopathic misogynist
It'd be one thing if it were possible to go strictly by the character and toss the actors out of the equation, but the character of Bond changed inexorably with every actor who played him. The Connery Bond owns all in his path, and if the franchise had ended with Connery we wouldn't even need a Cup. The Craig Bond isn't as sure a bet, since he's only done two, and the Quantum of Soporifics sucked, but Casino Royale is, no exaggeration, one of the best action pictures ever made and stands side by side with the best of the Connery years. Brosnan coasted on the fact that at least he wasn't Roger Moore. But goddamn. The Roger Moore years were really, really bad. Bad enough to be the stumbling block for James Bond's quest for the Cup. (By the way, I know I kid around a lot on this blog, but I'm dead serious about this: if you cross swords with me on the Roger Moore question, we are at war). This is basically the equivalent of a soccer player losing the game by scoring five own-goals, on purpose, to lose the game 5-4. For the non-soccer fans out there, doing that will get you killed in every country on earth other than the United States. Fucking Roger Moore . . .
(Ed. Note: Apparently he's a sweetheart IRL, so there's that. But holy Christ his Bond movies suck.)
And, finally, our surprising winner, the Cinderella of the Cup so far . . .
Moses, Attack The Block, United Kingdom
Since on the surface this looks like a case of something I saw recently seeming better because I just saw it, let's look at the objective merits of both this character and the movie itself. First, there aren't a lot of good SF movies in Europe, though “good” is a hard quality to pin down when dealing with some of the fucking insanely bad but extremely fun SF pictures made in Italy (side note, if Italian Spiderman was real, he'd have been #1 on this list no question.) Second, even in the handful of good SF movies in Europe (can anyone think of another one besides Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker, or maaaaaybe von Trier's The Element of Crime . . .?) there aren't a whole lot of own-or-get-owned showdowns with vicious carnivorous aliens. Third, even if Moses didn't own the bejesus out of an entire battalion of vicious carnivorous aliens single-handed, there's the added bonus of the fact that a black guy representing Europe will make racists' heads explode.
The thing that makes Moses so great is that he starts out at a place where he could very easily slip into a life defined by anger at his circumstances, taking his revenge on society at large until he got so deep in the game that there would be no way out except death. But Attack The Block catches him right at the brink, where his intelligence and ferocious tenacity can be channeled into the cause of saving Earth. Because, seriously? Those wolf-gorilla motherfucker aliens could have posed a threat to the entire planet. It's Moses, Pest, Sam, Ron, the hipster stoner dude, the girls, and the rest of them whose resolute defiance stops the thread from spreading, and Moses who stands out from the pack by being the one who lures the wolf-gorilla motherfuckers to their ultimate doom.
Look, what I'm trying to say is that the second Attack The Block hits DVD and groups of friends can smoke weed to it, it is going to take on once-in-a-generation classic status. Remember how The Big Lebowski tanked at the box office and became a cult hit on home video? Or Fight Club? Chances are, you barely do, because those pictures are regarded as two of the finest of their decade, and endure as classics to this day. I'm saying this right now and posting it online where everyone can see it, so if I'm wrong you all can laugh at me, but I'm not wrong. Attack The Block is going to be regarded as one of the classic movies of this generation the second people can smoke weed to it. I haven't smoked weed in well over a year and probably won't again for well over another, if ever, but I remember it (reasonably) accurately. And I remember this: people like SF when they're high, they like horror when they're high, and they like comedy when they're high, and Attack The Block is an unstoppable and seamless blend of all three. One of the biggest reasons why is because of its hero. And that's why Moses reps Europe.
Commentator: “Moses, how do you feel about representing Europe in the Cup?” Moses (not making eye contact, smiling shyly): “Allow it.”
French people are fucking awesome. That's totally an uninterrupted 8 minute and 40 second take of a French person driving dick-swingingly fast at dawn in Paris with a fucking camera mounted on the bumper. Could there be anything better for my 200th post? No. Not in this universe.
And, it also serves as a preview of my Fast and the Furious post, which you can expect sometime in the next couple days after I see Fast Five. Until then, bask in the existentialist glory that is this clip. Check the director credit at the end, by the way. If you say "holy shit!" we're totally best friends.
“You know something, Utivich? I think this just might be my masterpiece.” —Brad Pitt, ruling the universe, Inglourious Basterds
And so we come to the end of this series of essays on Quentin Tarantino, and to the picture that, in a lot of ways, just might be his masterpiece. The fact that there's some dispute about what his masterpiece is goes a long way to testifying to the strength of Quentin's body of work, as he defined an entire decade with Pulp Fiction, and a surprisingly high number of people (it's not just me) would argue long and hard for Jackie Brown as his best movie. An equally strong argument could be made for either, based on each picture's own merits. But in terms of Quentin's own style, preoccupations, and in terms of the historical and philosophical significance of the subject matter, Inglourious Basterds is a strong candidate.
It's a picture that's clearly very important to Quentin; he started working on it after finishing Jackie Brown, and spent nearly a decade and a half getting it exactly right, through Kill Bill and Grindhouse and all manner of other side projects (appearing on Alias, directing episodes of CSI and other television shows). A few months before its release I had the opportunity to read the script, and holy shit was it good. It reaffirmed everything I'd always loved about Quentin—the encyclopedic knowledge of movies, the peerless ability to take elements from other movies and make his own from them (again, for the nine millionth time, I respect skilled pasticheurs as artists), and his innate sense of what makes a fun fucking movie—and gave me new respect for his sense of history and what's right.
Obviously, Inglourious Basterds does not follow the established historical record. Hitler and his high command were not machine-gunned by the director of Hostel in a burning movie theater in 1944 in real life. Quentin, though, poses a great rhetorical question: “Wouldn't it be cool if they were?” And I submit that this is an important statement on the study of history. Things happen the way they do, and we are rarely afforded truly cathartic closure; this is why esprit de l'escalier is such a wistful and occasionally sad state of being. Quentin, being an autodidact, is free of a lot of the burdens of academia; in the case of Inglorious Basterds, the burden of “but things didn't happen that way” is refreshingly absent. Quentin's like, “I don't give a fuck if things didn't happen that way. I'm making a movie.”
This is what Quentin does. He makes movies. Because he loves them with an intense ferocity. He loves everything about them, from the stories, to the actors who play out those stories, to the writers and directors who construct them, to the craftsmen who make them look and sound the way they do, to the experience of seeing the completed movie in the theater, to the physical medium—film—that they're recorded on. Because his life experience is given over to such a large degree to watching movies, Quentin's movies are about movies. They radiate his personality, they pulse with his passionate love for what he does. His great saving grace is the one thing overly sensitive politically correct eggheads constantly rag on him for: he is not an educated sophisticate. If Quentin was an intellectual, his movies would not be what they are, which is beautiful, vibrantly alive cinema. A movie about movies made by an intellectual overthinking everything would be like going to school. And, lest we forget, above all else cinema is a medium of entertainment.
And so one of the greatest things about Inglourious Basterds is that Quentin doesn't feel beholden to anyone or anything but his own sense of what's awesome, certainly not historical accuracy. The opening sequence of shots following the title card “Chapter One: Once upon a time . . . in Nazi-occupied France,” like the title card implies, are reminiscent of a spaghetti Western, as is the Ennio Morricone music. Although other genres and forms get a tip of the hat from Quentin (he wouldn't be Quentin if he wasn't enthusiastically showing love to four or five different things at once), the spaghetti Western is the baseline for the rest of the picture, at the very least because spaghetti Westerns never gave a fuck about history, they gave a fuck about being cool. Which is, for lack of any other appropriate term, cool.
That opening scene also has one of the greatest excuses for switching from foreign language/subtitles to good old-fashioned Anglais yet devised in American movies, rivaling the switch at the beginning of The Hunt For Red October. What makes the one in Inglourious Basterds so great is that it's an essential part of SS Colonel Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa's plan to get the poor dairy farmer to reveal the location of the Jews underneath his floor without tipping said Jews off that they'd been discovered. It's a brilliant trick, and Quentin sure gives him some great text, but Christoph Waltz swaggered into this fucking movie and was like, “Guten tag, bitches, I'm a superstar now.” He is so good in this it's staggering. Quentin had worried that the part wasn't castable, but fortunately for him and all of us he found Christoph Waltz because wow.
After his thugs machine-gun the floor, only one of the family survives, daughter Shoshana. Christoph Waltz lets her go for reasons that seem vague at first, but remembering this bit at the end makes one wonder about the motivations of the incredibly complex Col. Landa. Once this opening scene concludes, establishing this recognizable but still alternative history, we introduce our title characters, the Basterds.
The idea that some military guy would sign off on the idea of assembling a crack all-Jewish unit and saying “Go fuck shit up” is simply YES. This is why no elitist assholes or limpdick sensitive people should ever, ever criticize Quentin. I mean, look. Both my grandfathers were part of the war effort in WWII: one flew in bomber crews, and the other (a German-speaking scientist) translated German scientific documents for military intelligence. The former was scarred forever and the latter said if he'd been assigned to a combat unit he'd have turned his rifle on himself rather than shoot another human being. That's reality, and it's kind of depressing. War is a depressing, ambiguous business. Some would say that by making the objective as clear and simple as Quentin does is a distorted, sophomoric view of the true nature of war. I think that view is itself distorted and overly simplistic: I say Quentin knows how fucked up real war actually is, but that he's making a movie, not a documentary. In a movie, getting a bunch of Jews together and having them go epically fuck shit up is a much more satisfying premise than doing one of those depressing twelve-part documentaries that makes you hate people. The fact that, after seeing Inglourious Basterds, my Jewish friends were all walking around hollering “THE BEAR JEW!!!!” is proof that Quentin was on to something.
Eli Roth, as the Bear Jew, doesn't really have to do much. He's the Bear Jew. He will fuck you the fuck up. He takes his proud place in the All-Star team of motherfuckers who will simply end you:
The Bear Jew John Locke Arnold Danny Trejo Helen Mirren in Red.
(Ed. Note: this list is not subject to debate.)
The Basterds' commanding officer, Aldo Raine (nice reference by Mr. QT), is a talkative dude from Tennessee without a ton of formal education who is nonetheless really fucking smart, has a way with words, and is a swaggering god. Wait, you in the back, did you just say “author surrogate”? You may be onto something. Casting Brad Pitt supports that case nicely (also note how far out Brad sticks his chin. Just saying). Bear in mind, calling Brad Pitt an author surrogate isn't a criticism. It's a sign that Quentin has a sense of humor about himself while also having perspective on how cool he is; false modesty would be hideously disingenuous considering Quentin's body of work. And goddamn Brad Pitt is fun in this movie. For his whole career, I've always respected the unpretentious quality control he's maintained. He knows movies are supposed to be fun, has no illusions about himself as a serious artist, but nonetheless refuses to do anything too stupid. Here, Quentin wisely doesn't try to convince us that this guy who scalps people and carves swastikas into people's foreheads isn't crazy. Because he is crazy. Fortunately “crazy” and “awesome” aren't mutually exclusive terms, and anyway, you want your military guys to kick ass, that's their job.
The third chapter reintroduces us to Shoshana three years later. She's now running a movie theater in Paris, and catches the eye of “the German Audie Murphy,” who seems fairly nice and humble considering that he's an enormous movie star in Germany due to his having killed a couple hundred people all by himself. He is, however, annoyingly persistent; one of those guys who thinks “eat shit and die” is flirting.
You can't blame him for flipping out over Shoshana, though. Not only is she gorgeous, smart, and resourceful—she got all the way from cow country to Paris and not only survived but kind of thrived—she loves movies. Melanie Laurent is absolutely terrific in this role. It'd be easy, in the wrong hands, for Shoshana to be annoying, since all she does for most of the movie is tell a guy to fuck off (however justified it might be, in non-talented hands that can get monotonous). But one moment sums up perfectly how good Melanie Laurent is: when German Audie Murphy gets the premiere of his new picture moved to her movie theater by Goebbels fiat, Christoph Waltz pops in for a chat, since he's running security. Melanie Laurent looks like she's just blankly maintaining for the whole scene where he's subtly implying that he knows who she is just to kind of recreationally scare the shit out of her, but if you look really close you see she's practically vibrating with fear and rage. The second he leaves, when she releases, she just fucking loses it; that's one of the best played scenes I've seen in a longlong time.
In Chapter Four, another character cool enough to be the lead is introduced: Michael Fassbender as Archie Hickox. Look, any film critic turned soldier with a plummy British accent is going to make me a little weak in the knees, but Michael Fassbender imbues the role with just the right kind of Brit swagger, a very different thing indeed from American swagger. The fact that he gets his orders—meet up with a German double agent movie star and the Basterds and go kill the German high command at Shoshana's movie theater—from Mike Myers and Rod Taylor playing Winston Churchill is a particular treat (Ed. Note: the fact that Mike Myers didn't make me want to kill everything in sight is a testament to Quentin's ability to direct actors).
The meeting with the movie star and Basterds is doomed from the outset. It's in the basement of a tavern in the middle of nowhere. Brad wisely points out “Fightin' in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you'refightin' in a basement.” Not only that, but when Michael Fassbender rolls in with the two German-speaking Basterds in their fake Nazi uniforms, they find a tavern full of German soldiers celebrating one of their wives having a son back home. The movie star (Diane Kruger) tells them it'll look weird if they leave before having a drink, so they have a drink. The new father wanders drunkenly over and asks for an autograph. Fassbender tells him, in very Brit-accented German, to hit the bricks, but the guy's so drunk that instead of doing so, he tells Fassbender his accent is weird. There's a kerfuffle that's immediately shut down by August Diehl, officer of the Gestapo.
In a movie with so many awesome actors, the way August Diehl just decides, on a dime, “I'm going to own the room” and does is particularly impressive. He sits down and starts talking to Fassbender and retinue, waiting patiently for them to fuck up, in one of the best dialogue scenes Quentin (and, considering how good Quentin is at dialogue, anyone else) has ever written. Eventually, Fassbender fucks up and reveals himself as a non-German (by signaling for three drinks the wrong way) and le jeux son motherfuckin fait.
“Well, if this is it, old boy, I hope you don't mind if I go out speaking the Kings.” —Michael Fassbender, man of style.
The guns go off and everyone except Diane Kruger auf wiedersehens off this mortal coil. Short two Basterds (and the only ones who speak German) and their inside man, Brad has to come up with a new plan, which is that he, the Bear Jew, and Omar are going to pose as Italians—since Diane Kruger assures them Germans have no ear for Italian—and hope for the best.
For the big night of the premiere, where the Basterds' plot is competing with Melanie Laurent's plot to use the hundreds of nitrate films in the theater as a makeshift bomb—the idea to literally use the power of movies to defeat evil gives me an erection, I'm sorry, I know I'm weird, that idea is just sexy—Quentin is faced with a dilemma. How to properly convey the gravity of the situation? A music cue? Okay, good idea, Quentin. You've displayed excellent use of Ennio Morricone music so far, which reinforces the whole spaghetti Western influences, and besides, it's Ennio fuckin Morricone, who rules on general principle. But still, this is where all the disparate plot threads of the movie are converging for the thrilling, action-packed climax. We need something more. And oh boy does Quentin come up with the perfect way to set the tone:
David Bowie.
Oh, Quentin, if you weren't just that slightest bit homophobic I'd kiss you for that choice. Not only does he use a Bowie song, not only does he use a Bowie song from his thousand-dollar-suit “yes that's right you'll never be this cool, now pardon me, my Somali wife wants to have the best sex that ever existed” phase, Quentin uses “Cat People,” which has the line “putting out the fire with gasoline,” which is exactly what the fuck's about to happen.
So tension builds. Diane Kruger and her fugazy Italian Basterd cohorts run across Christoph Waltz, who of course speaks perfect Italian (and by the way, the way he loses his shit laughing when she gives her bullshit story about why her leg is in a cast—since she can't fess up to having been shot—is both hilarious and terrifying), but he lets them go. Hmm. Tension mounts, and Christoph Waltz abruptly and brutally kills the shit out of Diane Kruger. German Audie Murphy stops being so nice, and Melanie Laurent shoots him (the gunshots in the movie mask hers) but he doesn't die immediately, and shoots her.
Still, Melanie Laurent's boyfriend/projectionist sets fire to all the film, and the Bear Jew and Omar take advantage of the chaos to blaze into Hitler's box and the Bear Jew shoots Hitler about 25 million fucking times (and boy is that is a satisfying shot). They all burn with the theater and everyone else in it, but hey. No more German high command. The war's over.
It turns out that this was all part of Christoph Waltz's plan. Sensing that the Allies were eventually going to win the war, he seized on the first opportunity to defect and get a full pardon and retconned OSS file saying all his work as The Jew Hunter was to establish his cover as an American agent. Brad and BJ Novak (the only surviving Basterds) just nod like, sure, we'll go along with it, sure, no prob dude. They put Christoph Waltz in touch with a guy who sounds suspiciously like Harvey Keitel (because he is), who says, sure, herr Colonel, your terms are acceptable, head out to the border and surrender yourself into Brad's custody as a formality. Christoph Waltz is bouncing up and down giddy, and it never occurs to him that Brad's going to shoot his dude and carve a swastika into his—Waltz's—forehead. But that's exactly what Brad does, and then the last shot is Brad looking into the camera going “this just might be my masterpiece.” Remembering all that earlier about author surrogates and so forth, the proper response is, yes, Quentin, this just might be.
Quentin's ability to decide “I'm going to create iconic movie moments and characters” and then do it, without fail, in every single one of his pictures boggles my mind. Every single other person ever, trying too hard is a recipe for failure. But Quentin doesn't even have to try. He comes up with a character that he thinks is awesome, demonstrates that they in fact are, et voila. And holy shit, his ability to dig up some obscure actor and turn them into a demigod . . . Quentin, forget any of the snarky shit I ever said about you, sir. Much respect.
If it hadn't been for Inglourious Basterds, I probably never would have written about Quentin. The fact that after all the highs and lows and pictures I didn't like, he managed to drop a picture as staggeringly fucking brilliant as Inglourious Basterds is what made me able to write as much about Quentin as he has meant to me over the years. I also could not have done this if the story didn't end on a high note, because I just couldn't let a discussion of all these wonderful amazing pictures end with me being like, “Yeah, and now he sucks.” That would be wrong.
And now we return to non-Quentin-related movie ranting. To end the series on the same note of form-meets-content that I began it with, it is fitting that our long national nightmare comes to a close on October 31st. Happy Halloween!
One would think that being both a dazzlingly erudite—and extremely serious—intellectual and a lover of action movies would be a contradiction in terms. Well, guess what? Contradictions are a matter of perspective and shit blowing up is awesome. However, being in possession of a cerebral cortex that can melt steel does give its possessor a taste for action movies of, at the very least, a reasonably low level of stupidity. It is for this reason that I, the humble owner of one such cortex, demand a certain degree of originality and wit in my action pictures. Other variables, like the presence of Jean-Claude Van Damme, may let a movie get away with being more derivative and retarded than others, but generally, I want an action picture to at least try.
I've been a fan of Luc Besson for a very long time. His body of work as a director hits me, aesthetically, in various defenseless places: sharp visuals, brisk editing, French music on the soundtrack, Anne Parillaud, a tendency to allow actors to cut loose and munch scenery (Gary Oldman in Leon/The Professional and, yes, Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element; if you turn the treble down so his shrieking doesn't deafen your dog, that's one of the great performances in the history of unintentional homosexuality), and Milla Jovovich. At a certain point—approximately coinciding with his Joan of Arc picture, which vibed “vanity project” a little too heavily for most critics and audience—Luc Besson started producing more often than directing, leading to a string of terrifically entertaining, modestly ambitious action pictures: the Transporter series (without which Armond White's longstanding crush on Jason Statham would be less florid), the Jet Li vehicles Kiss of the Dragon and Unleashed, and several others. None of these movies reinvent the wheel, but all of them are energetic, stylishly mounted, entertaining, and—not that this matters when discussing their quality—quite profitable.
Lately, the go-to director in Besson's action movie factory has been Pierre Morel, the DP on the first Transporter and Unleashed. Not so coincidentally, the three features Morel has directed for Besson have all been, to varying degrees and in their own unique ways, massively fucking cool. While Morel employs fairly standard modern action picture camerawork and cutting, his compositions are clear, framed well—he is, after all, a former DP—and while his editing is fashionably quick, it's purposeful rather than the coked up/tweaking style of Neveldine/Taylor, Bay, Tamahori, et al. While reports that Morel's next project is a new adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune are a little worrisome, astute cineastes will recall that the last time some poor bastard tried to make Dune, his next picture was Blue Velvet, so there's certainly no reason to panic just yet.
Rather than fret about what's yet to come, let's instead look at Morel's existing body of work:
District B13 (France: 2004, US and UK 2006) As already stated, the movies generated by Luc Besson's action movie factory are not to be confused with deeply felt auteur pictures, so to say District B13 is merely a showcase for the French martial art/sport parkour is not being dismissive at all. First of all, it's a perfect showcase for the French martial art/sport parkour, which is so fucking crazy and involves such absurd physical skill that it might as well be the stuff of science fiction, and District B13 is set in the near-future dystopia of 2010 (which, some minor physical details of the militarization of French housing projects aside, they got pretty accurately).
Secondly, parkour is fucking rad. Despite Hollywood's attempts to assimilate it and drain all the pleasure out of it, parkour managed to escape relatively unscathed since only about four people in the world actually know how to do it. Two of them, David Belle and Cyril Raffaeli, star in District B13, as, respectively, a good kid from the projects taking on evil drug dealers and a good cop on a corrupt police force taking on the same evil drug dealers. Eventually, because certain laws of nature are unbreakable, it transpires that a bunch of evil white guys in suits are using the drug dealers as pawns in their nefarious scheme to nuke the projects and put up expensive housing for other evil white guys in suits, or perhaps using the fallout from the nuclear explosions to create a mutant race of evil white guys who are even more evil, a paler shade of white, and favoring an even more conservative cut of suit. We may never know, in part because the action sequences in this movie are so mind-bogglingly badass that whatever the evil white guys are up to is irrelevant. Observe:
(Note, that's really David Belle doing all that)
(Alas, it's all smushed, but you can still see Cyril Raffaeli's moves)
What makes District B13 such a fucking blast to watch is that Pierre Morel doesn't just plunk the camera down on sticks and tell David Belle and Cyril Rafaelli to jump through transoms and over cars. Morel's camera is an equal collaborator with the stunt coordinator, and the editing is, while rapid-fire enough to keep adrenaline levels in the red, still coherent enough that it works with the action rather than obscuring it. The visceral thrills generated by the action sequences function almost symbiotically with the giddily retarded storyline with all the evil white guys in suits and nuclear missiles and such, producing an end result that's about as much fun as it's possible to have watching a movie.
District B13's smashing success as a piece of escapist entertainment lies mainly in its seemingly paradoxical balance between having a sense of humor about itself and still being passionately sincere. Ironic detachment absolutely kills pictures like this, because ultimately any action movie has to be stupid, because fucktarded meatheadedness is as essential an element of the action movie as scenes where women cry and hug each other are to the Cinema of Estrogen. But if you, as an action movie (reverse reification? Put that in your bong and blow some bubbles) are just smart enough to realize how stupid you are, have you not achieved a Socratic ideal and a resultant level of aesthetic purity? Yes, Luc Besson is Socrates, Pierre Morel is Aristotle, David Belle and Cyril Raffaeli are collectively Alexander the Great, and that's the known world writhing on the ground with a foot in its ass. No more need be said of District B13, other than “if you haven't seen it, go fucking see it. Right fucking now.”
Taken (2008)
“I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money . . . but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it - I will not look for you, I will not pursue you . . . but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” —transcript of Liam Neeson's induction speech to the Badass Hall of Fame
This is a very important movie, because this is the first time we really learned how severe the consequences are of getting Liam Neeson pissed off. Sure, he ripped shit up in Darkman, but he was all disfigured and miserable and shit in that movie. In Taken, the progression is simple:
(a) Bad guys kidnap Liam Neeson's daughter (b) Liam Neeson is displeased (c) Liam Neeson kills everyone (d) Liam Neeson gets his daughter back, nullifying the purpose of the bad guys' entire enterprise
No frailty. No digressions. Just straight up “oh you done fucked up now” unleashing of an extremely intelligent, competent, and dangerous man upon the forces of evil.
Morel is working in a much more naturalistic style here; Liam Neeson isn't doing that wacky Bugs Bunny cartoon parkour shit, and the picture is set in actual Paris, not extrapolated science-fiction Paris. However, “more” naturalistic does not mean that Taken is some kind of fuckin documentary or anything. Liam Neeson is practically machine-gunning bad guys with his dick for most of the movie, but the greatest lapse in plausibility is definitely that Liam Neeson's daughter and her airhead friend are in Europe following U2 on tour.
An argument can be made that Liam Neeson's daughter's interest in U2 is a sign of greater depth than that of the average teenager, and a further argument can be made that with opening acts like Arcade Fire, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, The Scissor Sisters, Kanye, and The Killers (as well as shittier but still popular groups like Snow Patrol, Keane, and Ash) on the Vertigo Tour, the girls might have been going for the opening act; the fiscal wastefulness of paying U2 ticket prices to see someone like Franz Ferdinand, while massive, is nonetheless in keeping with the behavior of privileged teenagers. But this is avoiding the central issue: teenagers dumb enough to go over to Europe and kidnapped—for all intents and purposes—in the fucking airport are not going to be U2 fans. Not in 2005 anyway.
I have an alternate theory, that rationalizes this thorny and problematic intellectual dilemma into quivering submission: having the band be someone old enough for Liam Neeson to have heard of them saves valuable screen time, lest he have to spend five minutes that could otherwise be devoted to breaking bones and blowing shit up to having to use “the Google” to find out who Kelly Clarkson is. Because, let's not forget, the intent of Taken is not to be a photo-realistic portrait of the American dipshit teenage girl. Taken is a picture about Liam Neeson reducing villains to bloody, formerly sapient heaps of viscera.
And yet, much like District B13 before it, it's just smart enough to get into some actual relevant political shit—in this case, the international sex slavery trade—without either getting bogged down in nuance or doing the issue a disservice through flippancy or exploitation for artificial drama. It's more of a symbol of the dangerous shit that can happen if you don't take your dad seriously, if your dad is ex-CIA who can kill everybody in the city when necessary and you're a dipshit teenage girl whose idea of tragedy is the wrong guy asking you to the prom. This is why if I ever have a daughter, I'm going to make sure my autocracy is subtle, because when you're too strict they end up with questionable, anachronistic taste in pop music and get kidnapped by Albanian white slavery syndicates.
Of course, everything eventually works out because Liam Neeson kills everyone, and his daughter (Shannon from Lost, with her hair dyed brunette to make it plausible that Liam Neeson and Famke Janssen fucked and had her) realizes how cool he is, finally. At the end, when Liam Neeson introduces the daughter—an aspiring singer—to the famous pop star for whom he runs security, all is well with the world. Well, except the coroner in Paris, that poor bastard is going to be working overtime for a month processing all those dead guys.
Liam fucking Neeson. Who knew? I mean, he's always been pretty cool, but again I think Pierre Morel deserves a bit of the credit. He may not, technically speaking, be a Serious Artist (very few directors who make cool movies where lots and lots of people get killed meet the criteria, sadly, though if I have anything to say about, those criteria will change) but he is a serious entertainer, and a skillful director of entertainments has the necessary mastery of his craft to know how to make his leading man look sufficiently badass at all times. Of course, Liam Neeson's dick wouldn't drag the ground in this if it wasn't big on its own merits, but the director is the guy who controls where the ground is. You know what I mean.
From Paris With Love (2010) A loose remake of the 2003 Danish kind-of-sort-of documentary The Five Obstructions, wherein Lars von Trier trolled the everliving fuck out of his mentor, avant-garde director Jørgen Leth, by forcing Leth to do five different versions of his 1967 short The Perfect Human with a different “obstruction” each time (not being allowed to have a shot longer than 12 frames—that's half a second—being the first example, and they just get crazier from there). This time around, Luc Besson and Pierre Morel lost a bet to some sadistic bastard who forced them to make an action movie starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta.
That's one theory. Another is that Pierre Morel was sitting around saying to himself “I made an action star out of Liam Neeson. Goddamn I'm good.” And, while polishing off a bottle of wine and watching MBB (Maison Boîte Bureau = French HBO) one night, Match Point came on, followed by the movie version of the Hairspray musical, and Pierre Morel started giggling to himself and said, “I am going to put the homosexual gay guy who killed Scarlett Johansson and the fat woman who played Tracy Turnblad's mother—holy merde, that's John Travolta? Wow . . . ok, sure, John Travolta—and I am going to make action film. Heh heh . . . Où est l'autre bouteille de vin, muthafuckaaaaa?” and eventually passed out, only to wake up the next morning with a massive hangover and a voicemail from Luc Besson saying “What's good, Pierre? Totally dig the casting choices, babe, Rhys Meyers and Travolta it is!”
Either way, this movie is nine kinds of crazy. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a well-educated, competent dork with a hot, fairly agreeable girlfriend, whose day job is playing chess and gossiping with the U.S. ambassador to France, and by night takes phone calls from some anonymous CIA guy who has him do shit like put phony license plates on a car so when the dudes in the car do spy shit, if they get caught, it'll have fake plates on it, and the local cops think some other country's dudes were responsible for the spy shit. Pretty cool night gig, all things considered, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers wants more. He wants to be a guy in an action movie, not an understated drama about a low-level covert ops dork.
Soon, after successfully planting a bug in a French dude's office, Jonathan Rhys Meyers gets his wish. His anonymous spy boss tells him to go meet John Travolta at the airport because the Customs Frogs are being all premenstrual. Although this interrupts Jonathan Rhys Meyers' engagement dinner with the hot girlfriend, she's supportive because this is his big promotion! Wow, a movie where the girlfriend doesn't bust the hero's balls about spending too much time at work. What could this mean . . .?
Jonathan Rhys Meyers arrives to find that the Customs dudes are very reasonably insisting that John Travolta's obviously fake cans of disgusting energy drink are not coming into France with him. Travolta's doing a wildly over-the-top Ugly American routine, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers intervenes. First he asks Travolta if it's going to be an excessive testicular compromise to just give his energy drinks up. Travolta says yes. So Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in a surprising turn of events, steps up to the plate and does something really badass: he slaps a “Diplomatic Mail” label on Travolta's bag and walks out. Problem solved. Baisez-toi, Froggy. (Ed. Note: Pierre Morel said it, not me)
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta establish the time-honored mismatched buddy cop dynamic, except Jonathan Rhys Meyers keeps surprising the audience with displays of balls; when it transpires that the real reason Travolta was so insistent on keeping his six-pack of energy drink was because he had gun parts hidden in the cans, JRM's response is “I'm authorized to get you any weapon you want,” rather than getting all prissy about Travolta illegally smuggling a gun into the country. Then, following a pretty well-filmed shootout in a Chinese restaurant that resulted in me Tweeting “There is cocaine raining from the ceiling. This is win” and JRM carrying a vase full of cocaine for the next half hour of screen time, JRM's response, rather than any pussy-ass moralizing against drugs, is “If you really want to score some coke, I can get you some.” Pure, uncut awesome.
Structurally, things appear a bit off, because JRM and Travolta do a whole picture's worth of bonding in the first hour, even going so far as to do a bunch of the blow in the vase (in a hilarious apparent homage to the scene where Ethan Hawke smokes dusted weed in Training Day) and culminating in Travolta dropping a suicide bomber vest out a housing project window to blow up a car full of Pakistani terrorists. This isn't even the capstone on the sequence: Travolta's backing a car into another car into another car into JRM's SUV—wired with a car bomb by the terrorists—and detonating it, is.
Now, with the terrorists having, problematically, a bunch of photos of JRM and his girlfriend on the wall in their drug lab in the 'jects, Travolta is a little suspicious. After he and JRM hand over the confiscated drugs from the dead baddies' lab, JRM invites the antisocial Travolta to dinner with his fiancee and his fiancee's friend, and Travolta, surprisingly, accepts.
Dinner goes well, but Travolta acts strange and seems to inadvertently antagonize JRM's fiancee's friend. He does something weird with his cell phone. Then, when the fiancee's friend takes a call on her cell, Travolta abruptly shoots her in the head. Whoa. It turns out JRM's fiancee is actually a terrorist sleeper! And . . . holy shit, that plot twist actually isn't retarded! Wonders never cease. The fiancee grabs a gun, shoots JRM in the shoulder, and splits, in one of the harsher cinematic breakups in recent memory (paling in comparison to Arnold putting one through Sharon Stone's forehead and coldly smirking “Considduh dat a divoooooahss” in Total Recall, of course, but that was 20 years ago).
The good guys determine that JRM's now ex-fiancee is plotting to blow up an African aid summit and a whole bunch of important political people. There's only one thing to be done. John Travolta has to hang out the window of a speeding car with a bazooka and try to blow the bad guys up. Only it turns out the fiancee ISN'T IN THE CAR! Travolta still blows up the car, of course, because certain things must be done, and hauls ass to the summit.
JRM may have taken one in the shoulder, but since he has balls (something I was still barely used to even now, near the end of the picture) he hauls ass to the summit and gets there first. The security dudes, naturally, detain him for carrying a gun, being coked up, and having both a mustache and one of the funniest fake American accents ever (more on which in a bit), but JRM runs into his boss, who has the security dudes let JRM in, sans gun.
JRM and his ex have a bit of a showdown where it appears that, despite Travolta telling JRM talk is useless and guns are the answer, JRM is going to talk her out of it. Except, alas, she's still going to detonate her suicide bomber belt, so JRM has to put one in her forehead Arnold-style after all. Travolta, having gotten there in the nick of time, catches the now deceased ex before she hits the ground and detonates her belt. End of threat. Our denouement shows a now grown-ass man JRM having to take his Desert Eagle out of his pocket before he and Travolta play a game of very manly chess. Roll credits. Ahhhhhh.
What really makes From Paris With Love such a delight is the proudly weird tone. Jonathan Rhys Meyers' flaaaaaaat Ameeeeeeeerican aaaaacceeeeent is funny enough, but his little two-sentence back story that he relates to Travolta as they swagger into the housing project to take down the terrorist's coke lab—that he grew up in the fucking Cypress Hills Homes in East fucking New York—is just breathtaking. I mean, someone who looks like Jonathan Rhys Meyers (i.e. white, not to mention like the kind of guy who'd bottom for Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine), growing up in that hood, definitely would have had to grow a pair of balls to survive.
John Travolta's performance is a slightly stickier issue. It seems, at first, to suck, but as the movie gets crazier and crazier, his performance seems to get better, but it's more because the movie itself coalesces around his weird overacting than it is that he's actually good. Which, once more, is a sign that Pierre Morel knows what the hell he's doing. They even admit in the making-of documentary that Travolta's undirectable and just does whatever the fuck he wants; faced with such a situation, some directors might keep tilting at windmills and get the difficult actor to behave and stick to the script. Pierre Morel, though, realizes that that's going to be impossible, and crafts the rest of the movie to be the right kind of crazy to make sure that Travolta's overacting and goofy improvising seems to fit.
In that same making-of doc, Pierre Morel comes off a smart guy with a sense of humor (of a scene where Jonathan Rhys Meyers is backing up Travolta on a staircase and dead extras keep falling out of the sky from offscreen, Morel says, dryly, “On the schedule, we called this scene “Chinese Rain” because it's raining Chinese people.”) This impression is certainly reinforced by his pictures, which manage to be smart—mainly by knowing when to shut up and be stupid—and entertaining.
Considering the kind of pictures Morel makes, and considering that the title of auteur could just as easily be attributed to Luc Besson on the pictures he's directed so far, just going to work, punching the clock, and doing the work is all one could reasonably expect from him. The fact that Pierre Morel invests his pictures with such pizazz, though, is a sign that he's more than just some hack cashing a paycheck: he's a genuinely inspired craftsman.
Still a little worried about him directing Dune, though . . . but maybe his unpretentious, no-bullshit (unless it's fun) style can make it work. But, hey, even if it doesn't, the David Lynch rule dictates his next picture will fucking rock.
Some months ago, there was a bit of a to-do in the video gaming world, with the release of Heavy Rain. It was hailed as a heretofore unseen level of artistry in video games, a brave and radical experiment in interactive narrative, the second coming of sliced bread, et cetera. Even I, a dilettante gamer at best, heard about all this and thought, hey, cool, next time I have sixty bucks I'll pick it up.
Video game critics got a bit hot under the collar in re: Heavy Rain, but I noticed one common theme in a lot of the reviews—the thing they were all praising it for was, essentially, not being a video game. This is puzzling, to say the least; when was the last time you read a movie review sucking some movie's dick for not seeming like a movie? If a thing bears scant resemblance to the thing it is, is it that thing? Or, in less opaque/stoned terms, doesn't a video game that's not really a video game, ipso facto, suck?
I decided to take time out of my busy schedule of stalking Gina Gershon and quixotically attempting to impute philosophical depth to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to investigate this thorny question. Not having the money to shell out to buy the game—and not necessarily wanting to piss away sixty bucks on something that one of my critic icons said this about—I borrowed the game from my good friend and frequent collaborator Gyda Arber and got to work.
Now, the reason I'm writing about this game on a movie blog is because, as every critic in the fucking universe pointed out at the time, Heavy Rain really is more like a movie than a video game. Its plot—a serial killer is terrorizing an unnamed city (“shot” in Philadelphia), leaving behind origami animals, and ONLY ONE MAN (actually four: a really unlucky father, a grizzled private eye, a cracked-out FBI agent with some cool gadgets, and a sexy girl reporter) CAN STOP THE MADNESS—is just a smidge too hackneyed for any movie made after about 1995, but it has echoes of a lot of those movies (Se7en, for one, but I have to admit the one it really reminded me of was the one where Keanu plays a serial killer and James Spader has to catch him; an ex-girlfriend made me watch it and got pissed that I spent the whole picture giggling at how bad it was).
Where Heavy Rain rises above the tawdry retardation of its source material is in its execution. The visuals are stunning: the motion-capture acting is genuinely expressive and affecting, the environments are rendered meticulously, with exquisite attention to detail, and the “framing” of the “shots” is such that Robert Richardson, Chris Doyle, Emmanuel Lubezki, et al would nod approvingly. The way the expository cut scenes are “shot” and edited make you feel like you're watching a good movie, and the action scenes (where you, as the player, press buttons when prompted to get your character to do things like dodge bullets, smash lamps over bad guys' heads, kick dudes in the balls, etc) are edited like it's a movie. A really good movie.
But technique is only half the battle. It helps to be crazy, to have balls, to be a little pretentious . . . yes, my dear friends and loyal readers, it helps to be French. You might not guess from his name, but the game's writer/director David Cage is French. And oh my does it show. After the opening scene, it's literally raining for the entire rest of the game (“Puisque la pluie symbolise l'humeur des caractères, et est une métaphore pour les horreurs ils confrontent”), there's a whole bunch of gratuitous nudity (“Puisque seulement un Américain voudrait porter des vêtements toute l'heure”), and there's a particular way the French worship fucktarded American movies (“Puisque ce qui est assez bon pour Godard et Truffaut devrait être assez bon pour n'importe quel Français raisonnable”) that no one else could ever—or would ever want to—pull off. This is why France rules. They're not that great at soccer (this year) or war, but boy is their idea of a good American movie gloriously weird.
That's how the single stupidest cliché in cinema, the serial killer, is elevated from crippling handicap (seriously, there are a total of two good movies ever made about serial killers: Silence of the Lambs, and Se7en. That's it, end of debate. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was a good movie but it's in a different category, title notwithstanding) to, amazingly, an asset. Because David Cage is French. The spin on stuff—the forensic procedural part of the plot with the FBI agent has him collecting fingerprints and DNA and shit, but doing so with a futuristic pair of sunglasses that gives him a Terminator-style computer readout of the info, for example—makes otherwise stale material fresh.
Another (not exclusively, although they do this quite well) French asset in Heavy Rain is that a lot of the dramatic elements are carried to extremes only a nation of largely atheist Catholic intellectuals could imagine. The main character, Ethan Mars (note also, weird nomenclature with an utterly non sequitur reference to a Howard Hawks movie) is, at the beginning of the game, a happily married architect with two cheerful, rambunctious sons. Before you even figure out how the controls work, however, Ethan loses one of his sons in a crowded mall and then watches as he's hit by a car and killed. Cut to montage of rainfall, urban squalor, grim-faced people with rain on their faces, over the credits. Two years later, Ethan is divorced, unshaven, depressed, late picking his surviving son up from school. Ethan's also going to a shrink and experiencing weird blackouts, during which he has no idea what he's doing. During one of these blackouts, his surviving son disappears. Could it be the “Origami Killer”?
We're then introduced to asthmatic, low-rent private investigator Scott Shelby (modeled after and voiced by the guy who played the cop in the Clive Owen/Vincent Cassel disappointment Derailed) and FBI profiler/possessor of awesome gadgets Norman Jayden, who is (barely) hiding an addiction to fictional drug Triptocane, aptly named in that its effects seem to split the difference between LSD and cocaine. Here be more Frenchness: layered characters, even if those layers are fucking stupid.
As Scott, you go around collecting evidence on behalf (you claim) of the victims' families. As Norman, you collect evidence, butt heads with the local PD (whose lone avatars are a violent, rule-averse sociopathic prick and a preening political lizard captain) and every five minutes or so have to wade through withdrawal-induced hallucinations where you have to decide whether or not to get high.
A ways into the narrative, for no apparent reason, Madison Paige, an extremely attractive female character, is introduced (more Frenchness: they do love ze byootifal wooman) who, two seconds after you gain control of her, you can actually have her go take a shower, where you can actually get her naked, and where she stays and luxuriates for quite some time.
Her purpose in the grand scheme of things remains mysterious almost until the end, where she's revealed to be an investigative journalist. This does nothing to make her seem less redundant or dispel any of those “Is she only in this game to show tit . . .?” questions you inevitably ask yourself, but she is extremely attractive. She's curvy in a way that's kind of a naturalistic version of an anime fetish object (this is, after all a video game, and a video game designed by French people), is very pretty, and in the lowest blow of all, she has short hair and rides a motorcycle, leaving me in the awkward position of being like, “No, she absolutely belongs in this game! She's not superfluous at all! In fact, Madison's boards are my favorite boards in the game, and it's not even because of the gratuitous nudity!” and leaving myself open to the customary facepalms and accusations of pubic cognition that trail me everywhere I go.
Ethan is given a series of increasingly brutal tasks by the Origami Killer to demonstrate how far he'll go to save his son (who is being held in a storm drain; with all the rain, he'll drown in a couple days if Ethan fucks up), and each time he passes the test, he gets more of the address where his son is being held, so if you pass with full marks you get the complete address. Since these tasks are so brutal (in one, Ethan has to crawl on his hands and knees through broken glass and then navigate a labyrinth of live high voltage electrical wires; in another he has to chop off one of his own fingers, Yakuza-style) Ethan is pretty fucked up afterward, leaving Madison, who just happens to have checked into the same motel as Ethan because she has some kind of insomnia that only lets her sleep in motels (which is so fucking stupid I'm almost impressed), to nurse him to health, bandage his wounds, develop a crush on him, and eventually, as Ice-T so poignantly phrased it, get butt naked and fuck. If you choose to.
That's another much-hyped aspect to Heavy Rain, the ability to affect the narrative by making choices. Like, you can decide as Scott to intervene when the convenience store where you're buying your asthma inhaler gets robbed. You can decide, as Norman, to get high or not (though if you get high every time you have a chance, as I of course did the first time through, you OD before solving the case), you can decide to keep your clothes on or not as Madison, and you can decide whether or not to chop your finger off as Ethan. Among many many other choices. Generally, though, the choices are between “Are you an unobservant, lazy, unscrupulous shithead?” and “Are you aware, alert, and a non-shithead?” except in the case of Madison and her tits, where your choices are “Do you like tits?” and “Wait, what the fuck is wrong with you, everybody likes tits.”
You can fuck up and get killed as any of the four playable characters. One of them is the Origami Killer. There are all kinds of stupid heavy-handed hints early on that it's Ethan, but since the first rule of whodunits is, it's never the obvious culprit, we know it's not Ethan. Even though Norman is otherworldly and a drug addict, he fights with the killer at one point, so it's not him. And since during that fight, Norman didn't get smacked in the face with a bare tit, the killer isn't Madison. And since Scott is in the other room when the nice old pawnshop geezer gets killed by the Origami Killer, and since a whole bunch of Scott's inner monologues, his own thoughts, with no one else listening in or anything, express surprise at turns the case is taking, it can't be Scott.
Except . . . it is Scott. This is the one narrative flaw that I can't write off to French people being aliens. Playing through the game subsequent to having Scott be unmasked as the killer, you can see how his actions can be interpreted as him gathering up all the evidence that he's the Origami Killer to have it be destroyed. His wild goose chase subplot where he's “convinced” that some zonked rich kid is the Origami Killer comes out of nowhere. Falling for the hooker (whose son he fucking killed) is weird. The montage where you're shown how it is that, in spite of saving babies and showing genuine kindness and stuff, he's the killer kind of reminds me of the episode where Nikki and Paulo were killed on Lost, where there are all these scenes from things that happened seasons 1 and 2 where they were retrofitted into the scenes as if they'd actually been there the first time around. No. They weren't there. It didn't happen like that, just because the writer(s) decided it did.
Oddly enough, I would have been fine with Scott's backstory—having to watch his twin brother die because his father was a putz—if it was what had motivated him to be a PI. Except he isn't really a PI, he's an ex-cop who's a fucking serial killer. Goddammit man.
Still, even the sub-Shyalamanic twist of having Scott be the killer doesn't negate the genuine entertainment to be found in Heavy Rain. And, in spite of what all the critics (and its creator) said, it doesn't fuck up the experience going through a second time. Even though David Cage said, in an interview:
“I would like people to play it once…because that’s life. Life you can only play once...I would like people to have this experience that way. . . I'm fine with [reloading to avoid a bad result], but the right way to enjoy Heavy Rain is really to make one thing because it's going to be your story. It's going to be unique to you. It's really the story you decided to write . . . I think playing it several times is also a way to kill the magic of it.”
he nonetheless made a game that withstands multiple replays. Maybe this is just where he and I differ. I like exploring all the different possibilities arising from one moral (or otherwise) choice. I tried once through where all the good guys were either dead or in jail and the kid died; that one had an interesting denouement, because I'd forgotten to let the hooker die and she ended up blowing Scott's brains out right before the closing credits.
The disappointment of the killer's identity notwithstanding, Heavy Rain is a massive achievement. Not because it's some kind of revolutionary video game (which it's not), but because it is the single most French thing ever created. It sounds better in theory than it is in reality. It's kind of pretentious. There are tits. It's basically a ten-hour serial killer movie where the audience is, to varying degrees, both star and director, and that's the beret on top of this particular croissant. There is nothing more French than imputing aesthetic and cultural value to the most unaesthetic and culturally devoid movies in America. Not to give CPR to a dead cliché, but Jerry Lewis is a case in point.
It'll be interesting to see if video game developers follow on the path of Heavy Rain, and how much narrative becomes a part of video games, and whether the increasing sophistication of hardware leads to increased sophistication of content. One thing we don't have to speculate about, though: there is a movie adaptation of Heavy Rain in the works, due for release in 2012. It remains to be seen whether something whose cinematic value is largely that it isn't cinema will work as cinema. I'm thinking . . . nuh uh. Or, no, now that I think of it . . . something that post-modern could totally work. In French. You're welcome.
I concluded my debut post with a top ten for the ten year span starting the morning we woke up and realized Y2K hadn’t happened and ending tomorrow night at midnight. Like any top ten list based on subjective criteria, it’s arbitrary, holes can be poked in it, and ultimately it doesn’t mean much. It’s not a list of the ten movies I enjoyed the most over the past ten years—if it was, Casino Royale and The Room would have been in the top three. And if it was a list of top ten experiences of a movie, that time I watched 24 Hour Party People when I was so high my eyeballs were vibrating would be near the top of the list. It’s a list of the ten movies I think are the best of what I saw.
There are some patterns in the list. All but one—The Departed—of the movies on my list were written or co-written by their directors. Most of them were fairly popular, or at least widely discussed critically; I don’t have any cred insofar as obscure shit no one else saw. Most of them won at least one Oscar, as per that last point. If my top ten is any insight into my perspective as a moviegoer I suppose it reveals a college-educated, middle-class white guy in his early 30s who likes movies and doesn’t have much of a problem with Hollywood. Which is (shockingly!) accurate. So, enough analysis of the list, more about the movies on it (10-6 today, 5-1 tomorrow):
(10) Criminal (dir. Gregory Jacobs)—2004
This is a remake of an Argentinian movie called Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens), but I prefer this one. Nueve Reinas didn’t really grab me, maybe because of the mood I was in when I saw it, maybe because the pacing was a little erratic. Criminal, though, moves fairly well, and it hits me below the belt; I’ve always loved movies and books about crime and criminals, and this one waves its title in my face.
It’s one of those narratives one can only summarize so far without spoilers, so suffice to say it’s about a young con man played by Diego Luna who makes a rookie mistake scamming a casino, and is arrested by John C. Reilly, who appears to be a cop, but after hauling Diego out in cuffs, John C. explains that he’s a veteran con man, and offers to show Diego some basics. They pull a couple small-scale cons, then suddenly John C.’s sister, Maggie Gyllenhaal (they presumably take after different parents) calls him to the hotel where she works, where an old colleague has a very large job, which John C. agrees to help him with in exchange for a usurious cut of the eventual take.
This is where the twists and spoilers start, so we’ll leave the narrative be and focus on Criminal’s other virtues. Gregory Jacobs, directing his first feature, co-wrote the script with a pseudonymous Steven Soderbergh (for whom Jacobs is frequently first assistant director and occasionally co-producer), and keeps things moving briskly, never overdoing either the direction or the script. The cast is excellent—it might be John C. Reilly’s best performance, and he’s been one of the best character actors around for a long time. He and Diego Luna interact well, with the upper hand changing hands constantly and subtly. The supporting cast, especially Maggie G and Peter Mullan as a mysterious Scottish media baron, is excellent as well.
Putting Criminal at #10 on the list meant having to bump a number of movies I really liked over the past ten years—Traffic, Mulholland Dr., Far From Heaven, The Station Agent, Sideways, Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, I’m Not There, The Visitor, Inglourious Basterds, and several others. I’m sure good arguments can be made for each of those movies in terms of superiority, narrative scope, et cetera. But this is a list being compiled by someone who’s a sucker for minimalism, crime fiction, and a good plot twist. So there you go.
(9) No Country For Old Men (dir. Joel and Ethan Coen)—2007
Enough has been written about this one already that I don’t need to pile on much more. Some brief thoughts (and spoilers for any Johnny Come-Latelys who haven’t Netflixed it yet):
--It’s better than Fargo. --Fargo, while overrated, was still really, really good. --Where the fuck did Josh Brolin come from? Seriously, he brings it. --Once Josh Brolin gets killed, it kinda falls apart (which is why I only have it at #9), but not really; I come down on the “it’s awesome” side of the controversial ending, the “it sucks” people need to listen closer to what Tommy Lee Jones is saying there. --Josh Brolin’s late bloom into awesome reminds me: Tommy Lee Jones is another one who was around for a long time, kicking around, not really living up to his potential, until he walks into frame in The Fugitive, says “My, my, my. What. A. Mess,” as if the train wreck was his career and proceeds to own shit for the rest of the movie, which by extension is his career. I could go on all day about The Fugitive, and may at some point. --Javier Bardem was all that, though I did murder five people who called me “friendo” at the time. --The Coens’ Best Director and Best Picture wins were long overdue, but it kind of pisses me off that the Academy rewards people stepping outside their comfort zone instead of recognizing brilliance at a director or actor’s strong suit. Of course, I’m the asshole in the corner of the party spilling whiskey and bellowing that Miller’s Crossing should have swept the Oscars in 1990 (and forgetting about Goodfellas in the process). --I remember someone asking me whether I liked No Country at the time and responding “Antonioni can go fuck himself, and so can John Ford,” which was overstating it a bit in retrospect, but it’s still a pretty damn good movie.
A closing note: I’ve still yet to manage to watch this one all the way through a second time, and I’m a compulsive rewatcher. Hence, #9.
(8) The Departed (dir. Martin Scorsese)—2006
Oh, The Depaaaaaaaaahted. Some of the accents sucked, yes. Jack seemed like he grew up in Boston’s Martian district. It’s almost an hour longer than Infernal Affairs, which was a terrific movie in its own right. All this is true. The Departed is still a really good movie.
Remakes are not, in and of themselves, bad, or even inherently lazy. At their best, when there’s more to the remake than merely recasting American stars in the leads to squeeze a buck or hundred million out of the multiplexes, it’s like a cover song. Or a revival of a play. In this case, screenwriter William Monahan had a story about the Boston underworld that fit within the framework of Infernal Affairs’ premise—a cop undercover in the Mob, a Mob mole undercover on the cops—to pose the question of what exactly is it that makes a good guy, or a bad guy. Or whether either good or bad really exists.
All of this could have been terribly ponderous with the wrong director running things. Or, in a different wrong director’s hands, it could have been a rote cops-and-robbers thing that dragged on forever. Mr. Scorsese couldn’t make a boring movie if he tried (which may very well have been the motivation behind Kundun, in which case he failed, it was pretty good), nor could he paint by numbers without setting fire to the canvas and slowly pushing the camera in on it with the Rolling Stones playing on the soundtrack.
Ultimately, The Departed will live on as one of the main pieces of ammunition in cynical Oscar watchers’ arsenal when they gripe about de facto lifetime achievement Oscars. Back in the dark days when we all wondered whether Scorsese was going to join the all-time Oscarless directors’ pantheon with Hitchcock and Kubrick, this used to really piss me off:
1976—Scorsese not nominated for Taxi Driver; John G. Avildsen wins for Rocky 1980—nominated for Raging Bull, Scorsese loses to Robert Redford for Ordinary People 1990—nominated for Goodfellas, Scorsese loses to Kevin Costner or Dances With Wolves
’76 isn’t that bad. Sure, Avildsen winning for Rocky is absurd and a symptom that “the people want to feel good when they walk out of a movie!” (though the kind of person who feels good about a movie based on the premise that Muhammad Ali needed to be taken down a peg is beneath contempt), but Sidney Lumet getting shafted for Network (which was years ahead of its time and a legit contender for Greatest of All Time discussion) was a bigger tragedy than a guy in his early 30s not getting nominated for a movie that was almost rated X.
It’s those 1980 and 1990 losses that burn my ass. Ordinary People is not a badly made movie. It’s got a good cast. It is, however, a good indicator of Redford’s future directorial efforts: looks nice, has all the polish money can buy, but there ain’t a whole lotta there there. Raging Bull is Raging Bull. Sure, it’s hard to watch, and it flopped at the box office (which has always been a factor with the Oscars). But it’s Raging Bull. Even if, for political reasons, you have to give Ordinary People Best Picture (which I understand, even if I don’t condone), Scorsese should have won Best Director for the fucking credit sequence alone.
Now, 1990. Dances With Wolves, oh Dances With Wolves. When I was 12 and I saw it on cable I was pretty impressed. But a lot of things impress 12 year olds. And, apparently, Oscar voters: “Oh, look, how meaningful! It’s about an issue! Oh, we’re such bad people for not caring about the Native Americans! Let’s show how much we care!” Now, if Costner hadn’t deleted the expository sequence about the time machine they sent a late-80s vintage politically correct liberal back in time with to assume the identity of John Dunbar, I might have bought it. Without that crucial bit of narrative, it remains one of the best examples extant of Hollywood jerking off to itself. And whose face took that sensitivity bukkake? Martin Scorsese’s. Goodfellas was the best movie of that year, and after the aforementioned Taxi Driver and Raging Bull snubs, it was a classic case of “we fucked him twice, let’s give him his reach-around this time.” But, alas. There was treacly sentiment and reductive liberalism to parade. The American Left doesn’t have cancer, it has diabetes. [Remaining ten pages of this political rant redacted, to be used if I ever get on the Huffington Post].
So, anyway, back to The Departed. Maybe it was his long-delayed reach-around. But if anyone deserved one, it was Scorsese. And there’s something to be said for a 151 minute movie that’s as re-watchable as The Departed (a few months ago when it was HBO all the time I watched it almost every time it was on).
(7) I’ve Loved You So Long (dir. Philippe Claudel)—2008
This is a real good one. Kristin Scott Thomas gets out of prison after a 15-year stretch and goes to stay with her sister and her family while re-adjusting to society. And that’s pretty much it. French novelist Philippe Claudel’s first film as a director unfolds like a novel. Kristin Scott Thomas’ character is revealed slowly, each revelation making her that much more vividly real. (Among the revelations is why she speaks French with an English accent). While there’s a mildly annoying tendency in independent/art-house/what-have-you cinema these days toward arbitrarily holding back information about character and plot in order to have a good end-of-second-act zinger, Claudel’s deliberate revelation of certain rather important details the circumstances behind Kristin Scott Thomas’ incarceration is not arbitrary at all. She, as a character, has put those circumstances behind her, and it’s only because of her sister’s (and the audience’s) need to understand that they’re even revealed at all. Elsa Zylberstein does a terrific job as the sister—in an American movie the sister who doesn’t approve of her convict sibling and is always harping at her and being self-righteous would have been torturous to watch, but in a French movie somehow she gets to be a real person. This is why we need French movies.
(6) Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola)—2003
Because Scarlett Johansson’s ass over the opening credits could end all war everywhere. Because when you feel lonely and far from home, staring out the window of a taxi with My Bloody Valentine playing just about sums it up. Because Bill Murray is, as GZA later dutifully reminded us in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, “Bill Motherfuckin’ Murray,” and in his career from Rushmore forward, he’s transcended his previous incarnation as “Bill Ghostbustin-ass Murray.” Because Scarlett Johansson’s ass . . . oh, wait, already covered that (even if those underwear didn’t . . . zing!)
Most importantly, because this movie was so good that until Marie Antoinette came out as such a head-scratcher, for a couple years there I stopped thinking of Sofia Coppola as the twit who fucked up Godfather III. This was big, for me. The first two Godfathers are holy to me. The third had potential; seriously, what other mountains were there for Michael Corleone to climb than the Vatican? And after seeing his rise to power, seeing his end would bring closure. So unlike some people I’ve spilled whiskey on talking about this over years, I saw a third Godfather as being potentially a good thing. However . . .
To be fair, Sofia Coppola is not the only problem with Godfather III. Her father was no longer the same guy he was when he made the first two. Robert Duvall was sorely missed. But Sofia’s miscasting was the biggest, and most noticeable flaw (a tradition going back to the beginning of the Godfather series; Diane Keaton was awful in the first two and seemed better in the third in comparison to Sofia). And, not being above the holding of long-standing, pointless, violently irrational grudges, I completely wrote Sofia Coppola off. Rich kid, dilettante, etc etc. Until Lost in Translation, which, a couple of batting-practice-fastball Japanese accent jokes aside, is an extremely well-observed character study, and captures the awkward, otherworldly sense of being very far from home perfectly. And with a dynamite soundtrack—Bill Murray’s drunk karaoke “More Than This” is still the gold standard of drunk karaoke (my own rendition of the Darkness’ “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” is disqualified because, although I’d had a drink or two at that point, I was still sober).
