Fog of War

Saw Fog of War. It was a fascinating equivocation by Robert McNamera, the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam. The filmmaker's (Errol Morris) and McNamera's interests in making this film dovetail in an effort to understand and explain the colossal quagmire that was Vietnam, but are opposed when it comes to McNamera himself. Morris wants to understand him and open him up, while McNamera, seasoned pro at press conference cross-examinations, deflects and counters these questions while freely admitting he is doing so. The film is slightly dry, but I was thankfully alert enough to be interested and fascinated anyway. Morris has a nose for poignant images and intersperses McNamera's talking head with Koyaanisqatsi-like images of frantic, densely layered montage (and also some hackneyed domino-falling imagery. When he talks about Vietnam dragging on, we see soldiers trudging through mud up to their waist. Almost like... a quagmire, huh?) at another time he drops a human skull down a flight of stairs simply because the image is striking.

The main thesis of this film seems to be that Vietnam was far too frightfully complex to be easily explained. There was too little information and too many agents working and communicating at cross purposes. There's an incredibly poignant anecdote where McNamera relates a meeting between him and the Prime Minister of Vietnam (the name went by quickly, I believe Đỗ Mười (this was after the war was over)) where they nearly came to blows about the purpose of the fruitless war. The Americans saw it as an extension of the cold war, saving the east from Communism and The Domino Effect (cue falling domino visual) whereas the Vietnamese saw the Americans not as liberators, but as just another colonial power, seeking to subjugate them. They would never ally themselves with the Russians and the Chinese, didn't we know that? The idea that the entire meaningless war could have been avoided if only we had spoken sensibly to each other is tantalizing and infuriating. Very interesting to someone as profoundly ignorant of history as I am.

It's tempting, but I think fruitless to read this film with an eye toward the current troubles in the middle east. To do so is too reductive. McNamera (and Morris, via McNamera) is trying to understand war in general. We are rational people who do not wish to kill each other, McNamera points out, and yet we go to war. He does not ultimately have any simple answers, but argues (convincingly) that no simple answers can exist. Troubling, but honest and true-sounding at least.

500 Days of Summer

Saw 500 Days of Summer. It was a really cute not-really-love story. It not so much about love as about the idea of love. The story follows Tom, a man with a grossly simplistic view of love (evidence of said simplicity to follow.) Tom falls in love with Summer, the titular girl with markedly different (though also immature) views on love. Tom believes in Disney-style love-at-first-sight True Love but Summer, terrified by the divorce of her parents and self-trained in the powers of suppression, believes love does not actually exist in any sense. This difference hews all the way down to their philosophical outlooks. Whereas Tom wants more celebration of what is beautiful in the world, Summer wants more redemption of what is ugly. Of The Beatles, she loves Ringo best simply because nobody else loves him.

Tom is such a romantic that when he has the sex with Summer for the first time, the world erupts into a full-on musical dance number as swooning pop songs play on the soundtrack. He is great at his facile greeting-card job, but avoids working toward a more artistically demanding job as an architect (which is the dream he seems content to continue dreaming about.) We get to know Summer less, but she reveals a bitter-sweet love of the idea of being strong alone which she recognizes as noble and sad.

Together they attempt a fumbling romance wherein both deny their true feelings of affection out of deference to Summer's insecurities but also suppress their fears and doubts for the sake of Tom's delusions. "Why label it?" they keep repeating about their maybe-maybe-not relationship. This is the epitome of the cutesy quirky romance that would never last a month outside of a rom-com and (not a spoiler) they break up after a year. As sometimes happens in life, they argue without arguing and actually swap sides on the romance issue by the end. Tom is the new-born cynic and Summer the romantic true believer. How interesting.

Everyone in this film has a differently flawed take on romance (except the precocious relationship-guru who is Tom's niece or something.) Tom's friends are a chronically dateless schlub and a man who has been dating the same girl since grade school out of apathetic inertia. The boss at the greeting card company has bought into his own flower-scented bullshit long ago. We are given a wide variety of options on the idea of romance but Tom, our avatar, is left confused.

Coming into this movie, I was kind of hell-bent on liking it (for silly reasons) and I succeeded in this endeavor. It's a more philosophical romance (which isn't even really a romance, as the opening narration warns us.) Don't take your smart girls to this one, guys. The conversations it inspires are dangerous first-date material.

Once Upon a Time in America

Saw Once Upon a Time in America. It was a gangster movie, set during the gangster-sploitation-era of the 20s. The film rocks steadily back and forth through time between the 1900s and the indefinite modern day of the 60s/70s. The protagonist is a gangster named Noodles but played by Robert De Niro, so he's not as wimpy as his name implies. In the past he is a tough kid who drifts into crime, lured by the easy money and relative freedom. He is aided and abetted in this endeavor by his partner in crime, Max, played in the future by James Woods' creepy, alien, cement-like face. Usual gangster business ensues.

They take over their neighborhood from a small-time thug, some guy in a suit says he likes their moxie, they hootingly have their 'first time' with a prostitute etc etc. The story is told from the perspective of the old-man Noodle, remembering his entire life (as people in epic films tend to do (this movie is 229 minutes long, so it counts as an epic, I say.)) The result is that this is all extremely nostalgic. The blood is there in cartoony fire-house red and there's violence, but not many bad times and not much suffering. The most sympathy we ever feel for the victims of the boys is when we hear a news-stand owner lamenting as his stand burns down. This lament is drowned out by the lil rascals' giggling. It's not done in an obvious way, but this is memory lane and Noodles' story. A recurring musical theme in this movie is a schmaltzy version of Yesterday by The Beatles that has violins drowning out everything but the words "Yesterday" and "Suddenly." Even the title! "Once upon a time..."

In all of this sentimentality is the childhood sweetheart of Noodle. She's an ultra-serious girl who wants him to give up his egocentric life of crime for her. This he does not do of course and lives to deeply and centrally regret it. The entire movie is full of regret and strangely full of cruel acts of mercy. The ending in particular hits the revenge-by-mercy nail on the head. It's telling that Noodles' drug of choice is opium, famous for inducing a happy trip through memory lane. There's a sequence near the end that casts a strange ambiguity over the film. Leaving a party, our hero sees a creepy garbage truck go by, followed by a car packed full of drunken party-goers (that are perhaps from another time?) going in the opposite direction. Clearly someone's trying to tell us something.

An interesting take on the gangster genre, especially coming from Sergio Leone, who seems to be really interested in moral ambiguity. I suppose there's a good deal of sympathy for the devil which I normally am annoyed by but this time perhaps I was seduced by the Hallmark treatment of Tommy-guns. The film is more than just sentimentality, but that was the most interesting thing about it for me.

Kids

Saw Kids, a film from the writer of Gummo and the director of Bully, so this is gonna be an ugly trip through youth culture. The story follows a loose collection of urban teenagers in New York City (I guess) who skate and hang around parks, smoking pot and hooking up. They seem good natured and obviously think of themselves as friendly but they maybe beat a guy to death for daring to speak angrily to them and they all have this tough attitude, so they're troubled (of course.)

The central two teenagers are Telly and his friend Casper. Telly likes to have sex with virgins and, in a voice-over narration near the end, he reveals that that's sort of all he has in his life, this fascination with deflowering virgin girls. Alright fine whatever but we also learn fairly early on that this Telly has the AIDS and doesn't know it. This lends a yet more sinister edge to his constant talk of bangin' virgins. He is the villain of this piece. The hero is the increasingly partied-out Jenny, the girl who learns he has AIDS by contracting it herself, from him. She follows him from party to party always frustratingly one step behind him.

The whole movie is very frustrating. I'm not sure if this movie is supposed to be just luridly shocking, or some kind of Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale, or some self-righteous head-shaking at the youth of today. Any of these is not exactly flattering goals and I suspect it was actually trying for a combination of all three. This film upset me but that is clearly its aim (to upset,) so well done, I guess. There's an extended sequence of the characters just hanging out which is intersting and kind of pleasant (it reminded me strongly of Chain Camera, but this one is scripted.) This film has the reality and serious tone which the Troma films lack and is therefore actually subversive and kind of dangerous (as opposed to (say) Class of Nuke 'em High.)

This film plays as a very lurid tragedy. It aims to be shocking and in parts it is (although compared to A Serbian Film or Salo of course it is as nothing.) It mainly plays on the hand-wringing fears of parents that their sons and daughters are being lead astray which feels like cheap fear-mongering to me. Instead of scaring parents into locking up their progeny, let's be help everyone understand each other. There's a gross feeling I got that these kids are beyond redemption which is a kind of shitty thing to say and especially about children. I think I'm slightly hysterically reading into the film a bit much (as I say, mission Unsettle The Viewer was a success) but it's the sort of shit-stirring film that invites social-commentary-based readings. Bleh. Review over.

Chronicle

Saw Chronicle (thanks, Susan!) It followed Andy, a troubled kid with an abusive (step?)father and sick-n-dying mother. He and two other (apparently 30 year old) teenagers happen upon a mysterious, glowing rock in a cave and gain telekinetic abilities. This can only end well. They refine their powers and joke around, mainly using their abilities for pranks. I kept waiting for the trio to start thinking about becoming super-heroes or just, you know, do something with their abilities. They wind up bending their super-powers to the task of making Andy popular and, for a while, succeed.

I remember seeing the trailer for this film and it seemed like it was being marketed as a slight deconstruction of the super-hero genre. Well and good, but this does the film a slight disservice. It is more a teenage power-fantasy (although it is not exactly that either.) It played as a sort of tragedy for me. With my bleeding heart, I wanted Andy to be cared for and loved, but <spoiler>as the film went on, it became more and more clear that this was not going to happen. The film was ultimately more interested in creating and defeating a compelling bad guy than saving the innocent</spoiler>. I don't know how else the film could have ended, however, without feeling like it was cheating us in some way.

Also, when the film ended, I felt like chapter 2 was left as yet unwritten. Do the boys go on to change the world? They claim they will some day, but we never see it. Think how interesting a film about superheroes saving the world would be, if they were to save it from want and poverty. I think I just really wanted this to turn into Miracle Man (which is excellent if you haven't read it.)

The film is also composed entirely of 'found footage' from Andy's camera, and later from news reports. This is a little annoying and seems unnecessary, although some neat visual effects are mined from it. Every time the camera floats out of Andy's hands it seems a little magic. But I wish the film had just adopted the omniscient eye that most movies do.

Make no mistake, I enjoy the film a lot as it stands. It has interesting and believable characters in fantastic situations and usually you get only one or the other. It would have been interesting had it been slightly different, but the same can be said of every film.

State and Main

Saw State and Main, a farcical showbiz film about a hoard of Hollywood-types who descend on a sleepy little town straight out of Norman Rockwell. This is written and directed by David Mamet though, so things are a little poisonous, a little dangerous. The film is kept busy and frantic by a motor-mouthed William H Macy (Mamet's muse) and a thronging team of assistants all clamoring for his attention. He must talk a hysterical actress into doing a topless scene while an interviewer is on the phone with him.

Meanwhile, the town is reacting with dull surprise to all the goings on. The ancient farmers change from gently teasing each other to reading Variety and commenting on average view per screen ratings. The local politician, a hideously self-serving ass who is "this close from being this close to being next in line for congress!", reacts with hostility to what is supplanting his role as the mover and shaker. Cleverly, the film has cast famous actors as the Hollywood types and unknowns as the townsfolk.

The central plot of the film revolves around the budding romance of the writer and the local politician's girlfriend, a bookish woman who is constantly adopting an attitude of "gee shucks, us country folk with our wise little ways, huh?" which I imagine must get tiring eventually. The film intelligently avoids the easy sentimentalism of siding with the townsfolk against the Hollywood-ites, rather adopting a more turbulent middle-ground. Of course the actors come off way worse than the townsfolk, but the townies have their failings too. In the Mamet-verse everyone is swinish to various degrees. The nearest thing to a villain in this film (apart from the elemental force of chaos, the engine of all farces) is the local politician, after all.

The dialogue is snappy, the plot constantly frantically spinning, and the underlying juggling act of our interests and alliances as audience members is masterful. Not a brilliant or stuffed-shirt kind of a movie, but very good.

Happiness

Saw Happiness. Another Todd Solondz film, he who directed Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I found so painful. This one is similarly a full-blown menagerie of all different kinds of pain. The film surrounds a central trio of sisters. There is a lonely, kind of perpetually embarrassed singer who still lives with her parents, a suburban house-wife who seems to effortlessly and obliviously say the exact cruelest thing in every situation, and a self-absorbed and self-admitted phony of a poet whose cruelty, it seems, has been honed by endless catty luncheons. Their parents are getting divorced, the house-wife is married to a serial child-rapist, the poet's neighbor is a fat Philip Seymour Hoffman who mastuba-prank-calls women all over the state (the state of New Jersey specifically. That state just gets no good publicity.)

All of these characters are major ones and all of them suffer sort of continually. Far from angels, they are shown mainly to be cruel, vain, idiots who are the main causes of each others' suffering. However, whereas I found Welcome to the Dollhouse deeply depressing and unnerving, somehow either I or Solondz hit the right wavelength and this one is kind of hilarious. One of the early scenes is of the house-wife comforting the signer after the singer has just broken up with Jon Lovitz (this breakup is also shown and is bizarre and painful and sets the dark-humor tone.) She tells her that there's still "a glimmer" of hope for her and then goes on to say that it sounds ridiculous now of course, but that she always thought that the singer would wind up alone and jobless forever (she says, smilingly, into the face of the sister who is still living at home and is now newly single, whose music career is nonexistent.)

The movie has all these moments that are incredibly grotesque and painful and then someone adds just one little thing extra and it becomes hilarious. Solondz is still an artist of pain (a sort of filmic cenobite) but this time he is being funny with his art, instead of dismal.