Year in Review: 1959

1959 was a watershed year for movies in many ways. The French New Wave officially arrived changing film forever, and we started to see the birth of the Indie Film Movement in American as well. And yet, the film that I admired the most from this year were Hollywood films – from old masters.


10. The Fugitive Kind (Sidney Lumet)
I know a lot of critics don’t like Sidney Lumet’s version of the Tennessee Williams play, Orpheus Descending, but I can’t help but love the film – with its strange direction, wild performances and its choice to wallow in the type of sexual melodrama that only Williams could write this well. Marlon Brando is wonderful as a drifter who comes to a small town in the South – and becomes the immediate object of desire by the women there. Joanne Woodward is wonderfully over the top as an alcoholic nymphomaniac who lusts after him, Maureen Stapleton quietly touching as a simple housewife and Anna Magnani a firebrand, as the bitter wife of a cruel, sadistic man slowly dying (Victor Jory). Lumet has a way with turning plays into films, and his direction in this film is strange – its long close-ups, it slow pace that allows the characters to slowly build, and the sexual tension to simmer, works wonderfully well. No, it isn’t the best version of a Williams play on film – but it’s great nonetheless.

9. Shadows (John Cassavetes)
With Shadows, John Cassavetes not only started one of the most interesting directorial careers in America cinema, he also pretty much found the Independent Film Movement. Shadows is not, for me anyway, one of Cassavetes very best films – it is a little too rough, too unformed, and doesn’t contain the power of films like Faces or A Woman Under the Influence. Yet, everywhere you look in Shadows, there is Cassavetes breaking new ground in American film – the jazz infused score, the sense of isolation and alienation of the cast, the interracial relationship, which was downright daring in 1959. Yes, watching the film now, it has aged – it has been copied too much over the years – and yet if you put the film into historical perspective, it is one of the most important in American history.

8. Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk)
Douglas Sirk was the master at melodrama – no director had a better feel for it than he did. Imitation of Life was his last film – and one of his best. It is the story of an ambitious young widow (Lana Turner) who wants to become a Broadway star, and her relationship with her black servant (Juanita Moore) who starts out acting as a nanny to Turner’s daughter (Sandra Dee). To me though, the most interesting role in the film belongs to Susan Kohner, as Moore’s light skinned daughter. She is so light skinned in fact that she can pass for white – and wants to do this. She hates that she is black, and resents her mother for living the life that she does. The film is a great melodrama about Turner’s ambitions, and her various relationships with men, but it the struggles of Moore and Kohner who truly makes this one of Sirk’s best film – an emotional powerhouse.

7. Pickpocket (Robert Bresson)
Robert Bresson was one of the most interesting filmmakers in history. He was a director who hated performances – he wanted his actors to show as little emotion as possible at any given moment, yet at the same time, he like to shot them head on – staring directly into the camera. The combination is eerie, and in a way lets the audience see themselves in the film whatever emotions we think the actors are feeling, are really the ones we supply them with. Pickpocket is one of his best films – a film about a thief who feels that he has the moral right to steal from others – because he is somehow better than they are, and as such, more entitled to their money. But there is also something masochistic about him as well – late in the film, he knows the undercover cop is an undercover cop, but he tries to pick his pocket anyway – in the hope of being caught and being punished. There are great sequences in the film – one on a train that shows a three man team working to pick the pockets of as many people as possible that is a masterpiece of shot selection and editing, that movies fluidly. But overall, Pickpocket is simply a film, like all of Bresson’s best work, that sits back and observes his characters in whatever situation they are in, and asks us to make of them what we will.

6. Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger)
Anatomy of a Murder was a groundbreaking legal thriller when it was released. It was one of the first mainstream movies to talk openly about rape and sex – it also showed a rather cynical view of lawyers, who do pretty much anything they can do to win. James Stewart gives one of his best performances as a Defense Attorney, who takes on the case of an Army officer (Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering the man that his wife (Lee Remnick) says raped her. Stewart lays on his “simple country lawyer” schtick pretty thick in the courtroom (it has been copied and mocked ever since), but he is brilliant in the film – and the film shows just what he’ll do to win. On the other side, George C. Scott is equally as good as the prosecutor from the city who pulls his own tricks. Otto Preminger’s film is big and sprawling – encompassing many characters throughout – and remains one of the best trial movies ever made. It doesn’t quite have the originality that it must have had in 1959, but it is a great film nonetheless.

5. The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut)
The 400 Blows was Francois Truffaut’s first film – and perhaps his best one. It is certainly among his most personal films. It details the life of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a young teenager who is essentially abandoned and judged by all the adults in his life. His mother never wanted him, and all these years later he remains merely a distraction for her from what she really wants. She is often cruel and dismissive of him and why she tries to be nice, it comes across as disingenuous. His stepfather is nice to him – but doesn’t really care about him. His teacher hates him. And on and on it goes – he meets many adults in his life, and none of them really seem to care about him – mistreat him, don’t understand him. He runs away, again, at the end of the film and ends up at the ocean with nowhere else to go. This was Truffaut’s life, and it shows, in effect, how cinema saved him – gave him something to love. It is one of the biggest films about children ever made.

4. Some Like it Hot (Billy Wilder)
Billy Wilder has made some of the best comedies of all time – and while I think he has made greater comedies than Some Like It Hot, I’m not sure he ever made one that was out and out funnier than this one. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis gives great performances as two musicians who witness a murder – and disguise themselves as women to escape the mob. The film is a classic screwball comedy in the best sense – in that it is utterly hilarious, the plot barely matters, and the acting is superb. Jack Lemmon has never been funnier than he is here – especially when he’s paired up with Joe E. Brown as a millionaire who falls in love with him as a woman (and Lemmon may consider marrying for security). He carries his part of the movie effortlessly, and when teamed up with Curtis, they make one of the best comedy duos in history. For his part, Curtis is great paired up with Marilyn Monroe – who never gets the respect she deserves because most directors just used her as an sexual object. But Wilder uses Monroe’s sexuality to great effect – and teamed up with Curtis, one of the fastest talking actors in history, she more than holds her own. Some Like it Hot has been copied so many times since, but it has never been surpassed for a movie of its type. It remains one of the greatest comedies to ever come out of Hollywood.

3. North By Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock)
North by Northwest is perhaps the quintessential Alfred Hitchcock film. It isn’t his best, but it’s the one that takes everything that Hitchcock was doing before and throws it together in one deliriously entertaining thriller. It has a classic Hitchcock setup – Cary Grant plays a man who is pursued by mysterious agents across the country because they think he is someone else. He has no idea why they want him, but his first encounter with James Mason makes him realize he doesn’t want to be caught. He tries to find the man they really want, leading him all over the country. The film is fast paced and exciting – the iconic cornfield sequence is brilliant, as is the finale on the top of Mount Rushmore. Grant was the perfect foil for this movie, and he is supported wonderfully well by the evil Mason, and the cold blond Eva Marie Saint as the woman who helps him. Hitchcock was a master at playing the audience, and he plays them perfectly in this film.

2. Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks)
Rio Bravo is perhaps the best film that Howard Hawks ever directed – and considering his career that is saying something. It is also one of the most influential films ever made – it has been copied repeatedly by just about everyone, and yet no one has quite beat it. It has a simple story – four men – a Sheriff (John Wayne), a drunk (Dean Martin), a gunslinger kid (Ricky Nelson) and a old coot (Walter Brennan) are holed up inside the Sheriff’s office protecting a prisoner that the whole town wants to get at. There is even a romantic interest for Wayne in the form of Angie Dickinson. Yet this movie, that seems so chock full of clichés – works amazingly well. It’s because the characters, and their relationship to each other, feel real and unforced. And because Hawks was an amazing visual director who loads every scene with suspense, a feeling of unease and impending violence. This is one of Wayne’s best performances – he remains silent and authoritative, which is when he was at his best. Hawks would use this same formula himself in two other films starring Wayne – El Dorado and Rio Lobo – and while both are good, Rio Bravo is a masterpiece.

1. Room at the Top (Jack Clayton)
Despite being an Oscar winning film, Room at the Top is not as well remembered today as it should be. It is one of the first gritty, realistic British films – the start of the British New Wave if you will – is daring in its sexual content, and is also one of the strongest indictments of social climbing and corporate culture I can remember. Laurence Harvey gives an excellent performance as Joe, a young man who arrives in the city from his lower class factory town. He sets his sights on Susan (Heather Sears), the daughter of the richest man in the district – who doesn’t approve of their relationship and sends her away. Meanwhile, Joe starts seeing Alice (Simone Signoiret), an unhappily married older woman who falls in love with him. However, when Susan returns, Joe seduces her and gets her pregnant – meaning that he will finally get to married his way up in social standing – even as if makes him, and even more so Alice, miserable. This is not an easy movie – it isn’t one that wraps everything up into a happy ending, but instead is a tragedy because Joe is such a prick, and he uses everyone around him for his own devices. The acting in superb – not only Harvey and Signoiret, who won the Oscar this year, but the entire cast, including Hermione Baddeley – who made such an impression in just over two minutes of screen time as Alice’s friend, that she got nominated for an Oscar herself. Room at the Top deserves to be ranked among the best British films of all time – and considering the films on this list which I think this is better then, the best films from anywhere.

Just Missed The Top 10: Ben-Hur (William Wyler), Compulsion (Richard Fleischer), Floating Weeds (Yashujiro Ozu), Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais), On the Beach (Stanley Kramer), Shadows (John Cassavetes), Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi).

Notable Films Missed: Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus) , The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens), Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa), The Indian Tomb (Fritz Lang), Kaagaz Ke Phool (Guru Dutt), The Nun’s Story (Fred Zinneman), Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher), The Sign of Leo (Erich Rohmer), Le Trou (Jacques Becker), The World of Apu (Satyajit Ray).

Oscar Winner – Best Picture & Director: Ben-Hur (William Wyler)
What can one say about Ben-Hur. It is the type of HUGE epic that Hollywood has forgotten how to make these days – for better and for worse. The film is exciting, and has some interesting homoerotic subtext in it that seems obvious today, even though apparently went over most people’s head in 1959 (including Heston’s, who insists there was no subtext in the film, just like when he would portray Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ectasy, he would insist that he did a lot of research and that Michelangelo was assuredly not gay). The film has many great moments in it. But for me, as entertaining and well made as it is, it also drags in places as almost any movie that is three and half hours long undoubtedly would. It is still a motion picture spectacle of the highest order – but it isn’t one I want to revisit any time soon.

Oscar Winner – Best Actor: Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur
Charlton Heston was nowhere near the best actor in the world – but he was good in roles like this, that required little more of him than to be square jawed and stoic. His performance as Ben-Hur certainly carries the film – and is also an intensely physical performance – but he remains one of the least interesting characters in the film for me. In a way, that is necessary – with so much going on around him, the film needs a rock at the center, and Heston perfectly embodied said rock. Yet it doesn’t particularly make it the best performance of the year. At least three of other nominees – Laurence Harvey, Jack Lemmon, and James Stewart – were better than Heston, who certainly benefited from the Ben-Hur sweep.

Oscar Winner – Best Actress: Simone Signoret, A Room at the Top
Simone Signoiret embodied tragedy better than almost any other actress I can think of. Remember her great performances after A Room at the Top – her work in the over bloated Ship of Fools seems tragically real, her performance as the doomed resistance fight in Army of Shadows is heartbreaking. She was one of those rare actresses who got sexier as she got older – and in Room at the Top she is at the peak of her acting ability. Watch the film and try to not let her break your heart – you will fail.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actor: Hugh Griffth, Ben-Hur
This win has always somewhat mystified me. Yes, Hugh Griffth is great fun (if you can get over the inherent racism of the role) as a Sheik slave trader. But in nearly three and half hours of movie, he’s barely in the damn thing. Much better would have been Stephen Boyd, who is far and away the best in the film, as Ben-Hur’s rival (and according to screenwriter Gore Vidal, former lover as well. He let Boyd in on the secret, but not Heston, giving their scenes together an odd, but wonderful, feel to them). Of the nominees, I easily would have gone with George C. Scott as the prosecutor in Anatomy of a Murder.

Oscar Winner – Best Supporting Actress: Shelley Winters, The Diary of Anne Frank
I really don’t have an excuse for not watching The Diary of Anne Frank – other than the fact that I have seen so many Holocaust films that there are often times when I don’t think I could watching another one – especially a long one. I have faith that Shelley Winters is great in her role – she always was great, even if the Academy wouldn’t nominate her for her best work in Night of the Hunter or Lolita. Personally, I think it would have been great for the Academy to give the Oscar to Susan Kohner’s groundbreaking work, or even Juanita Moore’s heartbreaking work, in Imitation of Life – but how can melodrama really compete with the Holocaust at the Oscars?

Movie Review: South of the Border

South of the Border ***
Directed By: Oliver Stone.

Subtlety has never been one of the words anyone would associate with Oliver Stone. His brash, in your face style is one of those things admirers like myself like about him, and what drives his many detractors absolutely nuts. As a narrative filmmaker, Stone is responsible for some of the best films of the 1980s and ‘90s, although he has struggled a little bit in the past decade or so. When Stone decides to make a documentary – which he on the subjects of Fidel Castro and Israel – the directorial pyrotechnics may not be there, but they are undeniably the work of the same filmmaker. Stone’s documentaries make no effort to be fair or balanced or neutral – he has a point of view, and you’re going to find out what it is.

His latest documentary is South of the Border, which looks at the socialist revolution in Latin America – started by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela a decade ago, and spreading through countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Stone travels to all of these countries and meets their leaders – and then stops off in Cuba on his way to talk to new President Raul Castro as well. Stone fawns over them, painting them as socialist revolutionaries, proper descendents of the Cuban revolution (which hurts his case, because unlike the other leaders, Castro has never been elected – it truly is a dictatorship).

Stone fawns over the leaders, which can wear thin at times. I really didn’t need to see him play soccer with Bolivian President Eco Morales. He also never really pushes any of the leaders – doesn’t question anything that they have done, and quickly dismisses against arguments against them without proper support or backup.

Having said that though, South of the Border is a fascinating movie, if for no other reason than it paints an entirely different view of these leaders than the American media has used – they have been called drug addicts, brutal dictators (although all of them, with the exception of Castro as noted above, were democratically elected), enemies of America, compared to Hitler and worse. Stone paints them as men from humble beginnings – which in almost all cases, they are, who want to throw off the yoke of American imperialism, and fight against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) who impose restrictions on them. They want to be treated as equals by America – not as their subordinates.

These are legitimate aims, and as long as the people in these countries elect them as their leaders, they should be able to do as they see fit. When Chavez was ousted – for all of a day – many in America praised the overthrow, before having to take a step back when he was reinstated, and admit that the military should not really be overthrowing the democratically elected leaders of their countries – no matter how they may be behaving.

Stone begins his movie with snippets of the Western media – mostly from Fox News – criticizing Chavez and the rest of the leaders – he also liberally sprinkles in their thoughts throughout. And that is why I think that South of the Border, despite its obvious flaws, is a valuable film. It may not offer a proper corrective of the news media – it swings far too wide the other way for that to be true – but it gives the leaders a chance to speak unencumbered by the commentary supplied by Fox News and the rest of the American media. Whether you believe what they say or not, isn’t really the point – the point is that they are given the opportunity at all. I think that a great documentary can be made about these leaders, and the changing political landscape in South America. In order to be that documentary, the filmmakers would have to look at both the positives and negatives of all of these countries. If Fox News paints them as evil supervillians and Oliver Stone paints them pretty much as saints, I can guarantee you that the truth, as always, lies somewhere between these two extremes.

Movie Review: Boxing Gym

Boxing Gym ***
Directed By: Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman is a legendary documentary filmmaker – one of the most well regarded directors that the genre has ever had. He has been making films since the 1960s, and according to IMDB has 39 director credits, has won Emmys and Peabody award, and is generally considered a master at the form. So it is somewhat embarrassing to admit that before I saw Boxing Gym at the Toronto Film Festival, I had never seen a film by him. Mind you, the fact that most of his films rarely get a wide distribution, and mainly play on PBS, may have made them harder to see, so I’ll use that as my excuse.

I think Boxing Gym was a good way to introduce myself to this filmmaker. Many of his documentaries are epic in length – three hours or more – and walking into a film that long without a real idea of what to expect could have been a daunting task. But Boxing Gym clocks in at a lean 91 minutes.

The film is an observational documentary – meaning that unlike most documentaries we see, this isn’t a film full of talking heads and archival footage, but instead a film where Wiseman simply sets up his camera in a location and lets the people there act the way they normally do. In the past he has done this with hospitals, welfare offices, housing projects, state legislature, boot camps and ballet companies. In Boxing Gym, it is a small gym in Austin, Texas, run by Robert Lords. Through the action we see people from all walks of life, all different skill levels come in a train to become boxers. We see the pros trying to gear themselves up for real fights, children just learning the art, housewives trying to stay in shape, and older men who always wanted to become boxers, but never did anything about it until now. They are all different, yet share something as well – the passion for the sport, and the willingness to learn.

The movie has a wonderful rhythm to it, established by Wiseman in his editing. There is no artificial music in the film, but the sounds of the gym – the punching of the speed bags, people pounding on the heavy bags, trainers barking out orders, the constant beeping letting you know a set has finished – establish the rhythm of the movie better than any score could have. There are stretches of time where we do little else but watch as one guy trains by himself, and the result is almost hypnotic, as we fall into his same rhythm.

Wiseman has said he has always been fascinated by violence, particularly institutionalized violence, and here he finds a way to examine the same subject from a different point of view. It is impossible not to watch these guys train, and not think what they are training to do – beat someone else up. Wiseman established connections to other forms of violence subtlety in the opening and closing montages – showing us the Texas University football stadium, and other images. And he reaches beyond the boxing gym when some of the members there discuss the Virginia Tech shooting, which happened while Wiseman was filming, amongst themselves. Wiseman, unlike many documentarians today, never insets himself into the action, or into the conversations, but rather shapes his documentaries by what he shows us – not what he tells us.

Boxing Gym was an interesting experience for me. I don’t think it is a great documentary, but I do think it is one made with great skill and precision. It makes me want to delve into the documentaries of Wiseman’s past to see what else he has come up with. I can’t think of any other higher praise than that.

Movie Review: Freakonomics

Freakonomics ***
Directed by: Seth Gordon (Introduction and Interludes), Morgan Spurlock (A Roshanda by Any Other Name), Alex Gibney (Pure Corruption), Eugene Jarecki (It’s Not Always a Wonderful Life), Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady (Can a Ninth Grader Be Bribed to Succeed).
Written By: Seth Gordon and Jeremy Chilnick & Morgan Spurlock and Peter Bull & Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki and Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady based on the book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

The omnibus film has been around for decades. While the idea of gathering a group of highly respected filmmakers together to make short films, all based around a single theme, seems like a good idea, the result is rarely very satisfying. The new film, Freakonomics, applies the formula to the documentary genre – taking the best selling book by Steven Levit and Stephen Dubner as its model. And while the film is not great, it is entertaining, involving and fascinating. In this instance, it actually worked.

The film assembles documentaries Seth Gordon (The King of Kong), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight) and Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp), all of whom, except for Gordon who provides the introduction, and various other interludes between the other longer segments, take a section from the book and make a documentary out of it. While all the films are different, I think they are about equal in terms of quality.

Spurlock’s A Roshanda By Any Other Name, is the first segment. As a filmmaker, I find Spurlock increasingly annoying and smug, but his segment has an undeniably fascinating subject matter, that although Spurlock sticks his nose into a little too much, he cannot ruin. The film looks at the effect something as simple as a name can have on a person. For instance, one social scientist did a study where he sent out the exact same resume to the exact same companies – half with the typically white name Greg, and the other half with the typically black name Tyrone – and discovered that Greg got called for an interview more often than Tyrone did. The film also looks at what effect a name can have on your personality, and what it says about your socio-economic background. The result is a fascinating, amusing documentary about identity.

The next segment is Alex Gibney’s Pure Corruption, which is probably the best of the four docs on display. It looks at a very strange issue – cheating in the world of sumo wrestling, which is supposed to be a very pure sport. The result of analysis of the data suggests that cheating runs through sumo from top to bottom – and most people overlook it because they consider the system pure. Each sumo tournament has a wrestler go through 15 bouts – if you win 8 or more battles, you get more money and more prestige, and if you lose 8 or more, you are shamed. The study finds that almost every time a wrestler with a record of 7-7 goes against a wreslter with a record of 8-6 in the final round, that the 7-7 wrestler almost always wins, yet the next time these two wrestlers meet, the 8-6 wrestler wins. The system is so ingrained in their sport, that violence and even murder have been perpetuated to keep people silent about it. Gibney is on shakier ground when he tries to extrapolate this to the larger, political and economic system in America (if he had more time perhaps he could have done this part properly and more thoroughly – but the result is a fascinating little doc nonetheless.

Eugene Jarecki’s It’s Not Always A Wonderful Life is the most innovative, and controversial, of the shorts. Intercutting scenes of the Frank Capra classic, with animation and statistics, the documentary tries to explain the decrease in violent crime of the early 1990s with the Roe vs. Wade decision. The documentary claims that all the factors given as to why there was such a dramatic decrease in violent crime represented only about 50% of the reason – the other 50% is because a generation of unwanted children – those being the most likely to turn to crime – were not born. It’s a controversial theory, one that cannot wholly be backed up – but offers much food for thought – especially when it shows that those states where abortion was legal before Roe vs. Wade experienced a drop in crime ahead of the rest of the country, and in those states where abortions are more widely available, the crime rate dropped even more. This film is undoubtedly controversial, but like the best documentaries, offers you something interesting to think about.

Finally Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s segement, about a test where they tried to get 9th graders to do better in school by bribing them. Each student who maintained a C or better in every one of their classes, received $50 a month, and a chance to win an additional $500. The results of this test were disappointing – seemingly many kids simply don’t care about getting an education – but the process of the testing itself – and why it worked for some and not for others, was fascinating in and of itself.

Freakonomics is not a great documentary. For one thing, because of its format, none of these issues, which could probably each be a feature doc, were given quite as much time as perhaps they deserved. But the film does offer a lot to think about, and puts it all in an entertaining package. The result may not be great – but it sure is interesting.

DVD Review: Casino Jack and the United States of Money

Casino Jack and the United States of Money *** ½
Directed By: Alex Gibney.
Written By: Alex Gibney.

Jack Abramoff represents American politics at its worst and most corrupt. He was never elected to public office – never even had his name on a ballot – and yet he controlled much of what happened in Congress and the Senate. He was a lobbyist, who for a hefty fee, would represent your special interest group, and bend the ear of notable politicians. Because he was so close with Tom Delay, who at the time was the leader of the Republican party in Congress, he had a great deal of influence. He would take money from special interests, and then funnel it to politicians – after taking a healthy cut of the money himself. He became rich and powerful, and yet he kept pushing things further and further to the point where he was using his clients money to get politicians do things that were favorable only to Jack Abramoff. His clients, including numerous Native tribes who hired Abramoff to try and either get permission to open a casino, or to shut down a rival one, were billed millions upon millions of dollars, and got nothing back in return. Eventually, when the whole scheme became known, it caused one of the biggest political scandals in Washington since Watergate.

Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side) is one of the best documentary filmmakers in the world right now. His films have a way of taking an incredibly complicated issue – and one that you would think would make for a horribly boring movie – and making it easy to understand, and even entertaining. Casino Jack and the United States of Money won’t really tell you anything about Jack Abramoff or the scandal he was involved in than you already know if you followed the case closely when it erupted into a scandal during the Bush years, but still offers a valuable service – it gathers and distills everything that happened into one two hour, entertaining documentary package. Watching the film, you may be shocked at home deep the corruption really went – Jack Abramoff may have been the worst apple in the barrel, but he was hardly the only rotten one.

The movie paints a picture of Abramoff as a man who never did anything unless it benefitted himself. He got his start in politics with the College Republicans in the early 1980s, where he was around many of the people who would make up the Neo-Conversative movement, and he would exploit these contacts in future years when they rose to power. Abramoff tried his hand at movie producing – thinking that an action movie like Red Scorpion could reach more people with its anti-Communist rhetoric than anything else he could do. But that quickly failed, and Abramoff was in Washington remaking himself as a lobbyist.

The movie displays the tangled web that Abramoff wove – how he exploited Native tribes and their casinos, to fill his own pockets, how he became involved in buying a group of floating casinos, and did so using connections he had that themselves were related to the mob. Also how he exploited a group of small islands, technically under US control, but not subject to their labor laws, to allow a system of forced servitude and prostitution. It’s a ugly picture.

When the scandal finally came to light – helped along by other lobbyists who reported Abramoff to the Washington Post, perhaps because they were really disgusted with what he was doing, or perhaps only because he was better at it, everyone was quick to jump on Abramoff and distance themselves from him. The hearings, run by John McCain, who had his own reasons to hate Abramoff (he had backed Bush in 2000, and funneled all his clients money to him, and not McCain) offered up a scapegoat in Congressman Bob Ney (who deserved it, but was far from the only one involved), forced the resignation of Tom DeLay, but was really just a bunch of sabre rattling. McCain, gearing up for his next Presidential run, didn’t want to upset Republicans too much, so he didn’t.

But what Casino Jack and the United States of Money makes clear is that the whole system is corrupt. It costs a lot of money to run for any public office, and if you cannot get people like Jack Abramoff to steer their clients to you, you cannot get the money you need. If you want to advance in your party, you had better be able to fundraise, and to do that, again you need people like Jack Abramoff. Abramoff essentially was the lobbyist who got his hand caught in the cookie jar – he was stupid enough to put everything he was doing in writing in e-mails to his partner Mike Scanlon, but he is hardly the only corrupt lobbyist in Washington. Although this scandal involves Republicans, there are Democrats who do the same thing. And the system is not likely to change – since the people with the power to change it, are the same ones that benefit most from the system being corrupt. I suspect that in the future, we will see more Jack Abramoff’s – the system as it currently is requires there to be.

Note: In December, George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack, a dramatic film with Kevin Spacey as Abramoff will open in the hope of an Oscar run. I saw that film at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and it as well is a highly entertaining look at Abramoff. The two films would make an interesting double bill – this one being an up close examination of what Abramoff actually did, and Hickenlooper’s being a dramatic representation of the man himself, who for obvious reasons barely appears in the documentary except in the form of video clips. The two films enhance each other.

Movie Review: Jackass 3-D

Jackass 3-D * ½
Directed by: Jeff Tremaine.
Written By: Preston Lacy.
Starring: Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Ryan Dunn, Steve-O, Jason Acuña, Preston Lacy, Chris Pontius, Ehren McGhehey, Dave England, Loomis Fall.

I had planned on skipping Jackass 3-D, seeing as how I wasn’t really a fan of the show or either of the movie before it. But then it went ahead and set box office records its first weekend, so I decided that I should actually see it and review it (something similar may happen since I missed Paranormal Activity 2 this weekend). Watching the film feels pretty much like watching the first two films. I’m not sure that any of them really even qualify as a movie – there is no plot, no characters, not even an attempt at any. Instead what we get is a series of stunts – some clever and funny some just gross – pulled off by a group of men, who now must be in their mid 30s but to say they have the maturity of teenagers would be insulting to teens. Everyone seems to like it when they get hurt, but miraculously no one ever seems to be seriously injured.

The only new addition to this film that the previous did not have is 3-D. I am on record as thinking that 3-D really doesn’t add anything to most movies – really only Avatar benefitted from the technology, and that’s because James Cameron took the time, energy and money necessary to actually make the technology work for his movie, and not against it. On that level, I have to say that I don’t really know if 3-D added anything to Jackass, but unlike films like The Last Airbender, Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, it didn’t take anything away from it either. It places you more in the middle of the action than any of the previous films – but I’m not sure I really wanted to be there.

There are, I suppose, a number of ways you can look at Jackass. I know that some critics have placed these movies in the tradition of the surrealists – filmmakers like Luis Bunuel, whose early films like Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or also didn’t feature things like plot or character, but used a series of shocking images to stun the audience. I have never really followed that logic, because after all, I do think Bunuel had a larger purpose in mind – especially in L’Age D’or, whereas I have to think that the folks behind Jackass just think it is really, really find it funny to see people doing stupid things and getting hurt, or covered in shit, or vomiting, etc. That is the second way to look at Jackass – just as a bunch of idiots delighting in hurting themselves and each other, and grossing out an audience while they do it. Jackass 3-D is the first film this year that really did make me want to vomit (although to be fair, I have not seen The Human Centipede yet, and at this point, I am doubting whether I ever will). But while to most movies, saying that it made me want to vomit would be an insult, I don’t think the people behind this movie would mind – it would probably bring them some sort of warped satisfaction.

I don’t really feel the need to go into what happens in the movie – because after all, if you are going to see the film, then half the fun is waiting to see what stupid crap they will pull next, and reading about it would simply ruin it. I will say I found some of the stunts clever – and I liked it more when the boys were pulling jokes not just on each other, but on unsuspecting members of the public as well (there is a degree of overlap between films like Jackass and the work of Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat and Bruno).

Jackass 3-D is one of those rare movies that is critic proof. It doesn’t matter what I say, anyone who wants to see it already will, or already has and anyone who doesn’t, couldn’t be dragged there. It is also one of those movies that makes it almost impossible to assign a star rating to. On one hand, the film is sick and disgusting, and serves no real purpose, and can hardly be classified as a movie at all, except for the fact that it is playing at a movie theater. On the other hand, Jackass 3-D is one of only a handful of films this year that is 100% the film its makers wanted it to be. There are no compromises – they set out to make the exact film you see on the screen. So I was torn – do I give the film zero stars, because it’s so disgusting, or three stars because despite how disgusting it is, it achieves what it sets out to do. I decided to split the difference. The odd thing is no matter what star rating I gave the film, I don’t think I’d have to change a word of this review.

Movie Review: Carlos

Carlos ****
Directed by: Olivier Assayas.
Written By: Olivier Assayas & Dan Franck.
Starring: Édgar Ramírez (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez), Alexander Scheer (Johannes Weinrich), Nora von Waldstätten (Magdalena Kopp), Ahmad Kaabour (Wadie Haddad), Talal El-Jordi (Kamal al-Issawi 'Ali'), Alejandro Arroyo (Dr. Valentín Hernández), Christoph Bach (Hans-Joachim Klein 'Angie’), Rodney El Haddad (Anis Naccache 'Khalid'), Julia Hummer (Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann 'Nada'), Antoine Balabane (Général al-Khouly), Rami Farah ('Joseph’), Zeid Hamdan ('Youssef), Badih Abou Chakra (Cheikh Yamani).

The sheer length of Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, 330 minutes or five and half hours, will probably intimidate most viewers from ever seeing this masterpiece. But it shouldn’t. Carlos is a propulsive, energetic film – one that flies along for its entire length. Although this is undoubtedly the longest film of the year, it doesn’t feel that long at all. I am reminded of what Roger Ebert said about the length of films – no great film is too long, and no bad film is short enough. And this is a great film.

Illich Ramirez Sanchez will forever be known by his code name – Carlos (or perhaps Carlos the Jackal, a code name that Assayas refuses to name once during the running time). He was a Venezuelan born terrorists who came to Europe in the early 1970s, and soon rose in the ranks of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to be second in command of the European operations. He became a media star in France when he killed three police officers and went on the run – he became internationally well known when he lead a daring raid on a OPEC Summit, where he kidnapped all the oil ministers, and got the Austrian government to give him a plane, and then took the ministers on a journey back and forth across Europe. He wasn’t arrested for either of these crimes, and while his higher ups in the PFLP hated the attention he got, he reveled in it. When he was thrown out of the group, he went into business for himself – taking contracts from pretty much whoever would pay him. The 1980s and 90s were a long, slow period of decline for him – with fewer and fewer people willing to contract his services, fewer governments willing to let him into their countries, and yet fewer intelligence agencies who actually care where he was. Like many a celebrity, he started from nowhere, become a star, and then slowly slipped into being a nobody again. When he was finally arrested, he was most likely relieved – at least it showed that someone still cared about him.

Assayas’ film documents Carlos’ actions from about 1970 until the time he is arrested in the mid-1990s. This is not one of the biopics who tries to trace Carlos’ psychological makeup – no scenes of him as a child being warped by his parents, no real insight into the man at all, but rather focuses on his actions. And to me, that makes the film all the more fascinating. Carlos was a man who fancied himself a revolutionary – fighting for the underclass – but unlike someone like Che Guerrva, jungle warfare didn’t interest him much. He had too much of a taste for the finer things in life – fast cars, nice clothes, nice cigars and women. The number of women he takes to bed in this movie is perhaps greater than the number of people he killed. He apparently never sees a contradiction between his fight for the underclass, and his own media celebrity – something he positively reveled in. It is fascinating to see Carlos transform in this film – the break seemingly coming half way through the second part, when he agrees to let the oil ministers go against the direct orders of his boss, in exchange for money. Although he would still claim to be fighting for the cause for the rest of his life, it becomes clear that to Carlos, his own wealth and fame have taken priority over everything else. He also undergoes a fascinating physical transformation – something Assayas shows us in multiple scenes throughout the movie of Carlos’s naked body, which goes from tight and toned at the beginning of the movie, and ending up bloated to excess by the end.

Assayas’ filmmaking here is impeccable, and puts to shame most action filmmakers in America. The film may seem more like the work of a filmmaker like Michael Mann than the same director whose last film was the highly acclaimed, French drama Summer Hours – about a family drifting apart after the death of the mother. And yet, the two films are undeniably of the same maker. Assayas’ obsession in his career has been about globalization – from films like demonlover to Boarding Gate to Clean to Summer Hours, this has been a constant theme. And nowhere is this more prevalent than here – a film that takes places all across Europe (England, France, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Russia, Algiers), the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon) and finally into Africa (Sudan), Carlos represented a global terrorist threat, long before we started talking about Al Qaeda. Assyas’s attention to detail – in the cinematography, art direction and costume design – is marvelous.

Perhaps the key to the success of the movie is Edgar Ramirez’s performance as Carlos. He is at the heart of pretty much every scene, and it’s fascinating to watch his performance evolve. Carlos was always a charming man – with his dealing with women (especially in one sequence involving a woman and hand grenade), and with everyone else. He was someone capable of talking anyone into pretty much anything. He was also capable of great violence without feeling, and of course self aggrandizement (some critics have complained that some of the dialogue in the film is a little too on the nose, but I think it fits in with Carlos, and the self mythologizing he does throughout his life). Ramirez is surrounded by a great cast – all of which hit the right notes – but it is undeniably his film, and the actor gives the performance of a lifetime.

Coming to end of this review, I am at a loss as to what to say to get people to see the movie. True, it is five and half hours, meaning that you pretty much have to give your whole day over to seeing the film. And yet, this is a film that is so well made, so fascinating, and at the same time so exciting that it demands to be seen in its entirety. I know that Assayas has cut a two and half hour version of this film for release in some markets, and I suspect because he did it himself, that it is a fine film. But Assayas has made a grand epic here – why would anyone watch to watch a trailer, when the whole thing is available. This is one of the year’s best. Miss it at your own peril.