Alive In Joberg

District 9 was finally released yesterday, and so far it's been getting some pretty stellar reviews. The movie is based on an excellent short film called Alive In Joberg that director Neill Blomkamp made a few years back. Everyone's probably seen it by now, but if you're like me and are always behind the times on this stuff, then check it out. If District 9 is half as interesting as this film, it's sure to be worth seeing.

Kids These Days...

There's a great post called "young and dumb versus old and in the way" currently up on film critic Glenn Kenny's consistently interesting blog Some Came Running. It dovetails nicely with my ramblings about the culture industry from a few days ago and this whole idea that, as Kenny implies, culture isn't necessarily any more in jeopardy now than it's ever been. I'm not sure if I truly buy that argument, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Sleep Dealer (2009)

Sam Peckinpah once remarked that he made Westerns because they were the best medium through which to comment on the state of the modern world. Watching his movies, it’s easy to see his point, but I would argue that science fiction is an even more effective genre for delivering social commentary. I think that Alex Rivera, whose excellent film Sleep Dealer follows a collection of marginalized Mexican workers who literally “jack in” to the world economy to remotely do the jobs Americans won’t, would probably agree with me. The film uses the speculative nature of its eerily familiar backdrop to make an expansive statement on the future of technology and the world economy. Working on a shoestring budget, Rivera has managed to create one of the most cutting, hypnotic, and worryingly plausible science fiction films I’ve seen in some time, and along with the recent Moon, Sleep Dealer bodes well for the future of the genre.

One of the first SF films that truly fits the bill of being “cyberpunk,” Sleep Dealer takes place in a dystopic near future that resembles something William Gibson might have dreamed up. In Rivera’s future world, first world nations like the U.S. have been completely walled off from Mexico, where the story takes place, and multinational corporations have taken a controlling interest in natural resources. The story follows Memo, a young man who lives with his family in a small Mexican village where the water supply is managed by one of these nameless companies. When his father is killed by fighter plane drones that protect the company’s interests, Memo is forced to become a new kind of itinerant worker. Distraught and vaguely desiring revenge, he heads for the border town of Tijuana, a technological dust heap where migrant workers get their bodies implanted with “nodes” that allow them to jack in to a worldwide network and perform blue collar jobs across the border. Soon, Memo is regularly working at a “sleep dealer”-- the slang term for the companies that set up the jobs-- and remotely building skyscrapers hundreds of miles away in San Diego.

The social implications of the story are patent, but Rivera is good about letting his character’s struggle speak for itself. The film never becomes too didactic, and what little reference it makes to the modern day is exceedingly clever. For example, when Memo’s sort-of girlfriend, Luz (a futuristic writer who makes her living selling virtual reality recreations of her memories on the internet), takes him to get some illegally implanted nodes, the guy who puts them in is called a “coyotech,” a shrewd allusion to the modern coyotes who lead immigrants across the border. Rivera uses small details like this one to help immerse the viewer in his future world. The film uses extensive narration from Memo, which does allow it to cut some corners, but overall Rivera is quite adept at using small bits of set design, editing, and clips from fake TV shows (Memo finds out about his father’s death by catching it on a reality TV show that follows the exploits of drone fighter pilots) to quickly establish the world he’s trying to create.

Sleep Dealer’s special effects certainly aren’t going to win it any awards, but they are completely serviceable. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that they so quickly draw the viewer into this world that you aren’t likely to notice the effects aren’t ILM-worthy. In many ways, the budgetary constraints here have shaped the movie in a positive way. Rivera’s future world is gritty, organic, and oddly familiar (Blade Runner comes to mid), which gives everything a touch of immediacy and surreality. Too many science fiction films give us an antiseptic and metallic world completely different from our own, but the world of Sleep Dealer is just different enough to sell the future premise, and just familiar enough to let the ideas really hit home. Rivera’s world is one augmented by technology but not completely transformed by it. Characters in Mexico still drive cars, farm vegetables, and work outside, but they do so amid the constant glow of flat screen TVs and holographic computer screens.

Sleep Dealer has been criticized for being a small story about ordinary people in the service of a wider critique of political, social, and technological issues instead of vice versa. It's true that the story is relatively A-to-B, but never in a way that becomes boring or trite. Like the world it presents, this is a film that prizes experience and atmosphere above all else, and Rivera does such a great job of building his environment that it helps to carry the story along in its wake. As for the commentary, this is not a film that overtly preaches to its audience or falls into the realm of polemic. Quite the opposite, in fact. Like the best science fiction, Sleep Dealer is more concerned with asking questions than it is with providing answers or making statements. Thankfully the questions it asks--about the moral implications of immigration policy, the possible effects of mass globalization, and the price a society pays for prizing technological “connectivity” at the expense of personal relationships-- are endlessly fascinating.

The Culture Industry

Going back and re-reading some of the film criticism from the 1920s and 30s is always an interesting experiment. If anything, it’s fascinating to see how prescient guys like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were with regard to the possible directions film could take. From the very beginning, cultural critics (many of them Marxists) were arguing about the problematic nature of film as a cultural tool. Especially troubling to some of these critics was the cinema’s propensity to be used as some kind of mass marketing device that would homogenize culture and encourage complacency and conformism. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’re still having this debate today, perhaps more with regards to television than film, but these critics were writing before the television was even invented. The similarities are still there, though. Ask anyone who doesn’t own a television why and they’re likely to cite a very similar argument.

It is pretty compelling, though, to see that from the very start of sound film people were worried about its cultural placement as a product. Because of financing and other monetary constraints involved in getting a movie made, critics were concerned that film would never be able to be as “difficult” a medium as literature. Here, they weren’t able to anticipate that digital technology eventually would make it easy for anyone with a credit card to start making art films in their garage, but this is another issue that’s still alive and well in contemporary film culture. Every film snob in the world (myself included) has at some point lamented the way movies have become so mass-produced and easy to swallow, and they often point back to the golden age of cinema as a better, simpler time. If reading the criticism of the early 30s (or taking one look at the old studio system) proves anything, it’s that this belief is completely misguided, because before narrative film had even come into its own, people were already complaining about the lack of real artistry and the tendency to avoid taking risks. These critics, in particular a group known as “The Frankfurt School,” even had a name for it: The Culture Industry. This applied to all pop culture in general, but it seems to fit film and television the best. In short, it means a constructed culture full of mass-produced and palatable copies of the real, spontaneous art that springs from “average” people (again, most of these guys were Marxists). Take what you will from it, but to imagine that people were making these kinds of claims in a world before Transformers 2 and “Must-See TV” is pretty amazing, and you can only wonder what they’d be saying if they were still around today.

Le Trou (1960)

French films from the fifties have always held much more of a fascination for me than those of the New Wave. Filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais undoubtedly made huge contributions to cinema, but they often did so at the expense of telling a good story. Don’t get me wrong, I love many of their films, and had I been around in 1960 I would have championed them as much as anyone else. But from a modern perspective, it seems they reach a point of experimentation that now seems a bit tedious, and many of their films, unclassifiable as they are, seem oddly dated. This has never been the case with the class of filmmakers that directly preceded them. Directors like Jean Pierre Melville, Henri Georges Clouzot, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Becker were taking equally bold stylistic risks in the 1950s, but they always did so in the service of their narrative. Whereas Truffaut and Godard eventually just made films about film, movies like A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Les Diaboliques, Bob Le Flambeur, and The Wages of Fear were all about process and experience. They detailed the ways people would go to extremes in order to survive, and they were always just as entertaining as they were inventive and political.

Case in point: Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (The Hole). One of the all-time great prison break movies, this film revels in the details of the ways five Parisian convicts plot and scheme to escape from their jail cell. Le Trou is based on a true story, and in a bold move, Becker even cast one of the actual participants in the real-life jailbreak to play a character in the film. The rest of the cast were all nonprofessionals as well (some of whom would go on to have respectable acting careers), but you wouldn’t know it to watch the film. If anything, the lack of dramatic training is what makes these characters, who are cool and professional to the core, seem so believable.

Becker’s fascination with the minutiae of prison life and the small details of the prisoners’ plan pervades the whole film. It’s all a part of the preoccupation with the process of performing complex and dangerous tasks that seems to be a running theme of filmmakers like he and Clouzot. Here we get to bear witness to every small part of the convicts' scheme, from the way they build a periscope from a tooth brush and a shattered piece of glass so they can spy back on the guards, to how they construct an hour glass with sand smuggled from one of the guards’ ashtrays in order to keep track of time. Beyond these tasks, their days are filled with the monotony of prison life, which sees them assembling boxes, sleeping, and eating food sent to them by their relatives (there’s a great early scene of the prison’s inspector expertly and shamelessly cutting apart one prisoner’s items to check them for contraband), but at night they band together to institute an ingenious and very audacious escape plan.

In the early running, Becker maintains an airtight control of space and pacing, to the point that it seems many of the scenes play out in real time. This is one of the most-discussed aspects of Le Trou and Becker’s filmmaking in general, what has been called his seamless “control of temporality.” Here, he uses it to immerse the viewer in the gargantuan task these men create for themselves, and from the very beginning of the breakout there is a palpable sense of tension. Take, for example, the first step of the plan, which requires the men to hammer through the stone floor of their cell in order to reach a tunnel directly beneath it. As the men take turns chiseling the floor of their cell with a crudely fashioned hammer, Becker simply lets his camera roll, eventually creating a four-minute take of the floor being broken apart. The effect is that we become completely immersed in their struggle as though we are the sixth member of the team, and Becker’s refusal to cut away to show the guards just outside the cell only heightens the suspense. This stress-inducing scene is only the beginning of a massive undertaking that will see the men tunnel through rock, file metal bars, pick locks, and chisel through cement, and all while avoiding roving guard patrols.

Le Trou culminates in a stunning sequence of two of the men finally making their way to the city’s surface and getting a glimpse of the Paris street and the outside of the prison walls. It’s an amazing and evocative sequence, considering how hermetically sealed the film’s environment has been up to this point, and it speaks volumes about the film’s themes of freedom, responsibility, and loyalty, especially since the two then return to the prison in order to collect the rest of the group. What follows is a painfully nerve-wracking ending that hits about as hard as any you’re likely to see.

Le Trou was the last film made by Becker, who died shortly after filming, and its release in 1960 coincided with that of Godard’s Breathless and the start of the New Wave. Directors like Melville would continue the tradition of hard-boiled, realistic film that was started in the 40s and 50s, but it seems that Le Trou stands as a kind of turning point in French cinema. The bold style and medium-shattering experiments that followed were certainly a necessary step in film history, but it does seem a shame that the tradition of taut, athletic films like Le Trou was briefly lost along the way.

Inner Space By Way of Outer Space: Moon (2009)

As science fiction continues to become less and less distinguishable from action and adventure movies, it’s getting harder to find anything resembling the heady, speculative style of classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Silent Running. Even the better efforts from the last few years, like Pitch Black and 28 Days Later, rely more on action and horror than they do hard science, and you only need to look at the recent remake of Star Trek-- which, don’t get me wrong, was a lot of fun-- to see that this trend isn’t going away. But all this only helps to highlight the intelligence of a film like Moon, the superb debut from director Duncan Jones. It’s very much a throwback to the slower, more contemplative science fiction of the 1970s, and like those films it uses its far-out, technological backdrop to explore very grounded and very human themes.

The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an astronaut coming to the end of a three year contract for Lunar Industries, a company that mines the surface of the moon for an energy resource used back on Earth. Bell has been working alone on the company’s small base for too long, his only companion a helper robot called GERTY, and when we first meet him it’s clear that the isolation is starting to get to him. Although he’s anxious to be reunited with his wife and daughter back home, he’s become jittery and accident-prone, and worse yet, he’s starting to see things.

If that sketchy synopsis didn’t already make it clear enough, Moon is a difficult movie to review without giving too much away, because so much of its plot hinges on a number of big reveals that happen relatively early on in the story. This is one of the film’s major strengths, and it lets the audience know straight away what kind of movie Jones intends to make. Any other director would’ve saved these twists for the final ten minutes and used them as the big “aha!” moment of the film, but Jones is smart enough to know that to do so would only be telling half the story, and he’s less interested in getting his audience to ask “what just happened?” than he is in giving them the time to think and speculate about the very complex and, yes, very philosophical ideas he’s presenting to them.

This conceit is reflected in the technical style the filmmakers employ, as well. Jones uses a matter-of-fact shooting style that employs a lot wide shots and longer takes, but he has a gift for giving away just the right amount of information in every one of his shots, always keeping the audience in uncertainties when he needs to. Meanwhile, a number of scenes end with slow fades to black, and in others, the sound from one scene is allowed to bleed into the one that precedes it, creating an odd sense of interconnectedness and inevitability. In each case, (and thanks also to writer Nathan Parker’s script) the story is allowed to breathe and unfold deliberately. The filmmakers want us to constantly be second-guessing our assumptions about what is going on, but they let the complexity of the ideas take care of that for them rather than planting unnecessary red herrings throughout the story. Jones supposedly has a Master’s degree in philosophy, and no doubt understands the power of a good paradox.

Moon will almost certainly be both criticized and praised for its uncanny kinship with films like 2001 and Blade Runner, and it does employ many of the stylistic and thematic elements of those films. Let’s be honest-- this film is certainly not blazing any new intellectual territory, but at the same time it does engage with its ideas in a much more direct and astute manner than most films of this kind. Jones doesn’t go out of his way to skirt around the specter of his influences, but he doesn’t let the movie ever reach the level of homage, either. In many ways, it seems as though he and Parker are making use of the expectations the audience brings to the movie. Take GERTY, Bell’s friendly helper robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey in one of his coolest performances in some time). With his monotone voice and vaguely human personality, GERTY immediately conjures up memories of HAL in 2001, so from the start we ascribe sinister motives to him. This ready-made belief helps play a big part in the great deal of suspense that builds throughout the story, and all without any real effort on the filmmakers’ part, as GERTY, in what comes as a delightful plot twist, seems to have been designed with Asimov’s three laws of robotics clearly in mind.

I haven’t mentioned Rockwell yet, but it should be said that he gives a career performance here, the kind that should be earning him huge accolades. He’s always been hit or miss for me, and I’ve criticized him for being a bit over the top in the past, but here he won me over once and for all. He’s truly carrying the film, and the poignancy and warmth he brings to Sam Bell helps to ground the personal, human aspects of the story. The fantastic, haunting music by Clint Mansell, who scores all of Aronofsky’s movies, is also worth mentioning. His music really helps to set the mood here in a subtle, non-intrusive way, often adding even more levels of suspense to what is already a pretty eerie atmosphere.

Moon is not a movie that will win the hearts and minds of the fanboy sci-fi crowd, but it’s very hard to see how anyone who appreciates the old-school, cerebral brand of hard science fiction would not find a lot to like here. Even though it gives away its plot secrets relatively early, it plays its intellectual cards decidedly close to the vest, and this only helps to make its themes and its story all the more rewarding. Few movies have the audacity to really explore ideas like what it means to be human, or how much we can truly trust the validity our emotions and our memories. And beyond the unanswerable, there are scenes, ideas, and motives I’m still reviewing and questioning-- what, for example, is going on in those video messages from Sam’s wife?-- that have me eager to see Moon again. Refreshingly, this is not because I’m still trying to piece its narrative together, but because I want more time to consider its ideas. That, if anything, will always be a sign of good science fiction.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Ron Howard is the most innocuous director in Hollywood. The guy doesn’t make bad movies, on the whole, but outside of Apollo 13 he hasn’t made anything truly great, either. Frost/Nixon is yet another workmanlike effort from him, and it might as well be a metaphor for his entire career: It’s well-acted and competently shot, but it’s also frustratingly arbitrary and uninteresting (I can remember few Best Picture nominees that were any less discussed or controversial). Probably the only question raised by Frost/Nixon is why this movie--or, for that matter, the play it's based on--exists at all. Did we really need a dramatization of the famous interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, especially when everyone who’s interested in the subject has either already seen the real thing or can easily seek it out? Sure, it’s fun to watch Frank Langella do a Nixon impression, and he does it well, but all the movie as a whole amounts to is a slightly clumsy reenactment of something that most people already know about.

Howard’s way of getting around this issue is to shoot the movie in faux-documentary style, with characters frequently addressing the camera in confessional interviews and recounting their experiences as a part of the two research teams. In addition to just being a tired technique, these interviews also come off feeling like a cheat-- an all too easy way for the film to tell and not show--which ironically breaks the first rule of the kind of “good journalism” that Frost/Nixon is trying to champion. And this is too bad, because the backroom preparation, dealing, and politics that helped make the interviews happen are the only story really worth telling here, and these scenes should have been where the movie really shined. Instead, we get one cliche rolled out after another, where the characters sit around tables littered with papers and coffee cups and name-check all of Nixon’s greatest hits, from the “Checkers speech” to his unfortunate debate with JFK. Outside of this, the movie is also notable for featuring what might be the most half-assed romantic subplot in recent memory, in the form of Frost’s relationship with his girlfriend Caroline, herself a journalist. Why a talented actress like Rebecca Hall would lower herself to playing what amounts to little more than set dressing is completely baffling.

Not surprisingly, the movie only really gains steam when it gets to the unscripted bits: the actual interviews between Frost and Nixon. In what amounts to a real intellectual fencing match, Frost is initially outdone by Nixon, who controls the tone and speed of the interview like the slippery customer that he is, and it’s only when they reach the subject of Watergate that the tables begin to turn. Still, these few exhilarating moments only succeed in highlighting the question that’s hovering over this entire movie: Why watch the recreation of an interview when the real thing is readily available, and now on YouTube, no less? Regrettably, this is a question that Frost/Nixon and its director are never quite able to answer.