DVD Review: Elena

Elena

Directed by: Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Written by: Andrey Zvyagintsev & Oleg Negin.

Starring: Nadezhda Markina (Elena), Andrey Smirnov (Vladimir), Elena Lyadova (Katerina), Aleksey Rozin (Sergey).

Elena is a film that I found to full of surprises. When the movie began, I thought I knew precisely where everything was going to go – and why we would end up there. And while the events of the movie play out pretty much how I expected them to, their meaning is a hell of lot deeper, and more troublesome, than I expected. And I mean that as a compliment. I thought this was going to be another screed about the rich being greedy, and the poor having to scratch and claw their way for everything – but it’s much more than that.

The film stars Nadezhda Markina in the title role, and it’s a remarkably subtle performance. Years ago, when she was a nurse, she had to take care of the rich Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) in his home. Their relationship has changed over the years, but only in its name, as Elena is no longer his nurse but his wife. But they still have separate bedrooms, and she still pretty much waits on him hand and foot. Vladimiri is rich, and Elena is not, and even though they are married, that hasn’t changed. The money is still his and his alone. Yes, he supports her – but only her. He doesn’t want her to give any money to her son from a previous marriage – although she does give him her pension since Vladimir supports her. Even when she comes to him saying she needs money to help her grandson out – if he cannot afford to pay for college, which his family with an unemployed father and a new baby at home cannot, he’ll have to join the army – Vladimir rejects the idea. Her son should support his own family – Vladimir married Elena, not her whole family. When Vladimir has a heart attack, he decides that it is finally time to draw up a will. Most of the money will go to his single, childless daughter Katerina (Elena Lyadova), but Elena will be given an annuity with monthly payments which he is sure will be more than enough to see to her needs. He tells Elena this the day before his lawyer is going to come to see him and draw up the will. So what do you think Elena will do?

There are certainly elements of noir at play in this movie – Roger Ebert suggests that the movie could have been made in Hollywood in 1940s with Barbra Stanwyck in the title role, although I find it hard to believe than Stanwyck would ever play a woman who allows herself to be treated like a doormat like Elena does. The film did call to mind Mildred Pierce however – about a woman who sacrifices everything for her ungrateful bitch of a daughter. And writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev referenced Woody Allen’s Match Point as an inspiration – that film of course was another film about murder and class warfare, which ultimately ends with the main character getting away scot free to start his new life.

But Elena is more than a noir as well. It becomes a film about modern Russia – just a few decades removed from Communist rule, this Russia is still not a place you would to live. Vladimir’s house is Moscow is big and modern – but also cold and unfeeling, just like he is. Yes, this is a movie where the rich man is a greedy bastard – he could easily afford to help his wife, but won’t. It’s his money, he earned it, and he’s keeping it. But the poor don’t come off much better. Elena’s son, Sergey (Aleksey Rozin), really does seem to be the lazy, good for nothing layabout that Vladimir accuses him of being. His pretty wife seems a little dull and certainly not to bright – it’s hard to argue with Vladimir when he says if they cannot afford to have children, they should stop having them. And the grandson Sasha, is a violent, lazy, ungrateful brat. You could feel sympathy for these people if they were working hard to try and make ends meet, but they aren’t. They’re looking for a handout.

But there are two characters who are more complicated than they at first appear to me. One is, of course, Elena, who surprises herself by what she is capable of doing – and for a while, you feel good for her as she seems to want to stop being used as a doormat like Vladimir has been doing for years now. But then she falls right back into another smothering, domestic life – one that is perhaps even worse than the one she was living. The other character is Katerina, Vladimir’s daughter. We get a first impression of her just during a conversation between Vladimir and Elena – where he accuses her of being “just like her mother” and only caring about life’s luxuries and not the work that needs to be done to get them. And Elena is bitter with her because she doesn’t have to work – she has everything handed to her. When we first meet Katerina, we seem to have our suspicions about her confirmed – that she is nothing but a spoiled, lazy rich kid. But her first appearance is in a conversation between her and Elena – who obviously doesn’t like her. When she has a conversation with her dad, she comes across as much more sympathetic and likable – you almost feel sorry for her as she is trying to turn her life around. Besides, it’s not like she’s wrong about Elena or why she married her father.

Elena turns out to be a much more complex film than it appears to be at the beginning. What could have just been another modern noir, but this one is Russian, becomes something greater than that – and more complex. This is a film to track down.

DVD Review: Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

Directed by: Matthew Akers.

In 2010, The Museum of Modern Art in New York did a retrospective of performance artist Marina Abramovic’s work. It’s hard to do a retrospective of a performance artist, but essentially the museum had videos of her past performances, and a number of younger artists recreating her work – including two nude models facing each other in a narrow doorway, where the audience has to squeeze through. For this retrospective, Abramovic did one new “piece”, named after the exhibit itself – The Artist is Present. This consisted of Abramovic sitting in a chair on one side of a table with another chair at the other side. One audience member after another sits in that chair across from her, and the two simply stare at each other. You aren’t allowed to talk to her, nor was she allowed to talk to you, nor were you allowed to try and distract her. You simply sat there and stared at each other.

I know a lot of people who read that paragraph are asking the same question I asked myself when I heard about the film – and the same question Ambramovic says she has gotten more than any other throughout her career – “Why is that art?” She says no one asks her that anymore, which either means after 40 years as a performance artist that people are finally beginning to “get” her, or perhaps they are just pretending to – not wanting to admit to anyone that they don’t get her. I cannot begin to describe why this is art, but after watching the movie, I am convinced that it is. Some art does not need an explanation or at least defies explanation, and I think that is true of this piece by Abramovic. I cannot articulate why this is art, but I am sure it is.

Marina Ambramovic: The Artist is Present is a fascinating, entertaining documentary. The first half of the movie details Ambramovic’s career up to this point, with a focus on her 12 year collaboration with Ulay, another performance artist, who was also her boyfriend during that time. They spent nearly all their time together during those years, and their performances were meant to pull the mask off of male/female relationships, to show them in all their cruelty and violence, which very well maybe what ended up driving them apart. After the split, they both continued with their careers, but she became much more successful – in part because her new manager found ways to make money off of performance art, which is always a hard thing to do. She and Ulay hadn’t seen each other in 23 years, but he agrees to take part in her new exhibit – to be the first person sitting across the table from her.

The second half of the documentary is essentially solely about that new piece – it shows the toll it takes on Abramovic day after day (she’s there 7 and a half hours a day, 6 days a week for 3 months), but mainly it shows the people who are participating in the piece – those sitting across from her and those who sit back and observe them. Some of the people who stare at her are filled with joy, others with sorrow, and many begin to cry. People come back day after day, time after time, just to get a chance to be a part of this event. In all, she ends up sitting across from about 10,000 people.

It was this second half that convinced me what Abramovic was doing was art – not the first half where her assistants or the curator at MOMA or Ulay or Abramovic herself talking about the piece and what it means, but in actually watching the people and their reaction to the piece. I was reminded, oddly enough, of something Roger Ebert wrote about Jean Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, a film that both he and I disliked immensely, where he said that the film was essentially about whatever you thought about while watching it. Ebert, and myself, had no idea what the hell Godard was trying to say in the film, so the film became solely what we, as audience members, thought while watching the film – and for me anyway, mostly I thought about how bored I was. In a very real way, The Artist is Present, Abramovic’s piece, not the film, is also about whatever the audience member sitting across from Abramovic is thinking – she essentially becomes a mirror, and each audience member sees whatever it is they want to see in her. Unlike most art, where the message is the same for everyone who witnesses it, because the artist puts the effort in once, and everyone sees the same end result, Abramovic’s piece changes every time. Every individual who sits across from her gets the same amount of effort focused solely on them.

So no, I cannot put into words why what Abramovic did at MOMA was art, so I’m not even going to begin to try. But art is was. And like much great art, it requires artist participation and thought – you have to become an active participant in the art as an observer, or else there is no art.

DVD Review: 2016: Obama's America

2016: Obama’s America

Directed by: Dinesh D'Souza & John Sullivan.

Written by: Dinesh D'Souza & John Sullivan based on the books by D’Souza.

I would be interested in seeing a documentary critical of President Obama’s first term as President. When he was elected in 2008, a wave of hope swept America that Obama would actually be able to change things in Washington for the better – that he was a different type of politician and that his election signaled the end of politics as usual. Now, four years later when Obama is running for re-election that hope has changed – even for many of his die hard supporters – into simply saying that he is better than his opponent – Mitt Romney. Part of this disappointment was practically inevitable – expectations for Obama were impossibly high, and the Republicans in Congress and the Senate certainly did not work with Obama to solve anything. Yet, Obama is not above criticism, and there is a real case to be made about the disappointments of his first term. Unfortunately 2016: Obama’s America, which has become the highest grossing documentary of the year, is not really interested in making a serious case against Obama and his policies or his failures during his first term. Instead, it is a documentary that deliberately misstates facts, and in the films second half goes off into crazy conspiracy theories – pretty much arguing that Obama is not simply misguided or incompetent or wrong in his policies – but that Obama is deliberately trying to sabotage America from within and to destroy the entire country. Are there really people who believe this crap?

The film was co-written and co-directed by Dinesh D’Souza, based on two of his books – Obama’s Rage and Obama’s America. D’Souza was born in India, and came to America to attend Dartmouth, where he joined up with the Conservative group on campus, and became a Reaganite in the 1980s. D’Souza is obsessed with Obama, apparently because he sees a lot of similarities between himself and Obama and their upbringing, even though the two of them have taken such radically different paths during their lives. Despite all the inaccuracies in the film’s first half, this is where the documentary is at its best – when D’Souza compares and contrasts himself to the President. His theory that Obama’s entire worldview was shaped by the father he only met once in his life doesn’t really hold much water, but it is sort of fascinating to see him try and make his case. In fact, the most fascinating person in the movie turns out to be D’Souza himself, and not Obama. What it is about Obama that makes D’Souza so obsessed with him? He’s kind of like Bizarro Obama.

I could waste a lot of time listing the inaccuracies of the movie, but enough people have already done that, so I don’t think there’s much reason to do so. What I will say is that D’Souza’s theory about Obama’s anti-colonialism, and his radical socialism bordering on communism doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, and is based on nothing other than D’Souza’s wild speculations, backed up by nothing other than his own theories. He ties himself into knots trying to tie all of his theories together. In D’Souza’s mind, nothing is a simple coincidence, but evidence of a large effort that shaped Obama’s worldview. When his mother remarried an Indonesian man, this is because he reminded her of first husband, Obama’s father, because he was also a dark skinned man from the third world (this is a nice way of saying his mother had jungle fever). And when she sent him back to Hawaii to get an education instead of staying in Indonesia, this is because her second husband had a more pro-Western attitude than she was comfortable espousing young Barack to – not because the schools in America were better than in Indonesia. And because some in Hawaii are still angry at the way their country was annexed by America 100 years ago, this means Obama was taught a lot of “oppression studies’ in school there, and of course, believed it all. Because he had contact with some controversial people – from a card carrying member of the American Communist party who was a friend of his grandfathers, to being the student of some radical professors at college, who Obama was friendly with even after graduating, to the more well-known examples of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, that must mean Obama agrees with everything all of them have ever said. D`Souza even brings up a paper than Obama Sr. wrote in the 1960s saying that in theory there was nothing stopping the government from taxing people at 100% as long as they provided everything the citizens needed, and wonders aloud if this is what Obama means by the rich paying their “fair share”.

But if D`Souza`s strange speculations in the first half are half baked at best, it`s the second half of the movie that really bothered me – when D`Souza tries to predict what will happen if Obama were to win a second term. Well, according to this movie, you might as well shoot yourself in the head if Obama is re-elected, because it will most likely bring upon a virtual apocalypse where everything America has done during its history would effectively be destroyed, and the Muslim world would become a new superpower, and America would be left so deep in debt that the country would be destroyed, and everyone in the world except America would have nuclear weapons, so America would have no way to defend themselves. This would make a great science fiction dystopian movie, but since this is a documentary, there is nothing really to back any of that enough. D`Souza has a few actual facts in the movie, but the conclusions he reaches based on those facts are insane.

The success of 2016: Obama`s America shows nothing if not the fact that a large number of Americans are not satisfied with the job he is doing as President. Those people, and even Obama`s supporters, deserve a real commentary about the man and his politics – not the insane speculation and ranting that makes up most of this movie.

Movie Review: Argo

Argo

Directed by: Ben Affleck.

Written by: Chris Terrio based on the article by Joshuah Bearman.

Starring: Ben Affleck (Tony Mendez), Bryan Cranston (Jack O'Donnell), Alan Arkin (Lester Siegel), John Goodman (John Chambers), Victor Garber (Ken Taylor), Tate Donovan (Bob Anders), Clea DuVall (Cora Lijek), Scoot McNairy (Joe Stafford), Rory Cochrane (Lee Schatz), Christopher Denham (Mark Lijek), Kerry Bishé (Kathy Stafford), Kyle Chandler (Hamilton Jordan), Chris Messina (Malinov), Zeljko Ivanek (Robert Pender), Titus Welliver (Bates), Keith Szarabajka (Adam Engell), Bob Gunton (Cyrus Vance), Richard Kind (Max Klein), Taylor Schilling (Christine Mendez).

A lot of actors eventually try their hand at directing. Some do it simply as a vanity project or to prove to themselves they can actually do it. And some become filmmakers whose directing career eventually becomes even better than their acting career – Clint Eastwood for instance. Ben Affleck is more of the second type of actor. A few years ago, Affleck, the actor, had a string of disappointments on his resume and was most likely disappointed with how things had gone for the past few years. So he directed Gone Baby Gone (2007), a wonderful little crime movie that turned out to be much deeper than its genre roots suggested. He followed that up with The Town (2010), which was another fine crime film. With those two films, Affleck proved himself to be a director to watch – one with a definite skill and style. If he hadn’t quite crafted a great movie yet, he was surely on his way to doing so. His third film, Argo, is that great film.

Argo is a thriller, that if it wasn’t true, you couldn’t possibly believe it. As everyone knows, in 1979 Iranians stormed the American embassy and took all the workers their hostage. Six of those workers however escaped out a back door and ended up hiding in the Canadian ambassador’s house. No one knew they were there, and it had to stay that way. Eventually though, these six workers had to get out of the country – and no one has any idea how to do that. That is until Tony Mendez (Affleck), who specializes in getting people out of places that shouldn’t be, comes up with a gloriously absurd idea – the six embassy workers are really a Canadian film crew, scouting locations for a Star Wars rip-off that needs an exotic location, deserts, etc. Why wouldn’t a film crew want to shoot a movie in Iran during a hostage crisis?

It turns out making a fake movie isn’t as easy as you would think. The key to getting away with any lie is that the details have to be accurate. And so before he heads to Iran, Tony heads to L.A. He meets up with John Chambers (John Goodman), an Oscar winning make-up man and Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), a producer. They need to make Argo, the movie they are supposedly making, look real – they have a script, a poster, storyboards and even host a big event in Hollywood and get written up in Variety. Then Tony heads to Iran to train the embassy workers on their jobs, so they can head to the airport and all fly out together.

In some respects, Argo is almost two different movies – both of them great. On one hand, you have a Hollywood comedy not unlike Wag the Dog, where a Washington insider goes to a Hollywood producer to create a fake war, and the scenes in LA are mined for great comedic effect. John Goodman and especially Alan Arkin are great in their roles as Hollywood men, doing something not for fame or money, but simply because it is the right thing to do. These scenes are great for film buffs.

The other movie is much more delicate and hard to pull off – a thriller without chase sequences, shootouts or really any violence of any kind. It is easy to manufacture drama, and get audiences perched on the edge of their seats with those types of scenes, but Argo contains none of them. Instead, it is a breathless thriller where seemingly simple actions are heightened to an almost unbearable degree of suspense – where a simple questioning by the Imperial Guard becomes nail biting. This is where Affleck’s real accomplishment lay.

Affleck also casts his movie well – even the smallest roles are seemingly played by actors we recognize, and together they make up one of the best ensembles of the years. Arkin and Goodman are great, yes, as the Hollywood people. Even better though is Bryan Cranston, the best actor on TV right now, as Affleck’s CIA boss who is quick thinking, intelligent and has an acid tongued sense of humor, even in the most intense moments. Scoot McNairy is also wonderful as one of the embassy workers who doesn’t think they should be leaving.

Argo is gripping, exciting, funny entertainment. It’s rare to get someone attempting that mixture in a film – even more rare for a film to pull it. If Gone Baby Gone and The Town showed Affleck was a director with promise, Argo fulfills that promise.

Movie Review: Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths

Directed by: Martin McDonagh.

Written by: Martin McDonagh.

Starring: Colin Farrell (Marty), Sam Rockwell (Billy), Christopher Walken (Hans), Woody Harrelson (Charlie), Tom Waits (Zachariah), Abbie Cornish (Kaya), Olga Kurylenko (Angela), Zeljko Ivanek (Paulo), Harry Dean Stanton (Man in Hat), Linda Bright Clay (Myra), Long Nguyen (Vietnamese Priest), Michael Pitt (Larry), Michael Stuhlbarg (Tommy), Kevin Corrigan (Dennis), Gabourey Sidibe (Sharice), Christine Marzano (The Hooker), Amanda Mason Warren (Maggie).

The main character in Seven Psychopaths, written and directed by the Irish Martin McDonagh, is an Irish screenwriter named Martin, who has a brilliant title for his latest screenplay, Seven Psychopaths, but no story, and no real idea for who the seven psychopaths of the title are. Throughout the course of the movie the audience is watching, Martin will meet these psychopaths – or most of them anyway – and they will help him write his screenplay, which is presumably, the movie we are watching. This sort of blending of the movie we’re watching as it’s being written has been done before – most notably in Adaptation, where screenwriter Charlie Kaufman made himself, and his fictional twin brother Donald, the main characters – and when Charlie gets stuck and doesn’t know how to end his movie, his hack brother takes over and ends the movie with chases and violence and death. Martin McDonagh does a similar thing with Seven Psychopaths – the result may not be quite the triumph of Adaptation, but damn if he doesn’t come close. Oh, and Seven Psychopaths is also one of the most deliriously entertaining films of the year.

Marty (Colin Farrell) is an Irish screenwriter, who has been stuck for months, possibly because he is an alcoholic – that everyone seems to feel the need to remind him of in nearly every scene. The movie acknowledges that an Irishman being a drunk is a cliché, but merrily goes on its way anyway. His girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish) is getting frustrated with his drinking, and is on the verge of breaking with up with him. Meanwhile, his best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is a would be actor, who makes his money with a dog kidnapping scam he runs with Hans (Christopher Walken). Their new plan is to kidnap the dog of psychopathic mob man Charlie (Woody Harrelson), because he loves Shih Tzu Bonny so much they figure they can milk a lot of money out of him. But Charlie is even crazier than they realize, and soon is on the war path looking for his dog. Oh, and Marty is trying really hard to come up with stories for his seven psychopaths, and starts taking them for the headlines – a man known only as the Jack of Diamonds killer, who only kills mafia men and stories others have told him. When he still needs subjects, Billy places an ad in LA Weekly for psychopath to share their stories – and this is how they meet Zachariah (Tom Waits), his rabbit and his strange story. The only character that Marty has actually invented for his screenplay is a bitter ex-Vietcong soldier hell-bent on destroying America – but he doesn’t really want to use him because despite the title, he doesn’t want Seven Psychopaths to be just another psychopath movie. After the first half of the movie, in which a lot of people get killed in one bloody way after another, Marty decides that how he wants the movie to end is the main characters drive out to the desert and talk – and that’s precisely what he, Billy and Hans do. But Billy doesn’t want such a pussy ending to the movie, and decides to stack the deck in favor of what he wants.

If all of this makes Seven Psychopaths sound like a complicated movie that’s because it is. But it is also a wonderfully entertaining movie that embraces some clichés of the genre, and then explicitly mentions the clichés the film is embracing (like in a great conversation between Marty and Hans about his female characters) and then completely defies other ones. The actors fully embrace their roles, and while you would think that a movie with seven psychopaths would have a lot of overlap in terms of characters – you’d be wrong. All the psychos maybe psychos, but they are each uniquely their own psycho. Sam Rockwell has perhaps the showiest role of the bunch that uses his off-kilter grin that always looks slightly crazed anyway to great effect. Woody Harrelson has great fun chewing the scenery as an unrepentant psycho, and has even more fun becoming a little wuss when his dog is involved. Tom Waits plays Zachariah as pretty much only he could – scary, sad and sympathetic all at the same time. And Colin Farrell keeps the whole movie grounded – the only “normal” character in the film. Far and away the best performance in the movie however belongs to Christopher Walken. You pretty much have to cast Walken if you are making a movie called Seven Psychopaths, and yet Walken’s Hans is the most sympathetic character in the movie – and the wisest. Walken has fully embraced his weird screen persona, and whored it out so often in some many bad movies, you sometimes forget just how great – how subtle – he can be when given the right role. His Hans is a man with a tragic backstory, and really a tragic story arc in the movie, and yet unlike everyone else, he doesn’t embrace violence – he has moved beyond that. Walken’s performance is a comedic gem, but also strangely moving. It’s one of the best performances he has ever given.

Martin McDonagh has already won an Oscar (for his short film, Six Shooter) and crafted a great crime drama with his debut feature In Bruges, which gave Farrell his best role ever. With Seven Psychopaths he has made a crime drama that is a little more complicated – that toys with the genre and the audience – and is still an hilarious, violent, bloody example of the genre it is sending up. I cannot wait to see what he does next.

Movie Review: Antiviral

Antiviral
Directed by: Brandon Cronenberg.
Written by: Brandon Cronenberg.
Starring: Caleb Landry Jones (Syd March), Sarah Gadon (Hannah Geist), Malcolm McDowell (Dr. Abendroth), Douglas Smith (Edward Porris), Joe Pingue (Arvid), Nicholas Campbell (Dorian), Salvatore Antonio (Topp), Elitsa Bako (Vera), Milton Barnes (Salesman), Katie Bergin (Candyce).

Having the last name Cronenberg is probably both a blessing and curse for Brandon Cronenberg. Being the son of David Cronenberg, the best director to ever come out of Canada, means that in Canada’s small film industry, doors will more readily open for you than they would for someone else. Yet, the name also carries with it baggage – and more importantly expectations. I don’t think that no matter how made Antiviral that it would a “good” film, but I do know that myself (and others) might not so readily compare it to the work of David Cronenberg had it not been made by his son. Yes, the plot of the movie sounds like something David would have made when he was younger, but the connection would have been more tenuous if someone else had made the film. The result is a movie where you admire the intention and effort much more than the execution. I want to see what Brandon Cronenberg does next, even if I have to ultimately conclude that Antiviral doesn’t achieve what it sets out. It’s a good try though.

The film takes place in the not too distant future, where our culture’s celebrity fixation has grown to an even more unhealthy level than it currently is. In this society, there are companies who can infect you with the same virus your favorite celebrity has – you can suffer from the same cold, the same flu, even the same herpes as the object of your obsession if you want to. In addition, there are places where you can go and buy cloned cell steaks – so you can essentially eat the muscle tissue of a celebrity if you want to. And all of this has come to be perceived as normal.

Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works as a salesman selling these viruses to the people who come into his sterile, bright, all white office. He is a quiet, awkward little man, not as easy with chitchat as the other people who work for this large, faceless corporation. But it’s possible it’s because he almost always finds himself sick. Knowing there is a black market for these viruses; Syd injects himself with the latest viruses, goes home, draws his own blood and on a stolen machine, recreates the virus. He cannot get the virus out any other way – and this pays well. All he has to do is be sick most of the time.

One of the company’s biggest “sellers” is Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon). Whatever she is supposedly famous for is never mentioned – maybe an actress, a singer or someone famous for simply being famous. She has an “exclusive” contract with his company, selling her viruses just to them. Syd is sent to collect the latest of these from her, as she lies sick in her hotel room. He draws her blood, but before getting back to the office, he injects some it into himself – to save some time, and to ensure that he is the one who makes the money on the black market off this virus. The next day on the news he hears disturbing news – Hannah Geist is dead of some strange virus. And now, of course, he has it too, and has to find a way to cure himself – or die.

Depending on your tolerance for this type of story, the above plot description probably either sounds really interesting, or really stupid. To me, I found it interesting – at least reading the outline in the TIFF Program. The film’s obsession certainly falls in line with David Cronenberg’s obsession with body horror movies – where the threat to the protagonist does not come from some exterior threat, but something growing inside them (this is true of many of Cronenberg’s earlier movies from Shivers to Rabid to The Brood to Scanners to The Dead Zone to The Fly, and continues, in more subtle ways, throughout much of his work). I think our celebrity obsessed culture is ripe for mockery, and this type of film should be a fascinating exploration of the subject. Unfortunately, I don’t think Brandon Cronenberg ever truly thought this all out – he came up with an interesting idea, and then does very little with it. Based on his own short film, Broken Tulips, Antiviral feels like a short film stretched beyond all reason into a feature. So we get many repetitive scenes and scene after scene of exposition, since the plot is so needlessly complex the movie has to stop itself every few minutes to explain what the hell is happening. It certainly doesn’t help that in the lead role Caleb Landry Jones is pretty much a zombie – sleep walking through his role, seemingly trying to go for quiet intensity that instead comes across as silly. And the rest of the cast are given such thin roles that there is nothing that can be done with them – the best being Sarah Gadon, who at least is supposed to be a cipher in the film.

Still, Antiviral shows tremendous promise from Cronenberg – much more as a director than as a writer. The movie is full of striking images, that grow more and more disturbing as the movie goes along, culminating in a one of the more disturbing and sickening images of any film this year. I want to see what Brandon Cronenberg does next – where he goes from here. But I also think that he would be better served by taking on a movie that doesn’t bare quite so much resemblance to the movies that his father has already mastered.

DVD Review: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Directed by: Chad Freidrichs.
Written by: Chad Freidrichs & Jaime Freidrichs.

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was built in the 1950s in St. Louis – and was torn down about 20 years later. Because this was a public housing project, Pruitt-Igoe has long been held up as an example as to why this sort of public housing doesn’t work – and a way to demonize all public housing. But Pruitt-Igoe failed for many reasons – as one former resident in the documentary says there is plenty of blame to go around – so to demonize all public housing because of Pruitt-Igoe would be shortsighted and incorrect. This isn’t to say that the Federal government should provide public housing, but only that Pruitt-Igoe should not be a reason why they don’t.

When the Pruitt-Igoe projects were built in 1950s, the city assumed that the population would rise in the coming decades. These high rise apartments were meant to house 12,000 residents, and keep them close to the jobs in the city’s center – good manufacturing jobs among them. Instead what happened was just the opposite – the city’s population plummeted – it lost half its population in the 30 years between 1950 and 1980. Middle class, predominantly white, residents fled to the suburbs, and the jobs followed them. While the Federal government paid for construction of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings, they were supposed to pay for the upkeep out of the rent of the tenants – which never really happened because so many people were unemployed, and couldn’t find a job in St. Louis. The buildings fell quickly into disrepair, which led to the people who did have jobs living there finding someplace else to live, which only increased the problems. People ended up paying nearly 75% of their meager incomes to live in these buildings, which offered worse conditions than other places they could live. And wherever there was poverty, there is crime and vandalism – and soon the Pruitt-Igoe projects were just as bad or worse than the slums that they had replaced.

Chad Fredrichs The Pruitt-Igoe Myth offers a wealth of archival footage of the projects slow decline, as well as suburbia’s rather rapid growth. He finds some great footage of middle class white housewives living in suburbia who claim that they don’t think that the “Negros” should not be oppressed; they just don’t want them in their area. After all, they moved out of the city into the white enclave of suburbia to get away from them in the first place.  He also has some great interviews with some of the former residents of Pruitt-Igoe, whose memories recall the steady decline of the area – some have very fond memories of the place, some have some rather horrid memories.

The documentary is interesting, but I don’t think Fredrichs quite makes his point as strongly as he wants to – that the residents and the fact that Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing project were not to blame for its failings – and that it was more because of poor urban planning, poor maintenance, racism, a shifting economy and suburbia that led to its failures. They all played a role – and this documentary highlights that – but the residents, who Fredrichs never really criticizes in any direct way, played their own role as well. Fredrichs tries to get this across, I think, especially when interviewing one former resident, forever scarred by the murder of his brother in Pruitt-Igoe, but mostly he blames outside factors solely.

Still, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a fascinating little documentary. It certainly breaks no new ground with the standard issue talking heads-archival footage format, but the story it tells is interesting – and necessary in many ways. True, I think Fredrichs could have, and should have, been harder on some of the residents who inhabited Pruitt-Igoe – the ones who actively destroyed it (blaming poor maintenance on not replacing broken windows or cleaning up vandalism, etc. ignores the fact that SOMEONE broke those windows, and vandalized the property). In a way though, Fredrichs doesn’t need to blame the residents – that is what everyone else has done for decades now. Fredrichs is showing the larger picture – the other factors that contributed to Pruitt-Igoe failings. And on that level it works - and may well remind viewers of some of the things said in politics today. Afterall, everyone who lived in Pruitt-Igoe would be part of that 47% of Americans Mitt Romney thinks are lazy moochers – and while some residents certainly share in the blame for Pruitt-Igoe’s failing, many were just hard working people trying to live their lives.