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Talking Out of Frame: In the Loop, Kobe, and Beautiful Losers
Talking Out of Frame: New at the Art House Cinema
Well, it's a new year...whatever that means. For film fans, I suppose, we're going to see a lot of early-in-the-year DVD releases of Oscar contenders. This will pick things up after the regular slowdown in late December and early January.
Set in a period of time where a possible Middle Eastern war is brewing, In the Loop details how minor politicians move both the United Kingdom and the United States toward conflict. A slip of the tongue by a minor minister, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), nicknamed Simon Fluster due to his regularly tripping over his own words, makes a similarly minor U.S. official, Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy), think she has an anti-war ally in the British government. Simon's backpedaling takes him so far away from his original statements, however, that he ends up on the radar of Karen's hawkish rival, Linton Barwick (a remarkable David Rasche, last seen in Burn After Reading). This farcical satire is more than its cat's cradle of a plot, though. In the Loop has drawn rather obvious comparisons to David Mamet and Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, and the coupling is more than a superficial relationship of narratives about building phony wars. Armando Iannucci, who wrote In the Loop alongside Simon Blackwell, Jesse Armstrong, Tony Roche, and Ian Martin, also have the same gift for the poetry of profanity that distinguishes Mamet's more Mamet-y efforts. The difference is that these fellows aren't shackled to Mamet's usual syncopation, and so they are free to let the invective fly at whatever pace suits their mood.
"The cutting is fast-paced without going overboard; it moves, yes, and the multi-camera set-up is fully exploited, but this isn't an MTV job. Lee stays with shots during slower moments and lingers on close-ups when necessary. Visually, the film is at its best when Spike stops worrying about the game and starts to play--he trots out some pretty inventive tricks. Slow motion is used at a couple of key moments but not abused; on a couple of other occasions, he shows a play or a trick move in a series of black and white stills rather than moving images (shades of his very first feature, She's Gotta Have It). He also spotlights a couple of crucial moments with a series of quick replays; I don't mean this in the style of a TV-sports 'instant replay,' but rather showing the sinking of a decisive basket from three different angles, rat-tat-tat, with the sound (say, Kobe saying 'gotcha') repeating each time. It's a neat trick and, again, not overused." From an artist on the basketball court to artists of the more traditional painterly kind--though with a quirky modern sensibility. Beautiful Losers is a documentary named for a recent art show reuniting a group of NYC-based artists who had come through the same galleries and reached prominence in the early 1990s. This documentary film chronicles the road to that retrospective, looking at the disparate backgrounds of the various creators and searching for the commonalities that brought them together. Some of the people profiled will be familiar to pop culture junkies, some will not. Mike Mills, for instance, is a filmmaker and artist who has directed music videos for the Beastie Boys and the movie Thumbsucker, and Shepard Fairey is the designer behind the Barack Obama "Hope" poster. Harmony Korine wrote Kids and directed Gummo. I imagine many of the others will be under most people's radar unless they read Giant Robot or keep up with other arts publications.
"Lucrecia Martel creates an amazing sense of mood, paranoid, off kilter, dour, yet painted with naturalism. Her unobtrusive camera always keeps Veronica within in the frame in tight close-ups or slightly out of focus as everyone bustles around her. Small moments speak riches about self-condemnation and the difference in social classes, be it between lowly workers and the rich or between women and men: Veronica reacting to a knocked-out child on a playground, listening to her husband and brother-in-law's matter-of-fact conspiratorial talk as they look over her car for damage, or Veronica nervously doting over a boy the family hires to do chores." We stay down in Argentina for Lion's Den, one of my favorite surprises of 2009. Lion's Den pretty much had me from the word "go." It's been a long time since I've seen as good an opening to a thriller as the first ten minutes of this film. Following a disconcerting animated credits sequence featuring a sing-a-long with South American children--I wondered it they had switched screenings on me--we get a series of quick-cut scenes where the film's heroine, Julia (Martina Gusman), slowly comes out of a state of shock to realize that there have been two bloody murders in her home. The way director Pablo Trapero (alongside three other writers) pulls you into the plot is deftly executed, moving rapidly to knock the audience off balance and put us in Julia's shoes.
There's a pleasing formula to the Tora-San movies. In each installment, the film basically begins with some kind of predicament that doesn't go Tora's way, often centering around the return to his family in Shibamata (in this way, being a little like the movies themselves, visiting the audience periodically). If Tora-san doesn't return home at the start, such as in the fourth film Tora-san's Grand Scheme (Shin otoko wa tsurai yo), the middle act ends up being the reunion. The second act generally has Tora-san reacting to the fallout of his latest misstep, and usually meeting his love interest for this particular movie. The final act is when he finds out that this love interest is already betrothed to another, and in a lot of cases, he helps her secure her situation before he heads out on the road again, disappearing into the sunset via whatever mode of travel will carry him.
The earliest film is Plucking the Daisy, and it's also the most entertaining. The light sex comedy, which sees Bardot playing a naïf from the country trying to make her way through the big city, is as enjoyable as it is inoffensive. Absolutely rotten, however, is 1958's The Night Heaven Fell, a troubled production from the Vadim formula that puts schoolgirl Brigitte on a road trip/flight from justice with a hardened laborer and details the various perils that await a young woman's clothes. Better is the last picture, also directed by Vadim, Don Juan. The mature and gorgeous actress plays a woman scorned who sets about breaking hearts of deserving men as a kind of revenge. There is an arty pretentiousness to Don Juan that makes it kind of fascinating, but Vadim has no idea how to end it. To get out of the jam he created, the director neutralizes her, literally burning her down. Don Juan in Hell. The film seems to display delusions of something more, but really, it's just more soft-core titillation We end this month with another oldie, but this time a goodie! John Sinnott tackles the lost gem Miss Mend, "[an] unusual film [Miss Mend] is a three part serial, with each chapter running about an hour and a half. What's more interesting is that it was made in communist Russia by a pair of directors who were trying to emulate western adventure films. The result is a very good flick that will have viewers entranced for the entire five-hours that it takes to watch the show. Set in the United States (something that's not clear at the beginning and had me scratching my head in a few spots) this action starts at a cork factory (??) where the workers are striking and demanding a living wage. The evil Organization has a member on the cork company's board and he sends the police in to beat and arrest the men. "Boris is sent to cover the strike for his pro-company newspaper along with a photographer Vogel, and a clerk for the company, Tom. When they arrive the police have just gotten to the scene and the captain is about to attack the union leader, only to be stopped by a plucky typist for the cork company, Vivian Mend. The three men are taken with her bravery and help her to escape from the resulting riot. In order to escape, Miss Mend jumps into a passing car and meets a man who introduces himself as 'Engineer Johnson.' He too is attracted to the rather homely Miss Mend and not only drops her at her home (where he discovers that she's raising her dead sister's child all by herself) but also prevents the police from arresting her when they arrive. That's because he's really Arthur Stern, the son of the cork factory's owner." "Now this wouldn't be a serial if there wasn't a convoluted plot," Sinnott reminds us, and there is plenty of more story to be had. That's just the beginning. "[Miss Mend] was a fun series that has a lot of action and chase scenes as well as an interesting and twisting plot. It's easy to tell that they were really trying to mimic Western movies and that this was a conscience departure from the more well-known Russian films from that period such as the work of Eisenstein. They do a good job overall though it's not quite up to the standards set by the best action films Hollywood was putting out at the time. Even so, there's plenty of action. One chase scene features a car trying to drive through a field followed by the three reporters on horses that they stole from the police, who are being chased by a motorcycle and finally the three horse-less cops on foot. The directors really tried to insert a sense of fun and comedy into the adventure, and for the most part it worked. The serial does have its serious side though, and people are killed on screen to point out the gravity of the situation. "It's easy to tell from the synopsis that this serial is filled with propaganda, but the message is never too overt and it's not as bad as many US movies (especially B-films released during WWII). The Organization is a typical evil group trying to take over the world and while they're targeting communists they are not any more over-the-top than your typical serial villains...Miss Mend is also an interesting historical footnote which makes it even more enjoyable to watch. Flicker Alley and their associates have done another magnificent job with this release. The picture looks much, much, better than it has any right to, the orchestral score is very good, and the extras are interesting. This is another Flicker Alley release that comes Highly Recommended."
Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. His most recent work is the forthcoming hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, drawn by the incomparable Joelle Jones. This follows his first original graphic novel with Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, all published by Oni Press. His next project is the comedy series Spell Checkers, again with Jones and artist Nicolas Hitori de. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com. Special thanks to Jason Bailey, Francis Rizzo III, John Sinnott, and John Wallis for their contributions.
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