I'd say that these events were a strong influence on Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," except that the book came out in 1977 and Shawn Nelson's tank ride took place 18 years later. The echos of Dick's great book are everywhere, though--the decaying California suburb, pervasive meth use, obsessive, pointless projects, and increasing paranoia. Scott's collage of news reports (including a hilarious on-the-spot sequence where the Talent does little except talk to his cameraman), industrial promo films from the heyday of San Diego's aerospace industry, and revealing interviews with Nelson's friends and family conveys the story with telling economy while placing it into the contexts of the marketing and disposal of a neighborhood and work force, the dependence of a city on the military-industrial complex and the drugs that came with it--methamphetamine having been developed for bomber pilots--and the personal disintegration of a nice, talented, regular guy. Moving and illuminating.
Reviews
11 Reviews
Hidden Agenda
(1990)
All too relevant
14 June 2004
Not top-drawer Ken Loach; the "thriller" elements are well-done, but the warmth and depth Loach brings to his working-class stories has no place here. There's a structural flaw in the script, too--it presents itself as a film about Northern Ireland but then jumps headlong into something equally involving but quite different.
It is, all the same, a well-crafted, atmospheric film that never lacks excitement and raises some substantial issues. More importantly, the entire film is sadly prescient. The opening torture narratives could have been translated from accounts of Abu Ghraib prison. Change a couple of proper names and the scenery, and this would be the best film around on the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Even the second half of the story (no spoiler warning, so I give no details) rings truer and truer as time goes by.
Richly deserves reissue.
It is, all the same, a well-crafted, atmospheric film that never lacks excitement and raises some substantial issues. More importantly, the entire film is sadly prescient. The opening torture narratives could have been translated from accounts of Abu Ghraib prison. Change a couple of proper names and the scenery, and this would be the best film around on the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Even the second half of the story (no spoiler warning, so I give no details) rings truer and truer as time goes by.
Richly deserves reissue.
Waking Life
(2001)
Hang in there
13 March 2004
Warning: Spoilers
Contrary to what you may hear, there IS a plot to this film; it's just not obvious unless you pay attention, and doesn't really emerge for half an hour or so. At first Waking Life plays like an animated version of Slacker, only more pretentious and less ironic, which is not an advantage; the philosophical points made by the various characters are much less profound than the characters think. (The banal flattening of existentialism by the over-prolific Robert Solomon is one of the most egregious examples.)
But Linklater has the film firmly in command. He gives his daughter the opening line, kicks off the action in his own person, reappears at the end to sum it up with a pointed reference to Philip K. Dick, and right in the middle stages an ironic autocritique of the whole project. And as the slow parade of faces and voices passes, the amorphous Wiley Wiggins begins to play a part in the story, and his struggle to comprehend what is happening to him is increasingly poignant and chilling.
To say more would require a spoiler warning. But this is not a film where anything can be taken at face value, and to write it off as a plotless philosophy symposium would be to miss out on a remarkably subtle and moving achievement.
And the music--played by the Tosca Tango Orchestra--is first rate.
But Linklater has the film firmly in command. He gives his daughter the opening line, kicks off the action in his own person, reappears at the end to sum it up with a pointed reference to Philip K. Dick, and right in the middle stages an ironic autocritique of the whole project. And as the slow parade of faces and voices passes, the amorphous Wiley Wiggins begins to play a part in the story, and his struggle to comprehend what is happening to him is increasingly poignant and chilling.
To say more would require a spoiler warning. But this is not a film where anything can be taken at face value, and to write it off as a plotless philosophy symposium would be to miss out on a remarkably subtle and moving achievement.
And the music--played by the Tosca Tango Orchestra--is first rate.
A film whose reticence speaks loudly
29 January 2004
In the blasting force of the Holocaust film industry I had worried that Melissa Hacker's touching film might be lost. I had the pleasure of seeing the film in a university theatre and spending some time with its director, and I'm very happy to see it available on video, where its intimacy should do well. This is a family story--Hacker's own mother, who appears in the film, was one of the children transported out of Nazi Germany--and what is most satisfying about it is its close attention to individual lives. And those lives turn out to be deeply illuminating, not least because the stories retain their childlike confusion at the insanity of the adult world. The idea that children should leave the families they loved and take up with new families who didn't even speak German was always somewhat incomprehensible to the Kindertransport emigrants--properly so-- and through their own bewilderment and their permanently mixed feelings of relief, gratefulness, sorrow and guilt we catch some glimpse of the incomprehensibility of the Nazi persecution itself. Because Hacker's touch is so light the weight of the film's message is all the more bearable; and it loses none of its depth by her sensitive treatment.
My Life as McDull
(2001)
An innovative and moving animated feature
21 June 2002
The little pig McDull and his cousin McMug are huge favorites in Hong Kong, but this lovely and complex film is unlikely to get a distributor outside of Asia. More's the pity, because it's one of the richest of recent animated films, even counting Studio Ghibli's work. It starts as a charming, off-beat account of an extraordinarily ordinary kindergardener in Hong Kong and his his obsessed but loving single mom, animated with an eye-popping variety of techniques that convey perfectly the hallucinatory intensity of early childhood. (We see Mrs Mc charging through her work day as the heroine of a video game; and her cooking show--with every permutation of chicken, bun and paper imaginable--must be seen.) Soon, though, it takes shape as a memory picture, and deepens and darkens without ever losing its cockeyed playfulness.
The visual direction of Alice Mak, McDull's creator, is exceptional, and so is the superb music, borrowing heavily from Schubert, Schumann and Mozart in a perfect balance of absurdity and tears. At the end the film moves seamlessly into live action, bringing its meditations on the end of childhood, the disappointments of life, and the mysterious possibilities of joy to an open-ended close. I'm sure that I miss a lot of the humor, since I don't know Chinese; but the subtitles convey a surprising poetic feel that surely is even stronger in the original. Not for children; but don't miss it if you have the chance.
The visual direction of Alice Mak, McDull's creator, is exceptional, and so is the superb music, borrowing heavily from Schubert, Schumann and Mozart in a perfect balance of absurdity and tears. At the end the film moves seamlessly into live action, bringing its meditations on the end of childhood, the disappointments of life, and the mysterious possibilities of joy to an open-ended close. I'm sure that I miss a lot of the humor, since I don't know Chinese; but the subtitles convey a surprising poetic feel that surely is even stronger in the original. Not for children; but don't miss it if you have the chance.
Pom Poko
(1994)
There's sadness under the farce
16 March 2002
Warning: Spoilers
Isao Takahata's films all share an exceptional emotional depth, which runs even under the four-panel-gag structure of "My Neighbor the Yamadas". In "Pom Poko" the war of the tanuki against the humans seems comic and almost farcical at times, and there is also a fair helping of satire, which is probably a lot more pointed if you are steeped in Japanese film and pop culture. But the inevitable conclusion is melancholy to the point of tragedy. The tanuki struggle--and their fate--is that of traditional peoples as well as that of ecological communities, and the script makes this explicit near the end: humans, it turns out, were once tanuki. The fadeout, as befits a film for all ages, is softened; but the happiness it shows is only temporary. It's a Ghibli film, and fully up to that studio's astonishingly high standards. The animation is invigorating and beautiful, the settings acutely observed and lovingly rendered. The music and sound are first-rate, too. The structure is off-putting at first, with a great deal of narration and horseplay; but gradually the film's odd blend of goofiness and pathos takes over. One of the most admirable aspects of Takahata's career is his inability to repeat himself. Every film seems to create a new style of animation. "Pom Poko" is unlikely to have successors, but it's a fine genre all by itself.
A miraculous merging of personal and political
16 March 2002
"A Time to Live and a Time to Die" reads like a family saga, but it is just as much a film about the passing of traditional China and the dislocation of exile. Of course the plot points are given away; Hou isn't interested in dramatic tension and Aristotelian unities--these are so dependent on Western ideas of
personality and the separation of individual and world that they make little
sense in China. He doesn't push the events in our faces, either--they just
happen, often in the middle distance with a tree in the foreground, the way real life happens. (Remember Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts", with Icarus plunging
in the sea far off while a ploughman works on his field?)
The space Hou gives his events and his characters doesn't give us the intimacy with people that we expect in the West. But it gives us a rich sense of the
texture of life and the things that pass among members of a family and a
community, even one that is thrown together and can just as suddenly fall
apart, as it begins to here. It's that feeling for social space, in part, that allows this film and others of his to address social and historical questions without ever losing the sharp particularity of a personal story.
personality and the separation of individual and world that they make little
sense in China. He doesn't push the events in our faces, either--they just
happen, often in the middle distance with a tree in the foreground, the way real life happens. (Remember Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts", with Icarus plunging
in the sea far off while a ploughman works on his field?)
The space Hou gives his events and his characters doesn't give us the intimacy with people that we expect in the West. But it gives us a rich sense of the
texture of life and the things that pass among members of a family and a
community, even one that is thrown together and can just as suddenly fall
apart, as it begins to here. It's that feeling for social space, in part, that allows this film and others of his to address social and historical questions without ever losing the sharp particularity of a personal story.
The Circle
(2000)
Great artistry and even greater power
2 September 2001
The "circle" in Jafar Panahi's great film is many things: the
structure of the film itself, which ends with the same image it
begins with; a location in Teheran, where a character meets a
friend in a movie theater; the circular stairs so many other
characters run up and down; the circling, hovering camera
movements that bring us face to face with the women in these
interlinked stories and the world they are caught in. Most of all,
perhaps, it is the constricting circle within which Iranian women
must live their lives, the tightly circumscribed rules and
expectations of a rigidly masculine universe. None of Panahi's
characters can escape this circle, though some try and one, at
least, believes that she can. The more experienced know the truth;
all they can do in running is map out the circumference of their
shrunken world.
It's easy to see The Circle as a film about the oppression of
women in Iran, but that would reduce it to the merely political--and
we should not forget that the film was made by an Iranian man,
and that three quarters of the Iranian electorate recently voted to
reelect President Khatami, a deeply intelligent voice for freedom
and dialogue who has had his own difficulties being heard.
Panahi's subject is far larger; a woman who grew up in an abusive
household told me that no other film had so accurately depicted
the experience of her youth, when the constraints on women's
lives were so much taken for granted that she was unaware there
was anything outside them. But those constraints are fatal. We
make our world together, through dialogue and interaction. To
deprive someone of voice and the chance to participate in that
process is to kill them, whether it is done through religious and
social sanctions or by a husband beating his wife. Panahi's
women are neither dead nor silent, even though their only
listeners are other women. Their tragedy finds echoes everywhere;
but in this film where theme and expression are so intimately
joined we, at least, can hear them.
structure of the film itself, which ends with the same image it
begins with; a location in Teheran, where a character meets a
friend in a movie theater; the circular stairs so many other
characters run up and down; the circling, hovering camera
movements that bring us face to face with the women in these
interlinked stories and the world they are caught in. Most of all,
perhaps, it is the constricting circle within which Iranian women
must live their lives, the tightly circumscribed rules and
expectations of a rigidly masculine universe. None of Panahi's
characters can escape this circle, though some try and one, at
least, believes that she can. The more experienced know the truth;
all they can do in running is map out the circumference of their
shrunken world.
It's easy to see The Circle as a film about the oppression of
women in Iran, but that would reduce it to the merely political--and
we should not forget that the film was made by an Iranian man,
and that three quarters of the Iranian electorate recently voted to
reelect President Khatami, a deeply intelligent voice for freedom
and dialogue who has had his own difficulties being heard.
Panahi's subject is far larger; a woman who grew up in an abusive
household told me that no other film had so accurately depicted
the experience of her youth, when the constraints on women's
lives were so much taken for granted that she was unaware there
was anything outside them. But those constraints are fatal. We
make our world together, through dialogue and interaction. To
deprive someone of voice and the chance to participate in that
process is to kill them, whether it is done through religious and
social sanctions or by a husband beating his wife. Panahi's
women are neither dead nor silent, even though their only
listeners are other women. Their tragedy finds echoes everywhere;
but in this film where theme and expression are so intimately
joined we, at least, can hear them.
Good Men, Good Women
(1995)
A masterpiece of personal and social tragedy
21 October 2000
A film about time and isolation and loss on a personal level, and on a national level, too; the Taiwanese patriots in the film-within-a-film cannot even speak Chinese--Taiwan having been a Japanese colony since 1895--so they are strangers to the motherland and strangers when they return home. The personal story glides seamlessly into the political. Endlessly moving, and only slow if you cannot feel Hou's deep compassion and depth of understanding. Why is this film maker not celebrated everywhere?
Man with a Movie Camera
(1929)
Life-affirming energy--and the joy of machines
14 March 2000
"Energy is eternal delight", wrote William Blake, and Dziga Vertov--the pseudonym means "spinning top"--would have agreed. "The Man With The Movie Camera" is the most energetic film imaginable, celebrating not only the exuberance and bustle of everyday life (significantly, represented here almost exclusively by the young) but also the power of film to reveal that energy and communicate it to an audience. We see the camera, we see the tireless cinematographer of the title, we see the editor (Vertov's wife) assembling the montage, and we see ourselves as the audience in the movie theatre watching this very film and, of course, ourselves. Vertov's reputation as the inspirer of Godard and cinema-verite can be misleading; the self-referential nature of this film is not critical and his project is not unmasking or irony. Instead, the camera is extolled as the vehicle through which all can participate in the wonders that can be found in apparently ordinary things. Vertov's vision is not propagandistic here as much as it is humanistic, in the tradition that runs through Blake and Whitman's young man who "became what he beheld", and technology is shown as a way for everyone to share in that process. The torrent of montage, which the humorless Eisenstein condemned as "purposeless camera hooliganism", is Vertov's visual rendition of Whitman's "Yawps" of pantheistic inclusion. A wonderful, life-giving film.
Made in Hong Kong
(1997)
A haunting, despairing film
27 February 2000
Fruit Chan's debut film was seen by many in Hong Kong as a metaphor for the foreboding that gripped the colony in the years before 1997, and Chan himself has said that it is the first part of a trilogy on the handover--the second part is "The Longest Night." Metaphorical resonances aside, though, under the energetic, sometimes violent surface of "Made in China" is a film of haunting sadness and compassion. The central character, the young, jobless Autumn Moon, is proud of his ability to live by his wits; but he ends up in a world that his wits can't handle. Chan's ingenuity in making this film on a tiny budget with amateur actors is obvious, but one leaves the film overwhelmed with sadness for the lives of the characters--most of all Autumn Moon's, and his despairing inability to help the people he cares about.
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