Cold Souls (2009)

Cold Souls finds Paul Giamatti joining the weird list of actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves. As such, he stars as Paul Giamatti, a melancholy actor who’s having a devil of a time pulling off the lead in a Chekhov play. The problem? His own existential fears, guilt, and neuroses are getting in the way of him delivering a true, unburdened performance. He gets the answer to his problems in the form of an absurd company that offers a most unusual service: soul storage. By some never-explained technology, they’ve found a way to literally extract the human soul (it sort of looks like a grey blob of putty), and then place it in stasis in a storage locker. Free from the weight of their mortal quandaries, a doctor played by the great David Stathairn explains, the soulless are finally able to get down to the business of really living. Although skeptical, Giamatti accepts a brief soul extraction in order to get through the stress of performing on Broadway. But as you might expect, things don’t go so smoothly.

Cold Souls is supposedly based on a particularly bizarre dream that director Sophie Bathes once had, and it would have been much better served to go down that kind of abstract path, especially considering its premise. Instead, the whole thing is played oddly straight, and this gets in the way of it ever really paying off on its promising setup. We’re left with way too many questions, and some of the more interesting aspects of the story, like what its like to be “soulless” or how the soul really shapes a person’s world view, are either glazed over or written out of the script with throwaway lines. For his part, Giamatti certainly rises to the challenge of having to carry such a tough sell of a story. He provides the movie with all of its most memorable moments, and it’s his strange mannerisms and comic timing that allows it to remain pleasant and watchable even though it’s never as interesting as it should be.

Still, despite the undeniable fun of Giamatti’s performance, Cold Souls is ultimately one of the most disappointing movies I’ve caught up with in a while, if only because the central idea of its premise was so fascinating. Discussions of the soul are a decidedly esoteric thing, and trying to tackle them in a movie that is so conventional in its presentation was bound to be problematic. It might have all been better served as a piece of literature or as a one-note short film, but as it is, Cold Souls seems like it’s always struggling to find something concrete and tangible to actually be about. That’s a problem that even some solid performances and a clever setup will never find their way around.

Favorites of 2009

It’s a little late for this end of the year stuff at this point, but I didn’t get to catch up with a lot of the big ’09 films until the very last minute. So consider the following my belated take on the ten best releases of the year. Also, I might as well start a tradition by once again including the ten best films, both new and old, that I caught up with on video this year.

1. The Hurt Locker

Someone finally realized that the way to make a movie about the Iraq war is to not mention any of the details specific to it. To watch this movie is to understand why Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James character is so addicted to war: it’s just plain exhilarating. That might be a bit appalling if this wasn’t also one of the first films to truly address the #1 problem of all war movies: that for all their horror, they will always be way too cinematically exciting to really be anti-conflict. That it does that while easily being the most gripping film of the year only adds to its greatness.

2. Inglourious Basterds

3. An Education

People who say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” apparently haven’t seen this film. It’s classically constructed, beautifully written, and features one of the very best acting performances of the year from Carey Mulligan.

4. Moon

5. Summer Hours

I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t seen even a single one of Olivier Assayas’ other films, but this was enough to make me want to go through his whole catalogue. A deeply moving and meaningful story that tackles subjects rarely covered in the movies. This also features my favorite ending of any movie this year.

6. Goodbye, Solo

7. Thirst

Korean priest-vampires having lots of kinky sex? Count me in! Seriously, though, beyond being one of the most gorgeous looking movies of the year, this one finds a way to take the now very tired concept of the vampire, strip it of all it pretensions, and make one of the most oddly moving morality tales I’ve seen in a good while.

8. Big Fan

Not only is it as creepy as it is funny, but it has the originality (that is, balls) to portray characters that most movies wouldn’t touch. Patton Oswalt also proves once and for all that he’s got the skills to be a truly great actor.

9. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

10. In the Loop

The year’s most scathing satire, this story of the political spin machine at work is full of delightfully obscene dialogue where nearly every other line is something so clever that you feel you should write it down.

Honorable Mentions:

Up in the Air, District 9, Zombieland, Sugar, Not Quite Hollywood, I Love You Man



Video Discoveries of 2009:

Le Corbeau (1943) D: Henri Georges Clouzot
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) D: Louis Malle
The Young One (1960) D: Louis Bunuel
Le Trou (1960) D: Jacques Becker
Downhill Racer (1969) D: Michael Ritchie
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) D: Peter Yates
Wings of Desire (1987) D: Wim Wenders
Withnail and I (1987) D: Bruce Robinson
The Hidden (1987) D: Jack Sholder
Joint Security Area (2000) D: Park Chan Wook

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Werner Herzog’s awkwardly titled new film The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans might stand as one of the most interestingly bold choices ever made by a legendary filmmaker. The film, which is full of Big Easy heavies and a ravaged post-Katrina landscape, could be described as a shameless b-movie, but that doesn’t really do it justice. Think of it more as one of those mid-eighties cop movies starring Gary Busey if it had been made by the world’s most prominent art house director…oh yeah, on drugs. (That little post-script might as well be tacked on to every description of this film.) Plenty of directors are willing to touch a toe into the tepid water that is exploitation, but Herzog, never one for doing anything half-assed, dives in headfirst, filling his movie with hookers, dead alligators, mobsters, hallucinatory iguanas, and, weirdest of all, Nicholas Cage. In the process, he finds a way to inject some new life into the “burnt-out cop” movie while simultaneously not forsaking one ounce of his trademark eccentricity. Whether you like the movie hinges almost entirely on whether you’re able to embrace its particular brand of insanity, but if you are, then The Bad Lieutenant proves to be one of the most rewarding and downright fun movies of ‘09.

Nic Cage stars as Terrance McDonagh, a New Orleans detective who, in the aftermath of Katrina, saves a convict from drowning in a flooded prison. His act of heroism earns him a promotion to Lieutenant, but it also leaves him with chronic back pain that leads to a mounting number of drug habits—both legal and otherwise. Just as he’s really starting to spin out of control, Terrance gets put in charge of investigating the execution-style homicide of a family of immigrants. In typical Herzogian fashion, McDonagh becomes absolutely fixated on solving the case—that is, of course, when he’s not too busy raiding the police evidence room for heroin or shaking down club kids for coke. While Terrance’s search for answers in the case leads him to a local drug dealer called “Big Fate,”(Xzibit) he also becomes entangled with a group of would-be mafiosos while trying to protect his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) from a particularly unpleasant brand of customer.

Herzog shoots this all in the same kind of straightforward, low-budget style as he did Rescue Dawn. Some critics have complained about this, as though in order to really appreciate the fact that Terrance is snorting enough drugs to topple an elephant we need a shakier camera and some quicker pans. This, of course, has never been Herzog’s M.O. Even his grander films like Fitzcarraldo are relatively unadventurous in their visual stylings. He’s a guy much more concerned with just documenting the spectacle going on in the scene than he is with trying to enhance it with elaborate camera moves. That being said, The Bad Lieutenant does have some tricks up its sleeve. On a few occasions where Terrance is really flying high, Herzog switches to what looks like 8mm film to get a real feeling of detachment, and there’s even a bizarre shot sequence where the camera seems to ride on the back of an alligator as it waddles into the swamp. This is only one of dozens of shots in the film that depict the local wildlife (someone should write a book about how animals and insects function in the work of directors like Herzog and Luis Bunuel), from snakes and fish to imaginary lizards, the last of which makes for the film’s most absurdly hilarious scene when Terrance offhandedly complains “what the fuck are these iguanas doing on my coffee table?” to some fellow cops, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Beyond these little touches, Herzog’s style here is relatively minimalist considering the material. This is all for the better, as his laissez-faire approach lets us sit back and really soak up the glorious insanity of Cage’s lead performance, which Matty Robinson of the Filmspotting podcast more than appropriately referred to as “a big bag of crazy.” Cage is in his full-on manic mode here, devouring scenery in a way that would have made Klaus Kinski proud. The guy gets a lot of grief, and he probably deserves most of it, but even I can admit that there is not one other actor in the world of such a high standing that would have been willing to tackle this kind of a role. For what it’s worth, there also might not be a single actor in Hollywood better at playing intoxicated, or at somehow ingratiating himself to the audience in the process. When Cage isn’t slurring his way through a scene, he’s bouncing off the walls like a madman and speaking in a rat-a-tat fashion that sounds like a mix of a 1920s news reporter and someone with a broken jaw. He switches between the two in a way that borders on confusing, but this mercurial quality is only one more part of what makes his delivery so fascinating. Still, Cage’s real achievement here, beyond affecting some really hilarious mannerisms and facial tics, is in the way he manages to make us believe in Terrance and root for him no matter how many despicable things he does. This is a guy who’s willing to pull guns on senior citizens and blatantly break the law in just about every way possible, but we still believe that there is a method to his more than considerable madness. That alone is an award-worthy achievement.

In the final analysis, this movie belongs more to Cage, whose performance alone is enough to warrant repeat viewings, than it does to Herzog. But Herzog still makes some truly wise decisions in his approach here. Unlike so many directors, he always knows exactly what kind of movie he’s making. He lets the material speak for itself, and beyond throwing in a few little Herzogian touches here and there, he’s not going out of his way to put too much of an authorial stamp on the film. This is disappointing at first, but then a bit comforting: if Herzog had filled The Bad Lieutenant with dwarfs, extended takes of chickens, or other evidence of his classic preoccupations, it would have been sure proof that he’d started to become a parody of himself. But he doesn’t. He’s restrained enough to let the movie’s strengths, particularly its bizarre brand of humor—this is, at its heart, comedy—be its biggest statement.

I’ll close with this: descriptions and reviews of this movie have all stressed just how over the top and insane it is. With this in mind, I was convinced going in that I would inevitably be a bit disappointed with the crazy factor of it, if only because it had been pushed so hard by every critic in the country. Suffice to say, The Bad Lieutenant manages to live up to the hype to be every bit it as mind-blowingly gonzo as you would hope it to be. And that just might be one of the most oddly significant achievements in any film this year.

Observe and Report (2009)

Jody Hill is a director who wholeheartedly doesn’t give a damn about whether his characters are likable. This stance was arguably the downfall of his first film, The Foot Fist Way, which heaped so much venom on its hero, a wannabe kung fu master, that it became downright tedious in its viciousness. Then came the excellent HBO TV series Eastbound and Down, on which Hill served as a writer and sometime director, which took a similar approach but added in equal amounts of pathos and a more experienced Danny McBride to help create one of the funniest egotists in recent TV memory. Observe and Report, which chronicles bipolar mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) in his struggle to get his life together and hunt down a serial flasher, is an amusingly uneven hodgepodge of Hill’s two previous projects. Its highs are soaring (in more ways than one, considering the different controlled substances characters ingest in heroic doses), but like its main character, it’s also got some serious issues.

The film has a great cast, especially Celia Watson as Ronnie’s perpetually drunk mom, and some seriously good set pieces, but tonally it’s all over the place. In the early running Hill and company are deliberately testing the limits of the audience’s threshold for dark humor (even the most hardcore comedies usually steer clear of characters slamming heroin and engaging in borderline date rape), and for a while, it’s all a bit too messy to be as funny as it should. But this is exactly the territory that Hill likes to deal in, so it’s almost not surprising that around the ¾ mark things get so ridiculous that the tone of the movie seems to swing back around the dial again to reach a level of absurdity that Will Ferrell would be proud to call his own. This shift is abrupt enough that it definitely drains the film of a lot of the off the wall creepy momentum it had early on. Still, jarring as it is, you are almost relieved that you finally get to laugh a bit. I would have preferred for Hill to have either made a unapologetically dark character study or an Anchorman-style comedy, but I can’t deny that some of the film’s most memorable moments are a mix of the two, and by the time Barnhardt faces off in hand-to-hand combat against a legion of angry cops led by Ray Liotta (!) while armed only with a flashlight, you sort of have to admit that Observe and Report has found a way to be both funny and completely amoral all at the same time. This might not be enough to keep every viewer engaged, as the critical uproar over the film showed, but even the movie’s detractors would probably admit that the players here are working with a fairly high degree of difficulty considering their intended audience. That, along with the fact that Hill has proven that he’s still not the least bit afraid of alienating half his viewers in any given scene, makes this a film that I have to admit I have an odd amount of respect for.

Crank as the Ultimate Video Game Movie

I’ve finally ended my reign as the last American male who hasn’t seen the movie Crank. I don’t remember the original or its even zanier sequel getting all that much attention when it first came out, but it seems that both have attained minor cult status on video, and it’s easy to see why: like all the best genre movies, both Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage relish their B-movie status, throwing all verisimilitude, logic, and dramatic pretensions out the window in favor of pure, anarchic fun. It’s the kind of attitude that made this year’s Zombieland work so well, and it’s the formula that many of the most beloved action and horror films, from the Evil Dead series to the cream of the Hong Kong action crop, do so well. It’s such a simple plan that it’s surprising it’s not employed more often: start your movie off with a bang, and then don’t let up ‘til the credits roll.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, so I’m not going attempt to review or discuss either of these films in the more traditional sense. I do want to try and tackle their style, though, because while watching them it occurred to me that these two films seem to encapsulate the so-called “video game aesthetic” as well as anything I’ve seen. In the past, a “video game” movie was something like 1995’s Mortal Kombat, or 1994’s utterly forgettable Street Fighter (which has the depressing honor of being Raul Julia's last movie); that is, movies adapted from video games. In recent years, though, some directors have started employing the feel and construct of games as a recognizable filmmaking style. Crank appears to be the exemplar. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are using this aesthetic at every turn throughout both movies, and while the effects are probably jarring or even confusing to people that didn’t grow up with Nintendo, for those that did, it’s too obvious to ignore.

Right from the beginning, Neveldine and Taylor cue their audience in to the kind of style they’re using. The opening credits are done in a blatant arcade game mode, complete with old school 32-bit graphics and Donkey Kong-style sound effects. When they finally do cut to the first scene of the movie, it’s a point-of-view shot of hit man Chev Chelios (Jason Statham, proving why he deserves two action movie franchises) waking up in his apartment to find that he’s been injected with the “Beijing Cocktail,” a mixture of decidedly un-groovy drugs that is slowly stopping his heart.

This opening scene works like a video game in two ways: the first is that it’s the classic “cut scene” that seems to open every action video game. That is--introduce the hero, let us know what his problem is, and then on to the ass-kicking. Some movies have used this method--Commando comes to mind--but traditionally they require a lot more throat-clearing in the form of character introductions and exposition before they really get down to business. Video games have always eschewed that kind of backstory out of necessity, since anything the person playing the game can’t control is really just filler, and needs to be dispensed with as fast as possible. The fact that Crank does the same is a definite clue as to what kind of movie you’re about to experience.

The second key aspect of the opening scene is that it sets the stage for a particular style of framing--establishing Statham as a video game hero who is essentially being “played” by the movie--that the filmmakers are to use throughout both films. For the rest of Crank, and in Crank 2, he’ll often be shot in a very deliberate and almost intentionally stilted style that is designed to recreate the look of a character within a game. Here, the idea is point-of-view, the kind of style used in so-called “first-person shooter” video games. But Neveldine and Taylor often employ a third-person style, as well, in the form of tracking shots that follow just behind Chelios as he walks down the street. Of course, the whole of both movies is not shot in this fashion, but even when they’re not using a particular type of video game framing, both Crank films take a cue from the particular set-design and set up of action video games.

The most notable example occurs at the beginning of Crank 2, when Chelios, still alive but now sporting an artificial heart with the battery on empty, escapes from the Chinese gangsters who were holding him hostage. He makes his way out into a kind of industrial park, where a collection of shipping containers have been stacked and arranged in such a way as to create a makeshift maze. Naturally, there are roving groups of armed guards, who Chelios both avoids and guns down at will. This kind of situation--where equal amounts of stealth and fighting are required--is found time and again in video games, and the style of filming, which again employs a healthy dose of centered third-person framing, is one of the franchise’s most obvious nods of the head to the arcade aesthetic. The shipping containers are also a nice touch. I’m not sure what it is, but in my experience every action video game--and quite a few movies, as well--have at least one sequence in a compound filled with shipping containers.

There are plenty of other video game elements to Crank worth studying, from the Godzilla-inspired fight sequence in the second film to the movie’s use of a map--courtesy, apparently, of Google Earth--to zip from one location to another throughout Chelios’ frenetic dash to get revenge, but I’ll let them be for now. The overall point is that these movies, juvenile though they may be, do seem to represent a small step forward for filmmakers interested in trying to mix media, whether it’s with music videos, computer animation, or video games. In the past, a “video game movie” was a movie that just borrowed hackneyed characters, plot lines, and elements from titles out of the Sega Genesis catalogue. But now it might refer more to a particular style, feel, and tone that’s more referential--oddly postmodern, even--than it is anything else. The purist in me wants to say that anything that contaminates the precious style of movies as they are is a definite step in the wrong direction, but as long as this kind of stuff is here to stay, it might as well be done right. And Crank, for whatever else you might say about it, gets the genre of the absurd, R-rated action movie oh so very right.

The New Great American Director?

Recently, I finally got a chance to see Goodbye Solo, the third movie from director Ramin Bahrani. Like both of his previous films, Chop Shop and Man Push Cart, it’s gotten rave reviews from all the major critics, including Roger Ebert, who proclaimed Bahrani “the new great American director” in the intro to this excellent interview from March of this year.

Whether or not Bahrani is going to go down as a pioneering filmmaker is too early to say, but Goodbye Solo certainly isn’t going to hurt his chances. Like Chop Shop, it’s a marvelously realized movie that attaches the heaviest of implications to what might seem like a small, simple story. It’s all buoyed by a mesmerizing performance from Souleymane Sy Savane as the title character, an immigrant cab driver who forms an unlikely friendship with an embittered old man, played by (no kidding) former Elvis bodyguard Red West.

There’s certainly no denying Bahrani has only gotten more accomplished with each movie he’s made, and after only three films he’s already established a recognizable style and set of preoccupations. Watching Goodbye Solo I kept thinking of the final scene in Dirty Pretty Things, another movie that followed the plight of immigrants, in which Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character describes himself and others like him as “the people you don’t see.” That seems as concise a definition as any of the kinds of films Bahrani makes. He follows food cart operators, poor families, and cab drivers, and finds in their stories the kind of poetry that usually only shows up in the work of other so-called “great” directors like Herzog and Bresson.

The most interesting thing about Bahrani is that he’s built his reputation solely on his brilliance as a storyteller. Usually, the young directors with the most heat on them are those with the flashiest style or the most audacious plot structures. Bahrani’s plots are audacious, but only in their elegance of execution. Whether you like his movies or not, those are the kinds of films that tend to stand the test of time. And while I still wouldn't proclaim him the next great thing in American movies, he’s certainly making the case with each film he puts out.

In The Company of Men (1997)

Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men follows two mid-nineties corporate types--complete with wacky ties--who’ve just been dumped by their longtime girlfriends. To collectively get back at the opposite sex, they come up with a particularly devilish plan: while on a six-week business trip in fly-over country, they will simultaneously begin dating the same woman, gain her affection, and then unexpectedly blow her off and skip town (it may be juvenile, but I couldn’t help being reminded of The Dennis System). It’s the kind of thing that inadvertently happens in countless relationships, but the kicker here, of course, is that the two bastards are doing it on purpose.

The duo involved in this nefarious scheme couldn’t be more different. Chad, played with a really despicable gusto by Aaron Eckhart, is an unapologetic misogynist who sees people as pawns and dupes to be played for all they’re worth. He puts off the impression of being just a fast-talking, opportunistic jock--the kind of guy whose handshake is always a bit too strong--but by the end of the movie your not likely to think of him as anything other than an out-and-out sociopath. Howard (Matt Malloy), meanwhile, is an unassuming, bookish-looking middle manager, but LaBute establishes early on that he likes to think he’s every bit the smooth operator that Chad is. Together, they decide to take on the task of breaking the heart of Christine (Stacey Edwards, who is terrific), a shy, good-hearted typist who works in their building and--oh yeah--also happens to be deaf. No one could accuse LaBute of pulling any punches when it comes to taking his comedy extra black.

This may all sound too dark to take, and at times it is, but on the whole LaBute manages to balance the woman-hating style of his lead characters with a healthy dose of satire, not only of masculinity and the vampiric nature of some modern relationships, but of corporate culture in general (Chad, for one, seems like he would fit right in with Patrick Bateman and company from American Psycho--which would make a fitting, if not uncomfortable, double feature with this film). It all amounts to an unusually good exploration of why bad people do the things they do, which is a much tougher trick to pull off than it sounds. I remember once hearing a critic say that this movie encapsulates the whole notion of “the banality of evil” as good as anything outside of the Coen Bros. canon, and I think they have a point. LaBute seems fascinated by the duplicitous behavior that outwardly upstanding people are capable of, and it's something he’s explored throughout his career. In fact, his recent effort The Shape of Things seems nothing if not an expansion of the ideas he’s playing with here. (That film, interestingly, is told not from the point of view of the victimizer but of the victim, who, even more interestingly, happens to be a man.)

My only problem with In the Company of Men, outside of the grating-but-sparse jazz score, is LaBute’s visual style. It’s become sort of a joke at this point that no director who comes to film by way of theatre (as LaBute did) can ever display even the most minimal deftness of visual style, and he’s no different. The film is all static shots and takes so over-long that the actors occasionally stumble over their lines. I wish I could say that this insular style allows us to focus in on the gleefully mean-spirited nature of LaBute’s dialogue, but really it's just off-putting and sometimes a bit tedious. Still, In the Company of Men provides more than enough substance to get over its lack of style. This includes a real killer of an ending--the kind of scene that’s bound to stay with you, probably for a few days longer than you’d like it to.