Demonic Ambitions

Fall is upon us and Halloween approaches! I rented the Blu-Ray of the original “Halloween” and several other scary flicks to get in the mood and will cap off the month seeing the original “Psycho” accompanied by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra- good times!

In ‘Audience of One ‘ director Mike Jacobs shows us something pretty scary- real-life religious fanaticism which is growing by leaps and bounds in this country. In uncertain times it’s comforting to have religion, however when it stops being a personal expression of spirituality and goes all cultish it is downright dangerous. Folks who believe that they are on a “mission from God” ala the “Blues Brothers” will have no problem causing all sorts of mayhem since anyone against them must be “the devil”. Working Jim Jones’ old hood, Pastor Richard Gazowsky is introduced to us as a charismatic leader who seems harmless at first as he preaches the word to his San Francisco congregation. We are told that he didn’t see his first film “The Lion King” until he was 40, but that God then told him to make a film (“Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments”) and lo the misadventures begin!

A delusional man pressing his family and parishioners to make a film that he says has 200 million in financing for is fascinating but also a little sad. Church collections don’t go to help the unfortunate but instead fund massive film expenses such as creating unnecessarily elaborate costumes. Volunteers are pressed into crew and talent positions putting in long workdays where safety precautions are non-existent. This is kind of like the doc “Burden of Dreams” about the madness of director Werner Herzog while making “Fitzcarraldo'” with the important exception that Herzog is a great filmmaker, Gazowksy is just a fool. Even late in the film as we see that his fiasco has no funding and he is forcing his studio landlord (the city of San Franciso) to sue him for his back rent, he attends a filmmakers trade show promising vendors that he is planning on buying their high end equipment. In short he has no conscience. Why should he? God talks directly to him. Kind of like “Bowfinger” meets “Jesus Camp”.

As I’ve said before here, I hate the cinema of sadism that passes as horror. Splatter and gore has hardcore followers but I can’t help to think that it’s just not a good thing to get such pleasure watching people get tortured and killed. It reminds me too much of how Rome fell with its residents using death as entertainment in the Coliseum (Though I did like “Gladiator” which makes me a bit of a hypocrite).

Sam Raimi on the other hand, gave us the “Evil Dead” trilogy back in the eighties and early nineties, films that mixed the spookiness of folklore with rollercoaster thrills shot like great slapstick ala “An American Werewolf in London”. These films were scary fun and became better as the budgets went up. Raimi went on to do a respectable indie, “A Simple Plan” before moving on up to the big budget “Spiderman” series. Obviously his brother and he had an old spooky script that they never made and Raimi decided to dust it off and give his fans a little bit of retro horror. I’m glad he did.

In “Drag Me to Hell” he shows his ability to take all of the scariness of that original haunted wooded cabin and bring it to a normal suburban home in Southern California transforming ordinary objects into instruments of fear: a stapler, a handkerchief, a coin, a button, a ruler even a piece of cake. Yes a piece of cake – did you ever eye up a delicious pastry when dieting? Raimi and the demons at his disposal know of these inner conflicts.

Our heroine, bank loan officer Christine (Alison Lohman), is a former obese farm girl from a broken home who wrestles these inner demons as she reinvents herself in LA. When her relationship and career seem troubled, the evil spirits channel her fear of eating; the arm of a demonic woman, a fly, embalming liquid, maggots and blood all make their way into her mouth at some point in this flick. It all begins with her fixation on an old gypsy womans’ dirty dentures that she observes as she is trying to decide whether to give her another extension on her home loan. Being exploited by her boss (David Paymer) as she vies for a promotion (he has her bring him and her rival food of course) she is forced into deciding to evict this old woman, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), which sets off the action as she is then attacked, cursed and terrorized.

Raimi gives us plenty of shout-outs to the ‘Evil Dead’ films including using his trademark 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, a visual reference to the original poster art, cartoon violence in an old shed and Christine’s boyfriend (Justin Long, the Mac pitchman seen using Mac products) making a passing reference that he has a cabin in the woods. The film even opens with an 80’s era logo for Universal. A drawback is the flat acting by the young actors in the leads; old-timers Raver and Paymer fare much better. Lohman, Long and Dileep Rao (as the worlds' most knowledgeable spiritualist) all seem to play the film straight rather than give it the subtle twist of camp that it needed. Lohman especially seems more of a dullard than an ambitious and then horrified woman. A Bruce Campbell cameo also would have rocked it. This is nitpicky of course – this film as I witnessed makes men swear in disbelief and women scream in fright and that’s a lot of fun in the serious world of mass marketed torture porn. A definition of Irish blarney is when you can tell someone to go to hell and have them anticipate the trip. Raimi still has the charm.

Lose your Illusion

There have been many documentaries about the war in Iraq but Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss's “Full Battle Rattle” captures the motivation and policies of our military better than most. Ironically it was filmed in the US, in a mock Iraqi city in the Mojave Desert of California. The “city” is a battle training ground that seems to be a cross between a video game simulation and the town featured in “The Truman Show”. The make-believe hamlet is populated by Iraqi-Americans and other soldiers portraying the locals. There are meetings with the city council, confrontations at check points and even photo opportunities as building contracts and cash are handed out to buy good faith. Insurgents and assassinations also sneak in as programmed by the war game officials. A soldier and the man portraying the deputy mayor refer to their script as they discuss how to play a scene in one of the many surreal moments in this interesting film. When the same deputy mayor proudly shows video of his mock execution to his real family, his wife breaks into tears and we are reminded that this role playing is mirroring the real life violence effecting actual families. As the military personnel are shipped off after their training exercise you can really sense the anxiety as they leave a place where the dead were just actors or medical dummies to enter the very real chaos of war. I found this to be an interesting dissection of the logistics of modern war with the implied violence eerily foreshadowing the reality that awaits them.

In “Anvil! The Story of Anvil”, director Sacha Gervasi first introduces the Canadian rockers via old footage of the 1984 Japanese Super Rock Festival that they appeared at with The Scorpions, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi and other top bands. Members of Metallica, Motorhead, Guns N Roses and others are seen telling of their influence. We then cut to 2007 Toronto to see the band members working middle-class jobs while still holding onto the dream of making it big. Lead guitar/singer “Lips” (Steve Kudlow) and his long suffering best friend/drummer, Robb Reiner are mellow but often prone to explosive arguments like an old married couple. This is one of the many parallels of this film with the famed mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap”: We see the band making its’ way to the stage saying “Hello Cleveland!’, the silly album covers, an audio knob going to “11”, the foreign road manager girlfriend, the series of humiliating gigs, Stonehenge and the redeeming call from Japan. Yet somehow this flick does not mock its subjects, in fact the optimism of “Lips” in the face of all odds is actually inspiring and touching. Their families are still trying to support them and you can’t help but to pull for (or head bang for) this group as well.

Steven Soderbergh follows his dense but unmoving “Che (Parts One & Two)” with a small film about a high-end escort in Manhattan just prior to the election of 2008. “The Girlfriend Experience” uses real-life porn star Sasha Grey to portray Chelsea, a call girl just trying to make it in the world of the wealthy. Captured in a series of high-end restaurants and stores we see what may be a collapsing gilded era as Chelsea acts as ‘the girlfriend” of several nervous movers and shakers, which mostly means listening to them talk about finances. Her live-in boyfriend is a personal trainer also trying to leverage his relationship with his rich clients to get ahead. Their parallel realities comment about the materialism and superficiality of life. Sex, looks and money is all important, but this soullessness is also the death of real love. The film even has a trip to Vegas in it, the ultimate metaphor for the illusions of wealth and the American dream of success. However, again Soderbergh just doesn’t pull it off. This is yet another arty film that moves slowly and seems plot less. To mix it up a bit, it is edited in a confusingly deliberate non-chronological order which is reminiscent of “Memento”. The biggest problem is the monosyllabic, boring performance by Grey in the lead. I suspect a high end call girl would be intelligent and an excellent conversationalist. Grey seems more like a bored teenager here and that’s a GF experience that no one would pay for.

Quick review: “Watchmen” a sadistic abomination, torture porn and fanboys still ruling Hollywood!

No Doubt

This film was another one of those instances of not remembering how it ended up in the Netflix queue but thankful it did.

"The History Boys" is initially a loving, gentle, pre-college educational romp. But as things progress, the truth is revealed in an easy-going, British style. In an all-boys prep school, the various characters have all nearly aced their preliminary college exams. But their headmaster wants more, and brings in a young consultant to bring more polish to the students, in the hopes of not just getting into Oxford or Cambridge, but getting in with scholarships.

A gifted ensemble cast delivers great performances. Esteemed English actor, Richard Griffiths (you know him from "Harry Potter"), as "Hector," is the teddy bear of a professor whose under-appreciated teaching style eventually gives way to a more serious charge, when he is seen fondling one of his male students while they ride his motorcycle. The students are all old enough to know what's going on with old Hector, and even have a standard retort to give when they feel his reaching hand. Nothing is done beyond this. There is a certain amount of acceptance and calm here that keeps things from developing beyond a simple, acknowledged fondle. Hector himself seems to truly care for the boys and encourages their success. We get the impression that he is controlling his urges so that he would never go beyond a roving hand. But when a crossing guard takes notice of this, the headmaster of the school steps in and "requests" that Hector retire immediately. Hector is so loveable, it's hard to come to terms with the realization that he truly is a pedophile. But, as in life, there are many shades of grey.

The struggles and coercion and maneuvering that the boys all partake in is what gets at the heart of the story. Learning the less-than-admirable manipulations that adults engage in is as much a part of their education as essays worthy of acceptance into Oxford.

Like "Doubt," "The History Boys" was also a play before it became a film. And both films tackle sexual child abuse in different ways. In Doubt, there is the ruination and damnation of an esteemed clergyman, and the tragedy of his young victim. In The History Boys, there is the more subtle realism of a gentle yet lecherous old man. Here, not only are the students older, but they are wiser, and know that these subtle advances are a part of the adult world, as it is about to unfold before them.

The American dream: Elusive, then hard to maintain

As the US seems more divided than ever lately, I recently saw three new DVDs that deal with our freedoms in their own personal way.

In “Sugar” (2008), Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s follow-up to their very good “Half Nelson” (2006), we are introduced to a Dominican baseball player whose whole town depends on him making the minor leagues in the US and then possibly the majors. The pressure to succeed and the fish-out-of-water culture clashes of his life are examined in a very low-key, naturalistic style: Far too low-key for my tastes. Whereas in “Half Nelson” we had the Oscar nominated performance of lead actor Ryan Gosling taking us into the shadowy world of teachers who abuse drugs, here we have a non-actor, Algenis Perez Soto playing the lead. The fact that he isn’t an actor does increase the realism but since in 90% of this film the camera is pointed at him, the story would have benefitted if we could have had more insight into his mind. He just seems to stare vacantly most of the time as things occur almost randomly around him. This trend of almost hyper-realism, where we find ourselves stuck into one unstructured scene after another seems a bit lazy and pretentious to me. In one long shot we see ‘Sugar’ walking through a blurry entertainment arcade finally arriving at the edge of a bowling alley where his American counterpart is enjoying a game surrounded by friends. I know I was supposed to sympathize with his isolation here but I was too bored by the length of the take of his walk. That’s just me- ADD boy! His character then makes a questionable decision halfway through the film that seems unlikely given all we’ve been shown. So although this film came with high praise and had some nice plays, it just failed to score with me.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is “Sin Nombre” (2008), which although shot with equal realism gives us memorable imagery, strong dramatic performances and a tight story. Filmmaker Cary Fukunaga wrote and directed this tale of a group of Central American immigrants making their way to the American border. Casper (Edgar Flores) is a Mexican gang member of the scarily tattooed ‘Mara Salvatrucha’, who needs to prove his worth. Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is a young Honduran girl just trying to follow her family to a better life. Both end up hitching on top of a rural train that snakes its’ way north. Somehow these images capture the beauty and sacrifice of these people. One touching scene has the train passing under a large statue of Mother Mary as many pray for her blessing. As the gang pursues Casper, he tries to thwart the advances of Sayra to no avail. Like good and evil itself these two seem trapped with each other. I found this film similar in my mind to “The Warriors” another surreal adventure of a road trip to redemption.

“State of Play” (2009) is based on a popular BBC mini-series and I’m sure if I had seen this I would have hated this film. In fact, I expected not to like it since it seemed super-hokey, which it is to some degree. However, although not the best political thriller ever it does make its’ points, have strong performances and is nicely shot. Russell Crowe plays Cal McCaffrey a veteran reporter for the fictional Washington Globe (a stand in for the Post); Della (Rachel McAdams) is a newbie blogger for the paper which has just been acquired though a merger by a global corporate media group. Helen Mirren is the editor who must weigh the pressure to sell papers with the infotainment demands of a 24-hour news cycle rather than taking the time to get the story told correctly. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), Cal’s old college roommate, is a congressman from Pennsylvania who oversees a committee investigating a defense contract corporation which eerily looks like Blackwater. The film opens with a series of killings that somehow link up to the death of a female Collins’ staffer who also was having an affair with him. Collin’s wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn) still pines for Cal in a ‘Casablanca’-like triangle that I found to be great old-timey Hollywood fun. The old-school vet reporter and newbie blogger team up to clear Collins’ name and get to the bottom of the killings in an attempt to bring the evil defense contractor out into the light while saving the paper from the pressures of its’ new owners.
There sure is a lot going on in this flick (since it is distilled from a mini-series) but it sucked me in and I enjoyed it! Director Kevin Macdonald (“Touching the Void”, “The Last King of Scotland”) really captures the surroundings from the messy newsroom, to the streets and eateries of DC, to the clean yet ominous halls of our government. He also gives some visual nods to “All the Presidents’ Men” with scenes at a creepy garage, the Watergate hotel, as well as extreme close-ups of copy being written, this time with a blinking cursor rather than the rifle-like cracks of typewriter strikes. Although it is flawed and a little too tidy in resolution, this film demonstrates how diligence is always needed to maintain our country’s morality in the face of a very complex, corrupt world. Sadly, this film also seemed like an epitaph for printed newspapers in a world overcome by the internet and bloggers (like me?).

A Shaky First Year!

Wow! As August comes to a close after flying by, a lot of great films hit which I would give four salt shakers to: Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, Trouble the Water, Tyson, The Class and Goodbye Solo. Normally I would choose one or two of these and tell you why to see them, but I didn’t want August to pass without acknowledging that this month marks the first anniversary of this blog!

Jessi and I worked together before she moved to New Mexico. I have seen so many friends come and go out of my little friendship fish bowl that I assumed we would e-mail once or twice a year before eventually losing touch. We are both frustrated creatives with the exception that Jessi works at it and I just repress it. Our e-mails would often turn to films we’d seen and we’d compare notes. As is obvious in this blog, some of the films she loved I hated and visa-versa. She then suggested this blog which I was dead against it since I see most blogs as self-indulgent and didn’t want to jump in that pool. However she convinced me to give it a try, nothing fancy just straightforward, concise reviews.

Last August, 'Salty Popcorn' began with Jessi’s post on 'Tsotsi'- I immediately countered thinking it was going to be the point-counterpoint deal, like the original Siskel & Ebert. We then both reviewed "The Savages" and "Surfwise", two great little indies and I put my best of all time list down. As we closed the most productive month ever, Jessi reviewed "Jumper" and I looked at "August" as we quickly realized it would never work for us to line up our viewing habits with the same films. We persevered somehow and this blog literally became my therapy.

Without going into detail we have both continued our struggle for meaningful work, again Jessi being more successful than I. I thought this blog would just die off since there were so many other places where folks could get opinions- but between Jessi and myself I feel we have added some original voice on the state of current home cinema. Even if we do have very light traffic, content is content.

I know one thing- as life gets me down - I do still find watching films to be my most favorite thing ever. This past year wasn't a banner year but through it all I have been able to watch many films I would never have had time for. Films inspire me and take me to a world as seen through someone else’s eyes. They touch and inform me- and remind me that the struggles of life are a common drama. I've seen artists who understand film as the 20th century art form and those who see it as a business churning out product. SP has allowed me the forum to yell at those who get it wrong and praise those who get it right. I’m still touched by heartfelt dramas and laugh loud at good comedies but unfortunately, more often than not, I feel like a hollow piece of crap has wasted my time and sucked out my soul. Yet that’s the point, I can suffer that turkey so you don’t have to. Even in my negative reviews I try to steer you to a similar film that got it right. So I thank you Jessi for nudging me into this. Happy Birthday ‘Salty Popcorn’! - Let’s keep the films popping and I’ll keep it shaking!

Your co-editor,

Tim

Dudeism

Two new releases this month tell of unusual male friendships- one for laughs and one for sentiment; both seemed overrated and predictable.

In “The Soloist” Jamie Foxx went with the advice of Robert Downey’s actor character in “Tropic Thunder” and didn’t play “full retard” just going with schizophrenia. Based on the true story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (played by Downey) who befriended a down-and-out man, Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx), who he discovers had some classical cello training at Julliard and then told his story in several articles. Director Joe Wright tries hard to beat the clichés and be original, but by playing loose with the facts (and doing hokey things like presenting a symphony internally from Ayers point of view), the film lays the melodrama on when understatement would have worked better. Downey as usual is great and Foxx keeps his character credible but this is another case of the actors being better than the material. With forced flashbacks and a skid row that seems to be more “Escape from New York” than the real streets of LA, Wright and the screenwriters kill the reality of film despite the two strong performances up front. Trying to play a meaningful violin piece with only two strings again doesn’t work.

On the wackier side of unusual male friendship is “I Love You Man” written and directed by John Hamburg although it seems way similar to the work of bro-mance comedy director Judd Apatow. Paul Rudd is Peter Klaven, an LA realtor who is getting married but seems to just realize that he has no male friends. He finally bumps into bohemian free-spirit Sydney Fife (Jason Segal) who he connects with on the rocky road to male bonding. Along the way there are jams in the man cave, scuffles with Lou Ferrigno and some forced awkward man-dates. Unfortunately for me all seemed like a Comedy Central made-for-TV movie and the only laughs are when Rudd tries to speak hip – saying things like “Slappa da bass mon! “, calling Sydney bizarre nicknames like “Joben” and generally mining the un-coolness of his character to the hilt. Segal as Fife on the other hand seems completely unreal whether when he is threatening people who ask him to curb his dog, launching an unauthorized billboard campaign for Peter or engaging in primal scream therapy. Needless to say this all builds to a downright stupid ending. Reworking date movies for male appeal is a good idea, but they need to be funny, this one is all premise no delivery- totally ... totes my goats!

Surreal Japan – Lost in Translation

Hikikomori - a Japanese term to refer to the phenomenon of reclusive individuals who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives.

Well I’m down for this! I love to learn about social phenoms and in the film “Tokyo!” which presents three short films (about 35 minutes each) we have this lifestyle dramatized in the final sequence "Shaking Tokyo," directed by Korean director Joon-ho Bong (“The Host”). Similar in style to 2006’s “Paris, je t'aime”, this time all three films are by foreign directors again using the titled city as a setting.

The first segment is “Interior Design,” by Michel Gondry who gave us the great “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and the poor “The Science of Sleep” and “Be Kind, Rewind” (Though Jessi and I disagreed on that one). I really enjoyed this tale in the offbeat style of Jim Jarmusch. A quirky indie director and his supportive girlfriend crash at her friends’ apartment in Tokyo in attempt to get his film shown and to become established there. They look at dirty potential apartments and try to find work as their host becomes increasingly annoyed since her apartment literally gets smaller as the film goes on. Once her filmmaker beau begins to get some recognition, the girlfriend is sidelined and must find a new purpose in her life possibly supporting another artist, this time a musician. Wonderful and bizarre!

The next segment “Merde” by director Leos Carax then destroys the charm by introducing an overacting Caucasian male playing a childlike “monster” who lives in the sewers and terrorizes the city. This film was so horrible I had to fast-forward through it. It is pretentious, boring and I swear unwatchable which means it will be hailed by critics as a masterpiece.

The final triptych “Shaking Tokyo”, as I noted at the start, returns to the offbeat tone of the opening segment, presenting an isolated man living off his fathers’ kindness (mailed cash) who has chosen not to leave his apartment in 11 years. The shots outside of an empty Tokyo are quite remarkable as everyone else appears to have chosen to do the same. I thought this was a very creative take on the isolation of a mega-city and Yû Aoi as the cute delivery woman who literally displays her emotions is great. Yet this story’s pace is way slow and in the end the structure is weak. So the cumulative effect of the film “Tokyo” is one of exhaustion and frustration due to its' uneven nature, a common problem with these kinds of anthology films. I think “New York Stories” started this trilogy and trend twenty years ago since I remember that Coppola’s segment really bit. My rating therefore is based on the segments and the overall effect; the salt here would be four shakers, one shaker and three shakers which gives us a two shaker overall.

In a full length film which actually would be better off it were a shorter entry in the above is Hitoshi Matsumoto’s “Big Man Japan” This one features some wonderfully freaky fight scenes between the title character (A beefy giant in his briefs carrying a big stick) and bizarre monsters that have to be seen to be believed. Unfortunately these absurdist scenes are interspersed in a mockumentary about the hero who spends most of his time as a normal-sized man looking sullen and bored. There are some clever ideas about how the glory days of his giant ancestors are gone as modern Tokyo holds him accountable more for the wreckage he causes than for his heroism in his frequent battles to protect its’ citizens. He must now rely on selling his giant body as a corporate billboard and deal with a condescending agent and an estranged daughter. Yet these sections just drag on and any potential humor gets lost in the tedious direction. Then the ending just drives the stake through this films’ heart as it dramatically changes style and tone further alienating the frustrated viewer. Like the giant himself, the director doesn’t know when to let up and move on.