Cannes 2009 Line Up

God, how I wish I could go to the Cannes Film Festival this year. Today, they announced the 20 films in Competition for the Palme D'Or, and the list is full of strong filmmakers and some of my most anticipated films of the year. I always try to catch up with any title that makes the official line-up, but most of the time it is hard. Out of the 20 films in competition in 2008, I have only managed to see 10 of them. The thing about titles officially selected is that they are always interesting films - not always good or great - but films that you want to turn over in your mind a few times. Some of them are downright awful, but they are awful in interesting ways.

So what are the highlights of this year's festival? For most, it would probably be Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds with Brad Pitt, his long awaited WWII "mission" film - something along the lines of The Dirty Dozen. I love the trailer, and I cannot wait to see the film, but for me it ranks a distant second. The film in competition I most want to see is Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which takes place at a French private school in 1913, and has something to do with fascism. No clue what, but Haneke is one of the most provactive and interesting filmmakers around today. His most recent film was last year's remake of his own Funny Games with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, and although many hated it, I thought it was near-great. His best film was the one he made before that though - 2005's Cache, a brilliant thriller about video tapes showing up on the doorstep of an affluent couple, and what they could mean. But all of Haneke's films that I have seen - Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher, Code Unknown, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, both Funny Games and The Seventh Continent - have been excellent. I cannot wait for this one.

Besides those two films, the line-up is strong. Jane Campion (The Piano) hopes to regain form with Bright Star. Pedro Almodovar looks to keep his string of hits alive with Broken Embraces, with Penelope Cruz. Lars von Trier's Antichrist will certainly be provocative. Gasper Noe, of Irreversible and I Stand Alone fame, returns with Enter the Void - no idea what it's about, but it's sure to be violent. Tsai Ming Liang, who made the excellent Goodbye Dragon Inn among others, has a new film - Face. Andrea Arnold, who won an Oscar for her brilliant short Wasp, and a Jury Prize at Cannes for her brilliant feature debut Red Road, has a film called Fish Tank. Old French New Wave master Alain Resnais has another film in competition. Ken Loach, who has made many great, working class films including The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which won Cannes two years ago, returns with Looking for Eric. A year after she made the underrated Elegy, Isabelle Coixet returns with Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, with Babel's Rinko Kikuchi and Pan's Labyrinth's Sergi Lopez. I quite enjoyed Jacques Audiard's The Beat My Heart Skipped a few years ago, so I look forward to his follow-up A Prophet. Ang Lee's gay themed Taking Woodstock, with Dimitri Martin, is also there. Oldboy director Chan-wook Park returns with Thrist, apparently a vampire movie. And Hong Kong action master Johnnie To has a new film called Vengeance. In case you lost count, that's 15 of the 20 films by filmmakers I admire that I would love to see their new films.

I have never heard of Xavier Gianolli, nor do I know anything about his In the Beginning, other than it stars Gerard Depardieu. I heard great things about Brillante Mendoza's Serbis from last year's festival, but haven't had a chance to see it yet, so I don't know what to expect from his Kinatay. Lou Ye's films, like Summer Palace, Purple Butterfly and Suzhou River, often get good reviews, but I have yet to see any of them, so who knows what his Spring Fever will be like. Elia Sulieman is an unknown Israeli filmmaker to me, and I have no clue what his The Time That Remains is about. And despite the fact that Italy's Marco Bellocchio has a long career, I have never heard of him either, although his Vincere, about Mussolini, could be interesting.

In total, there are four previous Palme D'Or winners in competition (Tarantino, Campion, Von Trier and Loach), and Haneke, Almdovar, Lee, Resnais, Arnold and Park have all had films win prizes at Cannes festivals in the past. It will be interesting to see if the Jury, headed by Isabelle Huppert will choose one of these directors (espeically since Haneke directed Huppert to a Cannes prize winning performance in The Piano Teacher), or whether they'll go with someone less well known, or at least less Cannes friendly director.

I look forward to Cannes every year, because it usually gives us the first signal of what movies are going to be great for the rest of the year. Last year for example, the 5 titles in the official line-up ended up in my top 20 films of 2008 (Gomorra, Che, The Class, A Christmas Tale and my favorite film Synecdoche, New York). I may never had taken a chance on the brilliant Secret Sunshine at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival (of which, I'm doing a post on soon), had it not won the best actress prize at Cannes that year. Cannes sets the tone for the rest of the movie year every May. I cannot wait to find out what people think of this year's line-up.

DVD Views: Them (Ils) (2007)

Them (Ils) (2006) ****
Directed By: David Moreau & Xavier Palud.
Written By: David Moreau & Xavier Palud.
Starring: Olivia Bonamy (Clémentine), Michaël Cohen (Lucas).

Them is an exercise in pure movie terror. That the plot of the movie is so simple, and the characters all completely one dimensional, doesn’t matter. This is a movie about generating fear and terror in the audience, and it does that brilliantly. Along with Neil Marshall’s The Descent, it is far and away the scariest horror movie of the decade.

The movie opens with an amazingly intense sequence that last about 10 minutes. A mother and her daughter are driving in their van late one night. They skid off the road and hit a pole. The mother gets out to check under the hood, and asks her daughter to try starting the car a few times. The engine still doesn’t work, and the daughter gets out to check what’s wrong. Her mother, who was behind the hood is gone. She hears a weird rattling noise. She works down the street calling for her mother. Nothing. She goes back to the car. The keys are gone. The automated doors keep locking and unlocking. She is terrified. She is strangled to death.

This sequence is brilliant and intense in its own right. It perfectly builds the tension to an almost unbearable level, daring you to look away, although you know you can’t. In 10 minutes, the filmmakers have grabbed you by the throat and let you know what is to come.

The rest of the movie – just over an hour (it’s a short movie), is like that scene only longer, and even more intense. Clementine (Olivia Bonamy) and Lucas (Michael Cohen) are a French couple living in Romania. They have a huge, sprawling house out in the middle of nowhere. She comes home from work, they laugh and flirt and play and have dinner then go off to bed. Clementine is awakened at some point during the night by loud music outside. She wakes up Lucas and they go to investigate. Their car isn’t park in the same spot it was before. Lucas goes further the headlights flash on and someone guns the motor coming towards him, and then flees. They call the cops, but agree to wait until morning before they go any further with the report. Then the light goes out. The phones are dead. And there seem to be flashlights all around them shining in the windows. Who or what is outside? And what do they want?

That is the essential setup of the movie. The rest of the movie deals with who or whatever is outside, and what happens when they get inside. We don’t see who is it terrorizing Clementine and Lucas until really late in the movie. For most of the movie, all we see is hooded silhouettes, shots of feet and flashes of them off in the distance. Clementine and Lucas, who injures his leg in the early going, stumble from one dark room of the house to another, trying to get away, but not being able to quite make it. There is a virtuoso sequence in the vast attic, with plastic sheets hanging everywhere, which is the one of the most intense horror movie sequences I have ever seen. It is matched later in the film as Clementine flees through the forest, and outdone when Lucas follows the sound of Clementine’s screams through an underground series of tunnels. Horror movies don’t generally scare me much anymore – especially not when I’m sitting on my couch at home – but this had me terrified almost from beginning to end.

The movie is pure cinema. The film is told all through images and sounds and doesn’t rely on gore or blood to scare us (after all, blood isn’t scary by itself), but rather on the unknown. It places us in the position of Clementine and Lucas, and ask us to identify with them – not because they are sympathetic people – although they do seem nice – but because they are fellow human beings who are being tormented for no logical reason that we can see. We place ourselves in their shoes, and wonder what exactly would we do in the same situation. The attackers seem to be everywhere all the time, and always one step ahead of them. There is no escape possible.

I know that the decision to reveal the identity of the attackers created a little controversy, because critics felt the unknown was more terrifying then the eventual explanation. Personally, while I see their point and would not have been upset had the filmmakers chosen to not reveal the identities, I thought that what they did do only added to the unsettling nature of the movie. When we find out the truth about what is happening, our blood runs cold

On the strength of this film, their first, directors Xavier Palud and David Moreau, came to America to make horror films. Their first was last year’s god awful The Eye with Jessica Alba. Watching Them, after seeing The Eye, you wonder how the same filmmakers could be responsible for the two films. Them is truly one of the very best horror films of the decade.

Weekly Top Ten Part II: The Best Performances of Nicolas Cage

Yesterday, I did my listing of the ten worst Nicolas Cage performances. I didn’t have trouble coming up with ten bad performances, but had I had to expand the list beyond around 12 or 13, I would have. For his ten best performances I had to eliminate some very good work. Red Rock West, It Could Happen to You, Honeymoon in Vegas, Guarding Tess, The Rock and even Con Air, which isn’t exactly a good performance, but one I have a soft spot for (“Put the Bunny Down”). That doesn’t even mention his acclaimed turn in Vampire’s Kiss, a film I never saw. So, my ultimate verdict on Cage is a positive one. Few can match his intensity on screen – I just wish he was more selective. Now, his top ten performances.

10. Raising Arizona (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1987)
I have a sort of love/hate relationship with Raising Arizona. The first time I watched it, shortly after falling in love with Fargo, I hated it. I wasn’t fully on the Coen’s comic wavelength at the time. Since then, I’ve seen it a couple more time, and grown to appreciate it more, but still think it’s one of the Coen’s weaker efforts. Having said all of that, I have always admired Cage’s strange performance as Happy, the low rent criminal who falls in love with a cop (Holly Hunter), and when they cannot have a baby, kidnaps one of the Arizona quintuplets. Cage plays a weird, wacky, lovable redneck with great humor and humanity. It’s strange to me that Cage has yet to reteam with the Coens, as he’s a natural fit for their strange world. This is a wonderful performance.

9. World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006)
I know a lot of people thought that Stone’s World Trade Center was a little bit cheesy. Even I described it as a higher class Ron Howard movie, and was disappointed that Stone played it so safe, even if he made a solid film through and through. Yet, one thing that cannot be denied is that Cage gives an excellent performance as one of two firefighters trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center of 9/11 and waits days to be rescued. Cage spends almost the entire movie trapped under debris, unable to move, yet still creates a compelling, believable character. He resists the urge to overact, and instead simply inhabits the character – an ordinary guy who tried to help.

8. Face/Off (John Woo, 1997)
Cage was at his most unhinged, and brilliant, in this movie, playing not one but two different characters. In the early scenes, Cage is the brilliant, crazy killer. But after he undergoes surgery and switches faces with John Travolta, he has to play a good cop in the body of a brilliant, crazy killer. There is no doubt that the premise of the movie is preposterous, and yet, Cage (not to mention Travolta) pull it off effortlessly. This is a more complex role than you usually get to play in an action film – essentially playing two characters at once, or at least one character playing another character. I can’t think of another actor who could have pulled it off, and made it look so easy.

7. Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990)
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is a demented Wizard of Oz, with Cage and Laura Dern as lovers on the run. Cage is at his most over the top brilliant as the Elvis obsessed young man in love, who opens the movie by beating someone to death, and then simply gets stranger. Like Raising Arizona, Cage is playing a redneck here, and he does it wonderfully well – with the proper mixture of menace and comedic timing for Lynch’s wacked out worldview. He is also surprising sympathetic as a young lover. A weird film, and performance, that I’m sure many would put on yesterday’s list, but I love it.

6. Matchstick Men (Ridley Scott, 2003)
A difficult role to play. A conman with ADD, who discovers that he has a teenage daughter and tries to integrate her into his life. The role offered Cage the opportunity to do his characteristic ticks and over the top acting, but Cage toned it down a little, and found a believable character in there somewhere. A smaller, more intimate film for director Ridley Scott, one that concentrates on the tightness of the screenplay, and relies heavily on the acting. Cage carries the film wonderfully.

5. Lord of War (Andre Niccol, 2005)
I’ll never be sure why Lord of War didn’t find a wider audience, or more love from the critics. A fast paced, realistic and completely entertaining story of Cage playing an arms dealer, who travels the world and will supply anyone with guns, as long as they have the ability to pay. He doesn’t care if they are Freedom Fighters or African Warlords hell bent on genocide. Someone will sell them the guns if he doesn’t, so why shouldn’t he? Even if they didn’t have guns, they’d still kill each other in more primitive ways. Cage is at his most charming, and cynical, in the film. He can sell anything to anyone, and can talk his way out of almost anything. The best line of the movie still haunts me. “They say that Evil wins when good men do nothing. They should change that to Evil wins”.

4. The Weatherman (Gore Verbinkski, 2005)
Another underrated gem from Cage in 2005 was The Weatherman. Had this been an indie, or perhaps directed by Martin Scorsese, this would have been far more critically acclaimed then it was. A smart, subtle, darkly comic movie about a divorced weatherman living in Chicago, who slowly realizes that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot change who is. He just has to accept it. His wife doesn’t want him back. His kids are a mess. His dad is still able to make him feel like crap with one biting remark. He acts out briefly, but eventually becomes resigned to his fate. Dare I say, he’s almost happy at the end.

3. Bringing Out the Dead (Martin Scorsese, 1999)
Critics were divided on Scorsese’s anti-Taxi Driver – another story of a man who travels the night streets of New York, and sees the worst the city has to offer. Unlike Travis in Taxi Driver though, Frank in bringing out the dead is a paramedic, who tries to stop the bleeding of the city, not encourage it. Over a three day period, Frank goes through his job with three different partners, as the city becomes increasingly erratic. Cage brilliantly plays Frank as a burnt out, tired, sometimes drunk, sometimes crazy paramedic struggling to maintain his sanity in the face of insurmountable odds. Like the last three films, this one is vastly underrated.

2. Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002)
Cage was hilarious and brilliant playing screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and his twin brother Donald, who wants to be a screenwriter. Charlie is smart, and wants to do a good job adapting a book called The Orchid Thief. Donald wants to make big money writing schlock. Cage portrayed these two polar opposite characters, who look the same, wonderfully, making them distinct, real people in the crazy world of Charlie Kaufman. The amount of notes he has to hit, the nuttiness of it all is staggering, but Cage nails it in every scene. Absolutely wonderful.

1. Leaving Las Vegas (Mike Figgis, 1995)
Cage deservedly won an Oscar for play Ben, a down and out Hollywood screenwriter who has descended into alcoholism. He decides to head to Vegas for one last bender – planning on drinking himself to death. There he meets and befriends Elisabeth Shue’s prostitute, also down and out but in a different way. Actors love playing drunks, because it gives them the opportunity to stagger around and slur their words, and generally be both funny and tragic. Cage’s performance is the best I have ever seen of a drunk. He is miserable, he has the shakes, he is dying, and he doesn’t care. Cage's performance is the least romantic of any of the drunks I have seen on screen. He is neither a figure to be laughed at, nor one that struggles to get better. He is miserable, he want to die, and so drinking is his way to get what he wants. A mesmerizing turn from start to finish.

Weekly Top Ten Part I: Worst Nicolas Cage Performances

I count myself as a Nicolas Cage fan, although I admit he has given more bad performances than almost any other actor that I like. But when Cage is one target, he is absolutely brilliant. The strange thing about Cage is whether he is good or bad, is that it always seems to be for the same reason – he throws himself into every role with gusto. But many of the movies he does are beneath his talent level, and at times instead of seeming daring, he just seems wildly over the top for no reason. When you walk in a Nicolas Cage movie, you never really know if you’re going to see one of the year’s best or worst. Either Cage has no skill at being able to tell what are good screenplays and what are bad ones, or else he’ll do just about anything they offer him. So this week, I decided to do a two part Weekly Top Ten – The Ten Worst, then the Ten Best, Nicolas Cage performances. First the worst – the best will follow later this week.


10. Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987)
This is probably the performance that most people would argue belongs on the other list. After all, Moonstruck was an Academy Award winning movie, and Cage’s performance was nominated for a Golden Globe and turned him from a little known actor into a star. But, I’m sorry, I hated Moonstruck. The whole thing rang false to me, and for a comedy, I didn’t really laugh. Cage went so wildly over the top it’s unbelievable. Every time I think of Moonstruck, I think of his ludicrious monologue about his hand. Dreadful.

9. Windtalkers (John Woo, 2002)
Cage isn’t really all that terrible in Windtalkers, but the movie probably should not have been made the way it was. Why, after all, is a movie about Native American code talkers in the Vietnam war being told from Cage’s point of view? As always, Cage goes too far over the top at times, and director John Woo lays everything on a little too thick – an excess of style that destroys the movie. Cage should have known better.

8. National Treasure/National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Jon Turteltaub, 2004/2007)
Both National Treasure movies are monuments of stupidity. They are The DaVinci Code for Dummies, and to me, The DaVinci Code itself was already The DaVinci Code for Dummies. The films are mindless drivl posing as intelligent, history based thrillers, but only an idiot could believe anything in them. Cage is stuck with the most perfunctory, plot specific dialogue of his career, and he still manages to mangle it and go over the top. Two films and Cage never delivers a single memorable line of dialogue, doesn't have a single human emotion. Shoot me if you see me buying a ticket to the eventual National Treasure 3.

7. Kiss of Death (Barbet Schroeder, 1995)
A supporting role, for a great director, is often a way for name actors like Cage to draw some critical acclaim. Unfortunately for Cage, he picked one of Barbet Schroeder’s worst films to do this in (it would be his worst, had he not made Desperate Measures a few years later). As a crazed mob boss, who bench presses prostitutes, Cage is so far over the top it can no longer be seen anymore. He is a bundle of ticks and nerves, without any real sense of purpose. He is adrift in his own eccentricity.

6. Ghost Rider (Mark Steven Johnson, 2007)
Ghost Rider probably works pretty well as a comic book, where the idea of a dude with a flaming skull collecting souls for Satan admittedly sounds pretty cool. But when seen on the big screen, it just looks retarded. And the role, of daredevil motor cycle rider during the day, and hell raising skeleton at night, gives Cage the opportunity to give into his worst tendencies for over the top theatrics. Glad it didn’t make enough to warrant a sequel.

5. Bangkok Dangerous (Danny & Oxide Pang, 2008)
Perhaps the only performance on this list that you could describe as “boring”. Normally when Cage is bad, it’s because he’s left his sanity behind and gone so far into playing his ridiculous character that he no longer resembles a human being. But in Bangkok Dangerous, a pretentious action movie about a hitman who wants out, Cage appears to be almost comatose for the whole movie. Even when Cage is terrible, he’s usually terrible in a somewhat entertaining, “I can’t believe he just fucking did that” kind of way. Here, he practically puts you sleep.

4. Next (Lee Tamorhori, 2007)
Poor Philip K. Dick. One of the best sci-fi writers in history, he has had many of his best works completely warped and destroyed by big budget movies. Such is the case with Next, where Cage plays a man who can see into the future – but only his future, and only two minutes ahead. But then Cage gets a vision of something further in the future, and goes running around Los Angeles like a maniac. Even worse, he has to convince us that he’s in love with Jessica Biel, who is a complete and utter blank slate in the movie. He is unsuccessful.

3. Gone in 60 Seconds (Dominic Sena, 2000)
A preposterious action movie, where Cage and company have to steal 50 cars in a single night, Cage delivers a performance that is enitrity unbelievable and completely devoid of any recognizable human characteristics. When I think of this movie, it’s always that scene where Cage is mentally preparing himself for the day ahead by shaking his hands around his head. Or his terrible chemistry with Angelina Jolie. But I try not to think of this movie.

2. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (John Madden, 2001)
Good God, does this movie ever suck! I mean, I may not have been the biggest fan of Shakespeare in Love, but that film was a well directed little film by John Madden. How he followed it up with this terrible romantic drama, with Cage as a soldier who falls in love with Penelope Cruz (during the period where she was terrible in every film in the English language), I’ll never know. Cage is a smiling buffoon in the film, and he has zero chemistry with Cruz. The film is painfully long and dull.

1. The Wicker Man (Neil LaBute, 2006)
I am really not sure how LaBute and Cage messed this movie so terribly badly. An amazing British horror film from the 1970s, because the strangest, stupidest, most pointless American horror film of the 2000s. I will always remember Cage’s phony scream in this movie as he’s being tortured, and how utterly miserable and ridiculous he looked in that fucking bear suit. Truly Cage’s worst performance by a mile.

The Films of Martin Scorsese Part VII: Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver (1976) ****
Directed By: Martin Scorsese.
Written By: Paul Schrader.
Starring: Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle), Jodie Foster (Iris), Albert Brooks (Tom), Harvey Keitel (Sport), Leonard Harris (Charles Palantine), Peter Boyle (Wizard), Cybill Shepherd (Betsy), Diahnne Abbott (Concession Girl), Harry Northup (Doughboy), Martin Scorsese (Passenger watching silhouette).

Had Martin Scorsese only directed three movies – Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and GoodFellas – he would still have a reputation as one of the greatest directors in history. No matter how good all his other films are none can compare with these three films. Most of the highbrow critics will say that Raging Bull is his best, the younger (read my) generation would probably support GoodFellas, but for me Taxi Driver is Scorsese’s best film. At the risk of making myself sound like a psychopath, I think the reason why I like Taxi Driver more than any of his other films is because of all his characters, I relate most to Travis Bickle. I will explain more later.

Taxi Driver is Bickle’s story. Played by Robert DeNiro, in what I feel is perhaps the greatest screen performance in history, we rarely leave Travis’ side for the entire running time of the movie. We are sucked into his world from the outset, and get inside his mind. His is a story of loneliness that turns to a rage so pure he can no longer contain it.

Bickle seems to arrive out of nowhere. We get little of his back story in the opening scene in the movie. He was a Marine who served in Vietnam, has little education and is most likely from somewhere in the Midwest. He now lives in New York, and because he cannot sleep nights, he takes a job driving a Taxi in Manhattan. He works long nights, and goes to the worse neighborhoods, and sees the worst of what New York has to offer. His clients are pimps, prostitutes and other degenerates that fill him with rage and disgust. He could go to other areas of the city, ones that aren’t as crime ridden, but then at what would he direct all his rage? He needs these degenerates, because without them, he would have to admit how alone he is, and he would have to direct his rage inwards.

One day, Bickle sees Betsy (Cybil Shepherd) working in a campaign office for Senator Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris) who is running for President. Bickle has no real interest in politics, but he is interested in her. He eventually works up the nerve to go and talk to her. He intrigues her. He is different from the guys she sees all the time, including Tom (Albert Brooks), her boss on the campaign. They go for coffee, and he intrigues her more. She agrees to go to a movie with him. Bickle, clueless as to what to do on a date, takes her to a porn movie. She walks away in disgust. Later he calls her and tries to apologize. In the movies most painful scene, we see him on the phone being rejected by her, and the camera slowly pans and looks down an empty hallway. The pain of the scene is too much for Scorsese’s camera to handle.

Having been rejected by Betsy, Bickle then turns his attention to a child prostitute who once got into his cab and asked to be taken away, before her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) dragged her out. This is Iris (Jodie Foster), who Bickle goes back and sees, first in the guise of a client, then as a friend. Like Betsy, Iris is intrigued by Bickle. Most guys treat her merely as a sex object, but when Bickle refuses to sleep with her, she thinks it’s strange, but also has a strange appreciation for him. He treats her like a human being, and that’s rare.

Or is it? In the one scene in the movie that isn’t told from Travis’ point of view, we see Iris and Sport by themselves. We have a view of pimps as mean and nasty people, who abuse the women under their employ. But Sport is kind to Iris. Sure, part of it is Sport simply telling Iris what she needs to hear in under to keep her working, but there does seem to be a genuine affection between them. Bickle, who wants so badly to save Iris, never really realizes that perhaps she does not want to be saved.

One of the key movies that influenced Scorsese’s career (not to mention Paul Schrader’s, who wrote the screenplay for the movie), was John Ford’s The Searchers, where John Wayne sets out to rescue his niece who has been kidnapped by Indians. As the months stretch into years, Wayne determines that perhaps it’s too late to save his niece, so he turns from rescuer to executioner. Like Bickle in Taxi Driver, Wayne in The Searchers is a man determined to save a young girl who doesn’t want to be saved. This is a theme that would be repeated throughout Schrader’s career, most notably in his underrated Hardcore (1979), where George C. Scott plays a religious father trying to save his daughter from the porn industry. The men in these movies see themselves as heroes and rescuers, but notably, we never really see how the girls they rescue feel. We certainly don’t see how Iris feels about it in Taxi Driver.

The movie climaxes with one of the most famous, and bloody, gun battles in cinema history. Bickle, who attempt to assassinate Palantine is thwarted, decides to let out his rage in another way, going back to see Sport and shooting his way through to Iris in his attempt to rescue her. In an ironic twist, it is Travis’ most anti-social act that brings him the attention he craves. He becomes somewhat of a media hero for his actions. Had he succeeded in killing Palantine, he would have been branded a villain, but because instead of killing a politician, he kills pimps and Johns, he is a hero. Strange how society views these things.

I could go for hours about Taxi Driver. It is one of the movies I have watched more than any other, and I pretty much know it by heart. I haven’t even mentioned Wizard (Peter Boyle), another Taxi Driver who tries hard to give Travis advice, even though he is so far gone by that point that it’s pointless. Or the almost religious way the gun dealer lays out his merchandise, like a priest preparing for mass. Or Scorsese’s disturbing cameo role as a man who watches his wife’s silhouette in another man’s apartment, and talks about what he’s going to do her. Or the strong influence of Hitchcock, not least because Scorsese uses Hitchcock’s favorite composer Bernhard Herman, who with his last score, created one of his best. The influence of Hitchcock can also been seen in the presentation of the two women Travis becomes obsessed with. Both blonde, both beautiful, both introduced via slow motion shots that emphasis their beauty above all else. They are seen through Travis’ eyes, so if you want to complain that they are objectified in the movie, then go ahead, but they are portrayed that way because that’s how Travis sees them. Or the repeated scenes of Travis alone in his apartment watching television, including one scene where he watches the happy couples dancing on American Bandstand, and in the next sequence, slowly rocks his TV stand, before letting it fall and smashing the TV, where you know the movie is about to take itself to the next level. I haven’t even mentioned the most famous scene in the movie, where Bickle alone in his apartment talks to himself in the mirror, envisioning some sort of gun battle with an unknown enemy and states “Are you talking to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck are you talking to?” Bickle is right about one thing – he is always the only one there.

But I want to get back to why I relate to Bickle more than any other Scorsese character. We have all been alone like Bickle at times in our lives, even if most of us are better equipped to deal with it than Bickle is. But essentially, what Taxi Driver is about is Bickle’s constant struggle to connect with someone, anyone, and constantly being rejected. He tries to strike up a conversation with the girl at the concession stand at the porn theater (Dianne Abbout), who is weary of being harassed by perverts, and threatens to call the manager. He tries to connect with Betsy, and fails miserably. Bickle reaches out time and time in the movie, and is met only with rejection. Had he been able to connect with someone, the chances are he would not have snapped the way he does in the movie. Because he was not able to, Bickle becomes a ticking time bomb, just waiting to explode. At the end of the movie, Bickle seems happy and secure with himself, but we know it will only be temporary. Soon, the media will move onto to someone else, and Bickle will be left by himself again, and the cycle will begin again. I feel sorry the next blonde Bickle meets. So, even if you cannot relate to Bickle’s rage, and have never been tempted to go on a killing spree, we can all relate to his loneliness and his feeling of isolation. One of the most ingenious things about the movie is that we don’t know too much about Bickle and what he went through before. Did Vietnam warp him, or was he already warped? What was his relationship with his parents like? He lies to them in a letter, but other than that we get no information about them. Most movies feel the need to explain everything about a character and their motivations, so that we can identify what’s wrong with them. The story is about their problems, not ours. Because we only know a little about Bickle’s back story, it’s easy to see ourselves in him. It’s a scary thought, but it’s what makes Taxi Driver Scorsese’s best film – and one of the very best films ever made.

School Shootings in the Movies

In April 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on their shooting rampage at Columbine High School, I was 17 years old and in grade 12. That meant, I was the same age as the killers – had I been more in Littleton Colorado, I could have been their classmate. For whatever reason, I was darkly fascinated by the case. While I understood their rage at being an outsider, I couldn’t fantom the reasons they had for doing what they did. It seemed so wasteful, so hateful to me.

I have always been more drawn to the dark side of humanity than to the good side. Call it morbid, call it sick if you like, but school shootings, as well as other mass murders and serial killings have always held a fascination to me that I’ve never fully understood. Perhaps it is because I am by my own nature a very non-violent person, but it fascinates me how people can be so cold, so uncaring about the people around them.

Columbine was hardly the first school shooting in America. Wikipedia starts its coverage in 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed the bell tower at the University of Texas in Austin and killed 17 people. Since then, there was a shooting listed every couple of years until the 1990s, when it became a much bigger problem. Since 1991, they list at least one and as many as four school shootings in America a year. Columbine attracted the most attention because it had the most victims, and also because Harris and Klebold left behind more evidence. In the wake of Columbine, the biggest school shooting has been the Virginia Tech Massacre, which has the highest death toll of any school shooting.

We have not been immune to these shootings in Canada. Our most famous shooting is obviously the Massacre at Montreal Polytechnique in December 1989, which we remember every year on December 6th as national Violence Against Women day.

What this piece is really about though is the movies that have happened since the Columbine massacre that have dealt with school shootings. They range vastly in terms of quality – some are masterpieces, and some are mere exploitation films, but all attempt to deal, on some level, with the issues raised by Columbine. The films I’ll look at are: Duck: The Carbine High Massacre (1999), The Life Before Her Eyes (2008), Home Room (2002), Dark Matter (2008), American Gun (2005), Polytechnique (2009), Zero Day (2003) and Elephant (2003). I figured I’d start with the first, and worst of the films, and then move by up the quality scale, ending with the best one.

Duck: The Carbine High Massacre was the first film about school shootings to come out after Columbine, appearing less than 6 months after the shooting. The film certainly feel the most like exploitation of any of the films, not least because of its release date. Were the bodies even buried when they started working on the movie? The film is ultra low budget and has the look and feel of something a high school student would make. It deals with two outsiders who are tormented and looked down on at their school, who eventually decide to carry out a school shooting. It is also a comedy, a satire, and a bloody horror movie. The movie looks at all the glib reasons the media gave for the shooting – ineffectual parents, music that drives people to kill, neo-Nazism, movies etc. , as well as takes on the media for its portrayal of both the killers and the victims. Everyone with the exception of the killers are one-dimensional characters, defined only in the broadest of strokes. This is a choice to show how the media portrayed them. The killers, while certainly not portrayed as sympathetic, are given a more in depth treatment to show how being outsiders, looked down upon by everyone, and affected them.

Unfortunately for directors William Hellfire and Joey Smack, what matters is not the intentions they had – which I believe were honorable – but what is on screen. Neither of them seem to have much talent – as writers, directors or actors (they portray the killers), and to be honest, had I not watched the interview with Hellfire – who seems intelligent and thoughtful – I would not have quite understood what the hell they were trying to do. The movie mocks everyone and everything, and when the shooting happens, it goes so far over the top in terms of gore and blood, that it’s impossible to take seriously. It also does a disservice, as this is the only movie on this list that makes the shooting seem like “fun”. They certainly tried to do something interesting here, but the movie is a complete and utter failure.

The major motion picture that I think comes closest to exploitation was Vadim Perelman’s 2008 film The Life Before Her Eyes. Based on the similarly exploitive novel by Laura Kasischke, the film does not really concentrate on the school shooting itself, nor does it present the killer as anything more than a minor character, who we glimpse only in a few scenes. What the movie is really about is two teenage girls – Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) and Maureen (Eva Amurri) – who are best friends who are confronted in the bathroom by the killer on the day of the shooting. He tells them that he will kill one of them, but it’s up to them to decide who. The movie flashes both back and forward from this time – to show the year in the lives of Diana and Maureen leading up the shooting, and a day in the life of an older Diana (Uma Thurman) as she deals with her husband and daughter.

Why I think the movie exploits school shootings, as well as abortion which I won’t go into here, is because the film uses it only as a plot point. Yes, you can make a film concentrating on the victims of school shootings, and not the perpetrator, but the film doesn’t deal seriously with that either. What it does is the use the shooting as a mystery to be unraveled. What happened in that bathroom is a question we do not find out until the end of the movie. That the performances by Wood and Amurri are so good doesn’t really help the movie, but simply serves to underline how facile the movies treatment of their characters are (the less said about Thurman’s disjointed performance the better, although to be fair to her, she didn’t really have a role to play). The film is a pretentious mess.

Paul F. Ryan’s Home Room (2002) is an earnest attempt to deal with the aftermath of a school shooting. Its problem is that it is too earnest. The film concentrates on two students – Alicia (Busy Philips) and Deanna (Erika Christensen), whose classmate walks into their homeroom class and opens fire. Alicia was the shooters friend, and the only one who didn’t try to run from the room, inciting debate that maybe she played a role, or at least knew, what was going to happen (since the killer kills himself, they get no answers from him). Deanna is one of the victims – she a bullet rip through her skull – but survives. Now in the hospital, this once popular girl now has become a pariah. The other students don’t want to be reminded of what happened, so they ignore her. Alicia goes to visit her, as she is the only survivor, and it’s suggested to her. What forms is an unlikely friendship between the two girls.

The film is a lot of talk between the two girls, who on the surface couldn’t be more different, but underneath are more similar than they would like to admit. Alicia is the dark, goth outsider, Deanna the pretty, popular teenager, but they bond in their suffering. The film is enviable in that it tries to seriously deal with the after effects of a shooting on the victims, and the people who witnesses everything, which The Life Before Her Eyes does not. But the film is too pat, too predictable, and too earnest to truly have the effect it wants on us. Plus, it doesn’t reveal Alicia’s big secret (which is really no big secret after all) until the end of the movie – deliberately withholding the information to generate suspense that was unnecessary to the movie. It’s an okay film, but not much more.

I reviewed Shi-Zheng Chen’s Dark Matter (2008) just last week, so I won’t go into too much information about it. It is about Liu Xing, a Chinese student at the University of Iowa, who comes to America with dreams of studying under the brilliant Professor Reiser in the origins of the universe, has initial success, until crushing failure sets in, and he lashes out on the people he feels wronged him.

No other movie on this list was more sympathetic to the killer. No other film tried so hard to understand him. But the effect this has the movie is, I think, the opposite of its intent. Because we truly begin to like Liu Xing, and understand him, we don’t believe that he would do the things he does at the end of the film. The shooting itself seems to spring from nowhere. The film, in fact, might had been better had it not included the school shooting at all, but simply remained a portrait of cross cultural alienation, which is what it was best at. The fact that it is based (loosely) on a real incident only adds to my uneasiness about the film. There are real victims here, and the film doesn’t really deal with the issues it raises.

Aric Avelino’s American Gun tells several interlocking stories about guns in America, including some that dealt with the aftermath of a school shooting. In the film, Marica Gay Harden plays a single mother struggling to raise her teenage son in the year following her other son’s Columbine like massacre in his high school. Now her surviving son is the same age, and she worries about what he’ll do. She faces ostracism and criticism from the community around her, and worries that her son will as well if she cannot afford to keep sending him to private school, and instead has to send him to the same school his brother shot up. Also in the film is Tony Goldwyn as the first cop on the scene of the massacre, who deals with guilt and criticism for not acting more swiftly and decisively, and perhaps could have saved some more lives.

American Gun is, like Home Room, a little to earnest, talky and well meaning, yet it really does hit home harder than that film does. Harden gives an excellent performance – torn about by guilt over what her son did, and worry about what her other son will do, she struggles to try and simply go on living day to day with the constant criticism and media coverage who warps her words, and makes her sound heartless. Christopher Marquette is also quite good as the younger brother, who is simply trying to live a normal life, but has to deal with the constant pressure of being “his brother”. Goldwyn is effective, and in many ways mirrors Harden’s character – torn by guilt and portrayed negatively in the press, he struggles to go on. The film is an honest depiction of the aftermath of an event like this, and how sometimes there are more victims then we realize. It is not a great film, but it is a good one.

The most recent entry, and only Canadian film, in the genre is Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, about the massacre on December 6th, 1989 at Montreal’s Polytechnique school of Technology. The shooter is portrayed briefly as a troubled, misogynistic young man, but the film mainly concentrates on the events of that day from the point of view of two other characters – one of the women who was shot, and a male friend. The film is perhaps the most difficult of all the films on this list to watch, and the shooting is portrayed in sickening detail – the blood feels real, and gunshots deafeningly loud. Shot in stark black and white, the films drains all the “glamour” that is a danger in these films away from the shooting, concentrating on the sadness and horror of that day. The film, I believe, makes a crucial misstep in the final act, flashing forward to show us what ultimately became of the two students whom we see the most of in the movie. The film tries to come up with sort of meaning to what was a meaningless, selfish act by a crazed, lone gunman. But overall, Polytechnique is a hard hitting, difficult film to stomach, yet an important one.

One of the least seen, yet best, of the school shooter films is Ben Coccio’s Zero Day (2003). The film, based on Columbine, is about two teenagers Andre and Cal, and follow them in the year leading up to their ultimate attack on their school. Shot almost entirely on camcorders, the movie takes the form of the video diaries that the Columbine shooters left behind. The film is made up of many scenes of Andre and Cal talking directly to the camera about their intended actions, and how exactly they intend to accomplish it. The shooting itself is portrayed on security cameras, much like the footage we saw from Columbine.

The film is very low budget, but unlike Duck: The Carbine High Massacre, this film is intelligent, thought provoking and chilling. What makes it so is the two great performances by Andre Kriegman and Calvin Gabriel, who create fully realized characters. Andre is obviously the leader of the two – the stronger one and the planner, whereas Cal is more of a follower. One of the things I admired about the film is its refusal to provide easily digestible answers or dime store psychology. Instead it focuses on the kids and their actions, making them believable, without being overly sympathetic. The film is chilling, and that’s the way it should be.

By far the best film made based on school shootings is Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant. The film won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year, and is far and away the most haunting film on this list. The film concentrates on the day of a Columbine like shooting carried out by Alex and Eric. For the first half of the film, Van Sant’s film follows the students of the fictional high school as they go about a normal day, unaware of what is going to happen to them. The film is a series of long tracking shots, as it follows these students as they argue, bicker, gossip and do everything that normal high school students do. The film opens on John as his father drunkenly drives him to school. When John takes over the driving, the responsibility from adult to teenager has been passed in the film.

The second half of the film concentrates on Alex and Eric, as the plan out the attack, get guns and then start shooting. Van Sant checks off all the reasons why the media gave for the attacks – violent video games and movies, Nazism, music, sexual confusion, only to find no answers. That the two kiss in the shower is not really a sign of their homosexuality, but of their loneliness. Alex is the dominant member of the duo, who uses and exploits Eric. Eventually, Alex will kill Eric before continuing his rampage, which chillingly ends with him reciting Eeny Meeny Miney Mo to a couple of students as the film fades to black.

What impresses me about Van Sant’s film’s more than the others is that he doesn’t try to explain the actions – he doesn’t look for meaning or try and provide answers. He simply observes the actions of the students on that day. His use of the long tracking shots is brilliant, as it strips the film of traditional film grammar, and instead forces us to watch. We realize just how conditioned we are by movies in their use of shots and editing by watching Van Sant’s stripped down approach. The film, in short, is nothing less than a masterpiece.

This is hardly an all inclusive list. Films like Uwe Boll’s Heartland and the highly acclaimed American Yearbook are unavailable to me, and I never did see the critically praised TV movie Bang Bang, You’re Dead with Ben Foster. As well, I didn’t go into older movies like Lindsay Anderson’s if (1968), or Basketball Diaries, which was blamed in some circles for Columbine, or for that matter Brian DePalma’s Carrie, which is essentially a school shooter movie with Carrie using her psychic powers instead of guns to carry out a massacre.

And there will certainly be more movies made. Just today, I learned that Lynne Ramsay will be directing an adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s brilliant novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, starring Tilda Swinton for release next year. What I do know is that in the ten years since Columbine (I did not realize that I was doing this piece on the 10 year anniversary until today), school shootings have continued to happen. They continue to be dark chapters in American history, and they continue to fascinate us. The film listed above were some example of how they have affected our culture. I will continue to watch the films, because they hold an eerie fascination to me. Nothing can explain why these kids do what they do, but these films are all a response to them. In that way, perhaps all of them deserve to be seen.

Movie Review: State of Play

State of Play ***
Directed by: Kevin Macdonald
Written By: Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray based on the BBC Series written by Paul Abbott.
Starring: Russell Crowe (Cal McAffrey), Ben Affleck (Stephen Collins), Rachel McAdams (Della Frye), Helen Mirren (Cameron Lynne), Robin Wright Penn (Anne Collins), Jason Bateman (Dominic Foy), Jeff Daniels (Rep. George Fergus), Michael Berresse (Robert Bingham), Harry Lennix (Det. Donald Bell), Josh Mostel (Pete), Michael Weston (Hank), Barry Shabaka Henley (Gene Stavitz), Viola Davis (Dr. Judith Franklin), David Harbour (PointCorp Insider), Sarah Lord (Mandi Brokaw), Tuck Milligan (PointCorp Executive), Stephen Park (Chris Kawai), Brennan Brown (Andrew Pell), Maria Thayer (Sonia Baker).

State of Play is a somewhat old fashioned movie – and I mean that in the best of ways. It is a thriller that doesn’t really on violence, car chases or action to provide the audience with thrills. It doesn’t feel the need to provide the characters with unnecessary love interests or provide the audience with any false dramatics. It is a film that would feel at home in the 1970s, where character based thrillers like this one were more popular.

The story is about Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), a reporter for the Washington Globe, who finds himself in the middle of the biggest story of his career. His old college roommate Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is now a Congressman in the middle of highly publicized hearings looking in PointCorp, a private defense contractor who supplies the army with highly paid “mercenaries”, and is looking to expand their business. Then an aide of Collins, Sonia Baker, is killed by a subway train. It looks like suicide. It quickly comes out that Collins was having an affair with the young woman. It also quickly becomes apparent to McAffrey, that not everything is as it seems, and that Baker’s death may be connected to the double murder he was covering for the paper. He teams up with Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), a blogger with the paper, to try and get to the bottom of the case.

I wouldn’t dream of giving away any more of the plot than that, because the chief pleasure in watching the movie is seeing this complex story unfold, with each new twist taking us in a new direction, yet keeping the story entirely plausible throughout. This isn’t a movie that becomes increasingly ludicrous as it goes along, but simply more involving, as layer after layer is revealed.

This is not a movie that spends a whole lot time on character development – there really is no need. The characters are defined, and define themselves, based on the jobs they do. Crowe is the seasoned, cynical reporter, who makes no apologies for trying to help out his old friend. That he had an affair with Collins’ wife (Robin Wright Penn) is known to everyone, but the wound seems to have mainly healed. Wright Penn doesn’t seem hurt by the affair that Collins had with his aide, just sorry that it is going to make his life more difficult. Crowe plays his role to perfection. He is at the heart of nearly every scene in the movie, and he holds our attention.

Affleck has a somewhat more difficult role, as his characters hold his cards closer to his chest – he doesn’t reveal his true motivations very often, but he plays the role wonderfully. Affleck is often an actor I cannot stand, but when given the right role – and this is that – he can be great. McAdams has what in some ways is the stock role of young, naïve reporter, but she doesn’t play it like a deer caught in the headlights, but as a smart young woman eager to get herself a break. In a lesser movie, she and Crowe would fall in love, but there is none of that here – just a mutual respect. The supporting cast, many of whom often only have a few scenes, is filled with great actors. Helen Mirren as the editor who wants the story, and wants to save her paper, Henry Lennix as the cop who is frustrated that Crowe seems to be holding back information on his case, Jeff Daniels as another Congressman who speaks cryptically to Collins about what they need him to do, Viola Davis as coroner. No one is better than Jason Bateman however, who has a few scenes as a sleazy informant, who pretty much steals the movie with his snappy delivery. Bateman has become one of Hollywood’s “go to” actors for roles like this (which is good, otherwise, we’d have to see Jeremy Piven in everything, and no one wants that).

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland), keeps the movie going at a fast pace, which is good for a movie like this which is mainly driven by the plot. The screenplay, by three wonderful writers Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom), Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) and Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) is intelligent and thoughtful, and gets most of the details just right. If the movie isn’t quite as involving as it could have been, it’s because we never really care that much about the characters. They are acted to perfection, but they aren’t very deep. Still however, State of Play is an intelligent thriller, and a hell of an entertaining way to spend an evening.