'Johnny Utah IS Hot.'

Point Break Live (2006; s. Julie Feuer, d. and also s. a bunch of random fucking geniuses). Point Break (1991) is a throwback to a simpler time, when major studio released action movies could be about cryptohomo relationships between male leads, star Lori Petty and Flea, and proteges of James Cameron, like proteges of Prince, could still get work.
That's all I have to say about Point Break. Now we're going to talk about Point Break Live. Point Break Live is a fairly straight telling of the saga of Johnny Utah, ex football great, now FBI agent, out to track down a devious group of bank robbers called the Ex Presidents.Kicked to the side by the F.B.I. brass ('cos that's the way shit goes down in the 80s), Utah is taken under the wing of another misfit, who has a name, but is, let's face it, Academy Award Winner Gary Busey.
Anyway, Busey has this Crazy Idea that the bank robbers might be surfers. So he sends Johnny undercover. You know, because great football players with bum knees make great surfers.

Until Johnny is recruited by Bodhi, a zen master of what it means to lead the life free of fear. A life of 100% pure adrenaline.

Ultimately, Johnny finds his loyalties divided between the straitlaced stuck up assholery of the F.B.I. and the intense, dangerous surfers.

Ultimately, however, the surfers reveal that they ARE the Ex Presidents, and that, as always, when in doubt we should listen to Busey. However, Johnny's cover is also blown. Violence ensues, innocents get hurt

And Johnny has to take Bodhi down. In the most dramatic scene of the movie/play, Bodhi attempts to escape by skydiving, and Johnny chases him down. Without a parachute. Because that's how Keanu rolls, mother fucker.

But Bodhi gets away.
Johnny chases Bodhi around the world, finally catching him in Australia during the 50 year storm, which brings it with the hardcore waves.

They fight, and Johnny gets the better of Bodhi, but then lets him go, sacrificing him to the storm. Again, that's how Keanu rolls.

Despite my multiple Keanu references, you've probably figured out that isn't Keanu in the pictures. Overcoming performance anxiety, Julie decided to bring it with her Keanu impression and win over the crowd.

Now, the Keanu impression is an underrated art. It's almost surfer, but dumb instead of Zen/stoned. It's almost dumb, but with an edge of something that you can almost pretend is smarter than what it is. Now, you really have to appreciate the degree of difficulty here. First, it's not like Julie was rehearsing or anything. Her basic directions were 'read the cue cards' and 'if we push you over, go limp.' Maintaining The Keanu Voice the entire time, whether she was taking major bumps while being taught how to surf, being tackled by the big breasted production assistant with a massive sleeping bag (I've had dreams like that), or robbing a bank with cap guns and NO RUBBER MASK.

And how did she do?

A star is born.

Despite catcalling from the audience in appreciation of her fine work, and a proliferation of douchebags in the corner who looked like they were living the whole "we're the pretty boy jock fraternity from every 80s movie (sans Billy Zabka)," it was pretty remarkable what they were able to pull off in the performance space, including two kick ass skydiving scenes.

So What Did I Learn from All This?

1. I have a new pick for which of my friends is best equipped to be an action star. (sorry Danny)
2. You gotta live to get radical.

3. It's really kinda hot to watch a beautiful woman simulate bank robbery and sky diving. And sell meatball sandwiches.

Next Time: Roadhouse: The Musical

The Accidental Anarchist

The Matador (2005; d. Richard Shephard; s. Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear, Hope Davis). Film is inherently collaborative. Here’s where I make a solemn pitch: trust the actor. When it comes to something like Hamlet, the actor’s interpretation will be what defines the play, moreso than the director doctoring the formula, having (SPOILER) Hamlet survive or mow everyone down with a machine gun, for example. Similarly, as much as people complain, no one really wants anything substantial to happen that might be life-changing for Batman or Superman. It inevitably fucks with the formula, and the formula is a comforting one.

But just because there is a formula, does not mean there cannot be innovation. Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets with a set structure. And let’s not get started on haiku. Or, consider the case of Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan has been a generally successful Bond. However, Brosnan’s best work has involved giving the piss to the Bond franchise. Remington Steele was a thinly veiled Bond joke, providing us with the suave, roguish British enigma who is secretly so incompetent at everything but conning people that Stephanie Zimbalist looks like Jack Bauer next to him. The early years of the show are amazing romantic comedy, so much so that the Bond producers (missing the joke?) offered him the Bond gig.

Even within the Bond set, there is an element of subversion to Brosnan’s performance, particularly in the best of his run, Tomorow Neverf Dies, which I believe features his defining moment as Bond. During a routine Bond movie stunt, Brosnan is steering a car by remote control from the back seat, and manages to do the usual Bondian con that results in the bad guys taking themselves out. But then, Brosnan breaks into a boyish laugh at his own cleverness. It’s a defining moment for his version of Bond—distinct from Connery’s cold machismo, Moore’s ironic detachment, Dalton’s angry solemnity, and Lazenby’s…blandness? There’s a very real sense that Brosnan plays Bond as being just as surprised as what he gets away with as we are, but only able to show that delight and surprise in private—behind the suave mask, he’s a little less cold, a little more relatable.

Plus, during his Bond run, Brosnan did a little number called The Tailor of Panama, where he again undid the Bond myth, showing what it means to be a charming and sophisticated amoral killer in the real world, when your actions have real consequences.However, despite evidence that the formula was working (nice bump in Bond receipts, nice ratings for Remington Steele), the Powers That Be fucked with things. In Remington Steele, they started to explore the back story, started to make Brosnan a little more competent. (Maybe this was a Brosnan call—it is rather emasculating to play the romantic equivalent of Inspector Gadget). And the Powers That Be in charge of the Bond franchise decided to innovate the franchise not by playing to what has been successful (letting a solid performer innovate within the formula) but instead by doing what has sunk each performer (“updating” the formula with darkening plots such as the James Bond-gone-rogue bits, or strengthening the female characters and pretending that it has always been a great honor to be a Bond girl. It sure did wonders for Tanya Roberts and Maud Adams, right? Right?).

In other words, the formula conformed to what the audience expected (or more precisely, what the audience was perceived to expect), versus capitalizing on what the actor might bring to the table that was new and different and interesting.And now comes The Matador, Brosnan’s first important role since his official exit/discharge from the Bond franchise. The movie itself is fairly average—the typical hit man meets ordinary guy and both lives are changed independent movie set-up of the last few years. Kinnear (a decent actor) and Davis (a great actress who has done more with less) are stuck in hoplelessly didactic roles, maybe a notch above narrators.

Brosnan lifts it up however, by doing what he does best, trashing the Bond myth. He plays his assassin, Julian Noble, as not a robot or ubersuave killing machine, but as a bullying child, gleefully lying, manipulating, and changing his identity to match whatever the situation requires. Even before the crisis of conscience Kinnear’s character is supposed to induce, Brosnan is already needy and wheedling, begging for some kind of recognition or favor from others. He’s cursing like a sailor, he’s shifting from crass to angry and paranoid to capriciously funny in a matter of seconds—he’s not cut off from his emotions, he’s running strictly on his emotions.

Performance-wise, Brosnan is loose and free-wheeling in a way he hasn’t been since that Bond moment, or perhaps that movie where he plays the divorced Irish da trying to get his daughter back—I was already choking up in the trailers for that one, so I refused to see it to save whatever tattered shreds of dignity I have left.

What’s sad about The Matador is the movie fails to follow the actor to his logical conclusion, instead opting for something warmer and fuzzier. Like many of the post-Tarantino indie films in the mid-90s: the family is clearly rejuvenated by their partial adoption of Julian Noble and the introduction of bloody violence into the family, but nobody follows that to its natural conclusion. Is Brosnan’s manchild a new son for them, someone for them to take care of? What about the flirtation that Brosnan engages in with Davis (which essentially gets mentioned and dropped, despite the intriguing and queasy possibilities)? What about Kinnear’s clear mancrush on Brosnan, and the intriguing and queasy possibilities of that? What about the suggestion that Brosnan keeps his propensity to violence? Instead, the movie becomes: do Noble’s panic attacks get resolved? In other words, they take a damaged, vulnerable, self-satisfied guy and make him more competent, more conventional, more emo. More like us.

Depressing, isn’t it.

Sure, Noble’s a mess, but Brosnan makes him a compelling mess, and frankly watching him start to give a substantial shit (as opposed to the mild cases of giving-a-shit that bring on his drinking and whoring binges and drunken apologies) is boring. The world needs a little anarchy, and watching Brosnan bring that kind of structured anarchy to the table is a rare pleasure. Sometimes, we don’t want to see growth, or change. Sometimes, we just want to see bad people do what they do, and get a little vicarious thrill. And is that so wrong?

Next Time: After the Sunset

Come What May

Perhaps Love (2005; d. Peter Chan; s. Takeshi Kaneshiro, Jackie Cheung, Xun Zhou) Hong Kong films understand myth. They literalize metaphor, making theme into the guiding force of a relationship, often moreso than any recognizable human behavior. I would say this was an ethnocentric position, but there is a direct correlation between John Woo’s willingness to make manifest his particular obsessions and themes in the absolute wonkiest way possible, and the success of the work correlated exactly with how explicitly they treated the metaphors (tracked in a straight line from Hard Target to Broken Arrow to Face/Off, and then back down the line again through MI: 2. And The Mirror Has Two Faces).

I hoped the restraint of the studio system might create an interesting tension with the unhinged brilliance of the Hong Kong stylists; instead, with rare exception, Hollywood just watered them down.

If there’s anything more stylized than an action film (with its doublings and who watches the watchmen identity switching), it’s a musical. Needless to say, you didn’t need to ask me twice to watch my first Hong Kong musical. And it was everything I hoped it would be—all the energy and insane passion of Moulin Rouge!, along with a didactic presentation of the themes in the narration and the music, along with some of the most brutal romantic reversals I have ever seen on screen outside of Crossroads.

Things they do better in Hong Kong:

Antagonists get to be equals. It seems like a fairly simple principle—your hero is defined by your villain. A great villain makes for a great hero (Exhibit A: Alan Rickman in Die Hard, with Exhibit B: Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves missing by a hair only because his great villainy was still overcome by Kevin Costner’s very mediocre performance. You still forget how truly bad that movie could be). Importantly, the antagonist in Perhaps Love is not a villain. Although I love Richard Roxburgh’s ability to swing from Snidely Whiplash to a character of real menace in Moulin Rouge!, it would have been interesting to see him do what Jackie Cheung does in this movie, play a powerful man driven to distraction when the woman he loves cannot see him as more than a business transaction. He begs, he threatens, he violates, he accepts, and then pulls a grand gesture that generates an entirely unexpected ending.

Similarly, Kaneshiro isn’t left to be just an idealized pretty boy hero—he indulges in an act of emotional violence that is almost worse than Jackie Cheung’s own gesture. And which again relates to the movie’s overall themes (sung by the Angel character at the beginning) regarding the present and past being mere traps, and life needing to be lived in the present.

Since I mentioned him: here's a little something for the ladies. And Frank.

There’s room for three. The female character is not blown off in this film. She is not a victim, she is not a passive prize for two powerful men to fight over, she is not an idealized love object. You get to see her ambition, her betrayals of herself and Kaneshiro, and exactly why she lives the way she does. They don’t cheat and make her a traumatized victim to explain her mysterious past; instead, all her reactions are legitimate functions of her choices, which are selfish, but understandable. Even if we kept calling her ‘whore.’ Hey, just because you have three equals in a movie doesn’t mean you can’t have a rooting interest in somebody.

They understand myth. This is a movie that is not afraid to be about big ideas. It hangs Big Ideas out there in the songs, and throughout the movie, even though it’s insulated around these three people (no ancillary people are breaking out into song), it’s scoping for something epic. A lot of people got turned off by this in Moulin Rouge!—the idea that the people were barely recognizably human in sanding a musical down to its bare essence. And as with Moulin Rouge!, the themes in Perhaps Love are nothing new—life is a circus, life is a movie, we’re all performers, memory is treacherous. Still, when you’re so inventive with the characters, and you come up with one hell of a brave ending (including a swaggering, self-satisfied smile all over the Angel’s face, who as far as I can tell mostly fucked everything up in a way that may or may not have been for the better), you’ve earned the right to at least get the discussion started.

This movie looks great, sounds great (even when you can’t understand the words), and while it’s not reinventing the musical like Singin’ in the Rain or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, it does mine out something unexpected, just when you thought you knew what you were in for. It makes me want to go back and watch the opera of The Killer, and wonder what would happen if they let Chow Yun Fat break into song here and there. Now that’s an experiance that we would find most kaliente.

Next Time: Tsotsi!

DVD Corner #1: One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

Grizzly Man. (2005; d. Werner Herzog and Timothy Treadwell) As you’ve probably already heard, Grizzly Man is Werner Herzog’s documentary about the crazy dude who lives with bears. And, as already noted by millions, if Herzog’s calling you crazy….Herzog does a phenomenal job of giving full voice to Treadwell’s belief that there was some secret wisdom in nature, while still creating a powerful counterpoint in his own position that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and best not spent living with bears. And I was surprised that despite Herzog’s own determinism, his ideological opposition to Treadwell, and the clinical detachment with which he dissects Treadwell in the back half of the film, he is still so visibly moved and empathic to Treadwell’s motivations and position. Still and all, though the movie is like nothing else, it is also a dead end moment—it is didactically exhaustive in its position, moving with such clarity in presenting the two arguments that I think it actually stifles any ambiguity or conflict in the two positions, and winds up being more a really interesting debate than a film I would revisit over and over again.


SPL (2005; d. Wilson Yip, s. Sammo Hung, Ken Chang, Donnie Yen). A movie of men, by men, for men. Not in a Brokeback sense. SPL features the stock Hong Kong crime drama set up of a cop and a ganglord who become so obsessed with each other, that the destruction of the other man becomes more important than each's own survival. SPL screws with the stock set up by involving a third man (played by Donnie Yen), and getting downright apocalyptic with the ending. I haven't seen an ending this over the top affecting since Old Boy. And props to Donnie Yen for some of the most innovative fight scenes I've ever seen. Like sex scenes, fight scenes can often feel distinct from the progress of a movie, which is an interesting problem considering most movies are built around one or the other. In SPL, there aren't many fight scenes, but, like the movie, the scenes feel sweaty and desperate, and enhance the feeling that wherever the conflict between these three men is building to, it's nowhere good.


Tarnation (2004; d. Matthew Caouette). Whereas Grizzly Man felt too complete, Tarnation almost felt too oblique. It leaves ellipses everywhere—almost always absolutely infuriating me. Sometimes, it’s obvious that the gaps were just material that was too hot to touch, like the first important relationship intersecting with Caouette’s almost off-handed mention much later in the film of his multiple suicide attempts and phases of acting out at the same time. Other times, it is obvious that Caouette is just as confused as we are, and choosing to portray the questions instead of the answers. Each choice feels organic and honest, a feeling only reinforced by the homemade quality of the movie. It’s easy to see why this movie feels like a revolution.

Meta This

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005; d. Michael Winterbottom; s. Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Kelly MacDonald, and Jeremy Northam). The trouble with meta-stuff is, it’s all frontal lobe.

(Admittedly, this is an ironic sort of comment for this blog.)

Meta-anything bridges similarities between concepts or cognitions or physicals; therefore, it’s all application of knowledge as opposed to feeling. Among my dearly adored Charlie Kaufman movies, I feel like I only truly love Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because only that film feels truly emotion-driven, as opposed to high concept driven.

Edit: I take that back. Charlie Kaufman films are emotional—it’s just a novel emotional experience. He actually evokes (or maybe invents) a new emotion in me, something blending admiration and fondness and jealousy and anxiety. Is meta-emotional a word?

Anyway, if you’re sitting back and gathering your thoughts, it’s hard to actually have a direct emotional response. You're thinking instead of having an experience—it’s the age-old distinction between criticizing and doing.

And part of the reason movie critics hate as many movies as they do—because it’s hard to shake yourself out of a distanced response to something, unless it’s new or interesting or resonant or ego-feeding. Particularly when you think how much easier it is to pun out 500 versions of ‘it sucked’ than denote your unique experience of Pulse.

I’ve actually read Tristram Shandy the book, back in a Beginnings of the British Novel class in college. It was a great class—it finished with the Jane Austen books (where most of us begin and end when it comes to early British literature), and you can see the great drunken staggering of the beginning of an art form. For instance, there’s The Monk, which presages the Great Trash Novel, but does it so much better, because there’s no context to know when you’ve gone too far over the top—there is no Top yet.

And then there’s Tristram Shandy, the purely commerce-driven art form, where the hero takes an age to be born, simply because the author was determined to make this book his steady source of income. Imagine that—he set out to write one book, for the rest of his life. And to make sure that happens, he barely ever gets born. And thus, postmodernism, and all its winding plots that become snakes eating their own tails and their deconstruction of social forms, is born of the most linear and primitive of social structures, the token economy.

And dick jokes. Lots of dick jokes.

The movie is, in its own way, a good adaptation. It introduces the characters faithfully, before breaking set and showing the architecture of the medium (the novel within the novel in Tristram Shandy, the movie within…well, you get the idea). Like the author, the movie keeps going not through action or plot, but giving people the room to talk and behave in a somewhat formless fashion, and then having other people come along and talk about what’s going on—the production assistant who lectures on the authenticity of the endeavor, the star who suggests plot changes based on what best serves his ego (mistakenly, because of his ignorance of what happens), the professor discussing the Major Themes of the Work, and the director, screenwriter, and crew arguing about what will happen next strictly because of what it will cost. None of whom actually explain anything. Instead, all their attempts to explain it all generate further distance between their desires to create something, and the actual behaviors. Kind of like the way friends, lovers, bosses, and our own theories about how life works and our secret desires about how we wished it worked, make living the chaotic negotiation of an ever-growing gap between what everybody wants and what it all means, ultimately resulting in a product that mystifies everybody and satisfies few.

Which, as Stephen Fry says, is exactly the point.

Problem is, the movie does its job too well, and like life, is at its most scintillating when people are just talking instead of thinking. I’ve never enjoyed a metanovel half as much as a novel, just because it always seems like a joke too clever by half. Watching Coogan and Rob Brydon riff on the color of Brydon's teeth or do dueling Pacinos? That’s direct experience, and that’s funny. And it casts the rest of the film in a pallid light.

So, yeah, I got the point. But the movie itself is kind of like granola—a little bit of flavor every now and then, and probably good for me, but it sure as hell doesn’t beat the sweet kick of a bowl of Lucky Charms.

Next Time: Leprechaun in the Hood

All Are Punish'd

Cache (Hidden) (2006; d. Michael Haneke; s. Daniel Auteil, Juliette Binoche). As with the horror film, the thriller is the most moral of films. It’s not a new observation to notice that as much blood- and intestine-shed and depravity as there is in the seminal Friday the 13^th series, ultimately conservative values are rewarded in the rush to restore order. Similarly with the thriller—while certainly we might spend our quality time and sympathy on the criminal, more often than not, bad gets punished, or it gets away and we have to cope with our own disappointment that things did not go to plan. But whatever happens, the anarchic effects of the original crime are somehow suppressed and order is restored, whether through conventional means of crime and punishment, or through deceit—the criminal has some crucial bit of information that encourages the hero (or antagonist, if the criminal is the antihero we’ve been tracking for the entire film) to let him or her go in the service of a greater good. Although not a proper thriller, see for reference Chinatown, where the crimes are so unspeakable that once blood has been shed, the actual history must be expunged. Order above all.

There is so much preamble to the discussion of Cache in part because I ramble, but in part because never have I been so tempted to spoil a movie so I can talk about it effectively. The four or five reviews I read prior to seeing the movie each spoiled the ending of the movie, which also tempts me to continue the cycle of abuse. The ending is not a major twist ala M. Night, but I think knowing what happened structured my viewing and kept my focus elsewhere, so my experience of the film was very different from my friends who were completely confused by the thing. Well, I was confused too, but in a more constructive way, because I had time to brace for the gimmick all the way through (which also buffered me from the emotion of the ending, which I will also not spoil).

What I can say—Cache is the story of a well-to-do, intellectual French couple being terrorized by mysterious (and somewhat innocuous) videotapes indicating someone is watching them.

What I will say—there’s a way that Cache is very conventional. It follows nearly every formality of the thriller. Daniel Auteil and Juliette Binoche fracture under the pressure of the tapes. The police ignore them. Auteil (in another great performance—I love this guy) takes the law into his own hands. Order is restored. Sort of. And as with every good thriller, guilt drives the action, mysteries are revealed, and hubris is punished.

However, Haneke uses the structure of the thriller to subvert and critique those conventions. Ordinarily, we feel relief at the close of a thriller, or at least some sense of closure, because order has been restored. Here, we feel welling despair. Haneke finds a whole new clever way of ripping off Hitchcock and John Carpenter and putting the audience in the antagonist POV. There is no music in the film, and it is shot on digital video almost entirely in flatly constructed wide shots, so you are often unclear whether you are actually watching the surveillance videos or the actual film until the movie starts rewinding abruptly. The film plays elliptically, willfully turning away at points that might be revelatory or emotionally resonant, just as a guilty conscience does.

Even as it glances around, Cache still manages to touch live wires of race relations in France and the U. S.—the psychological correlations between the white guilt in this movie eerily presage the riots in Paris and the response to Katrina in New Orleans. Our past doesn’t go anywhere. We can deny it, ignore it, even to ourselves, but some crimes have no reparations, and instead we wind up trying to go on like nothing ever happened.

And Haneke doesn’t leave Auteil out there on his own. Guilt, as any good psychologist will tell you, is an emotion based on a construction of how we feel we are perceived by others. As opposed to more "innate" emotions like happiness or sadness, guilt depends on our awareness of an invisible audience.

Via his direction and his attention to the characters, Haneke makes that psychological construct manifest, turning us into a literal invisible audience watching and judging all the way through as Auteil’s choices become progressively devastating to him and his family (if understandable). Still, as the pressure mounts and we get more clues that Auteil knows the secret of the tapes, we are encouraged to ally with Juliette Binoche, to tell him to confess. In one brief, ambiguous scene late in the film between Juliette Binoche and her son, we get the suggestion that although Juliette Binoche has been prodding her husband throughout the movie to open wider and let her in, she may have some secrets of her own. This scene is also critical because it flips the game on the audience as well. In this scene, the son passes judgment on her (correct or not), and each audience remember is encouraged to reflect on his or her own glass house. Like Closer taught us, it isn’t always the truth that builds healthy relationships; sometimes it’s just what you need to believe to get by.

Cache is a perfect elliptical little mystery of a film, in part because it is rooted not only in the relationships between the characters, but also in the audience’s relationship to the film. It’s no mistake that the videotapes themselves are almost innocuous, with little or no threatening material, other than flatly depicting Auteil and Binoche’s life and creating an awareness of some outside observer. Once you know you’re being observed, guilt and self-consciousness seeps in, and things break down. I’m sure the fact I saw race relations and male/female relationships was motivated in part by my own little guilty preoccupations

but I’m also sure that the movie’s flat spaces leave a lot of room for some other guilty preoccupations to emerge, and for the audience to leave with a little sense that they have been seen, been judged, and somehow found wanting. So even though you get the payoff on this story, order ain’t restored. Order is part of the crime, because it keeps us safe, but keeps us from truly seeing ourselves, and, as they say, learning and growing.

Which is bad. Because as we all know, knowing is half the battle.

Next Time: Shadow Conspiracy