Too Many Movies Tuesdays: "I'm A Freak, Chico!"

This week, Joe watched Pirate Radio while Tucker swallowed a dose of Green Zone, White Mane, Forty Guns, Alive, Blood of a Poet, Flying Doctors of East Africa & Lord of the Flies.

Green Zone
The olds hate that steadicam, 2010
Tucker Stone

Despite the continued fiscal assurances that the American public isn't interested in watching movies or television shows about Iraq, the machine continues to grind them out, again and again. There's been an overload of musings as to why, most of which seem to boil down to exaggerated political ramblings (don't worry, one is coming in a later paragraph), but the most unique one I've seen is the argument in a comment left on the AV Club, where one gentleman mentioned that American audiences just don't like watching movies set in deserts, ever, unless they're Lawrence of Arabia. "Desert movies always look boring," he said. For now, I'll ride lockstep with that AV Club guy. America: we don't like desert movies.

That Green Zone's action scenes are well done isn't much of a surprise--the time and place where the film is set restricts most of the running-and-gunning to the exact sort of one-man show that Damon & Greengrass perfected in the Bourne films. Cut out the more outlandish stuff that the environments of those movies allowed for, throw it into nightvision alley, and it's going to work. Damon's performance, while more of the same, is pretty good. He's thoroughly mastered that appearance of surprised preparation, always appearing to perform his swiveling torso action moves and lumbering body slams with a facial expression that says its his first time, that he isn't quite sure whether what he's doing will work. The Bourne house style is there as well, with United 93's Barry Ackroyd filing in for Oliver Reed's jagged camera work, and the only major failing on the same-as-always front turns out to be John Powell, who has decided that Green Zone is best served by having an obnoxious drum score in every scene, no matter if the characters are just opening a hotel room door or reading their email.

But this doesn't want to be an action movie, it wants to wrap its hands around the glory of the book its based on, and for that, it's got the wrong director, the wrong cinematographer, the wrong leads. There's probably a decent action movie inside the story that Brian Helgeland wants to tell, but there was never an action movie inside Imperial Life in the Emerald City. There was a comedy, and none of the people involved in Green Zone's production have a sense of humor. The brilliance of Imperial was its dry wit, the way Rajiv Chandrasekaran knew he had to provide room for the reader--the bewildered, war-hating reader--to laugh. Who was running the show, was what Chandrasekaran asked, and the answer--boot wearing suits, men who believed that an entire country could be changed and controlled through in-vogue ideas alone, men who hired fresh-from-college types who couldn't speak the language and made questions like "What's your position on abortion" an interview question for the job of reparing a domestic infrastructure that the military had effectively destroyed, all in expectation of a bent knee overflow of weeping gratitude on the part of the civilians--it was ridiculous, it was absurd, it was just so goddamn miserable you couldn't help but laugh. The alternative--the one that Helguland and Greengrass embrace with zero self-awarness--is one of conniving evil and vicious cruelty, yet another case where impotent rage results in a bunch of Darth Vader types playing checkers with the brown people. The book had heroes, sure--men who patrolled the streets without guards obsessed with catching zoo animals, men who ignored the influx of technology and helped Iraqi civilians rebuild a whiteboard-only stock exchange--but few of them were the Integrity First types that Damon portrays, and none of them were reporters, the group that serves as this film's greatest heroes. (There's a lot of cluelessness on display in Green Zone, but none achieve the heights of garishness found in that concluding shot of an email's cc listings. "Look", the film says. "Our hero is going to email a story to the same craven journalists that failed to do their job in the first place. Hopefully they can take a break from applauding everything they see.") 

It's understandable why the film goes astray--the release of torture documents, the Abu Gharib scandal, the continued unwillingness to admit that the Iraq war was motivated by straight up lies, all of these things have become national currency, they're clearly at the front of Helgeland's mind. There's a bit of admiration for the attempt that's made, a selective bit of praise for trying to do something with the sea of pain that is this continued misery--but the result is just another film that fails, and its failure is a mere showcase of this decade's tradition of lousy political art. The decision to skip past the wit, to ignore the fresh genius of In The Loop, to say that some things can't be made funny, and shouldn't--it's a bad, bad call. In the annals of political criticism, it's the Iannuccis, the Malcolm Tuckers, the Chandrasekarans, the Strangeloves that make it work. The rest of the time, people should just be sat down in front of Team America, forced to answer honestly: is this what you think you're doing?

Pirate Radio
aka: The Boat That Rocked, which was 19 minutes longer in the United Kingdom, which God has presumably forsaken, 2009
Joe McCulloch

The story of English offshore radio in the 1960s is a fascinating, complicated thing, manufacturing underground resistance to format and/or label-locked BBC and international commercial broadcasting through canny counter-programming and diverse, sometimes uneasy entrepreneurship that married the latest in young hits to, say, monied American evangelical Christian programming. So, naturally, writer/director Richard Curtis decided that his $50 million fictional evocation of the scene really ought to be an impossibly tedious series of ‘ribald’ anecdotes concerning horny Radio! Rebels! who fuck or attempt to fuck minimally-if-at-all-characterized women, which exist in this universe almost exclusively to facilitate men’s reflections on their penises or daddy issues. Worse yet, I get the sinking feeling it’s intended to be sophisticated and progressive, in that: (1.) guys think about stuff; (2.) ladies are interested without a thought in just about anything, save for some attempted cover-of-darkness surprise sex that affirms the necessity of bros sticking together; (3.) male homosexuality is tolerated as a delightful joke rather than outright reviled; and (4.) there’s a woefully vacant lesbian support staff character who is present to be a lesbian, albeit of the male titilation variety.

This all accounts for roughly an hour and a half of the total runtime, at which point our captivity is transferred to the B plot, a square, repressed, potentially murderous politicians BOOOO vs. Radio! Rebels! Sex! Counterculture! Music! Freedom! Hooray! scenario so insultingly simplistic you feel a twinge of disappointment that Philip Seymour Hoffman doesn’t defeat Kenneth Branagh at the end by hitting a power chord that sends him flying through a brick wall; instead, there’s a prolonged shipwreck sequence filled with groan-worthy images of heroic radio equipment and vintage records sinking in water, capped with an uplifting fable’s finale about how rock saves lives, our champions riding high on waves of stupid stinking ‘60s self-satisfaction.

You know what the actual climax of the pre-Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act of 1967 was? Radio Caroline, one of the free-floating broadcasters, attempted to strike up an alliance with Radio City, a rival broadcaster housed in a marine fort, supplying them with a new transmitter but pulling out of the deal for fear of political repercussions for occupying government property. Radio Caroline was not paid for the transmitter, prompting one of its directors, a decorated Major (eek!) and politician (awk!) to launch a raid on Radio City aimed at taking the transmitter out of commission, after which Radio City’s owner confronted him at his home and was shot to death in self-defense, as the courts determined. I don’t know about you, but this seems a damn sight more cinematic than radio disc jockey A wedding a beautiful woman on the deck of Radio Rebel Sex Freedom, only to discover she’s really snuck aboard for her attraction to radio disc jockey B, prompting radio disc jockey C to challenge radio disc jockey B to a game of chicken for the honor of radio disc jockey A than ends in everyone being friends again and that dumb bitch leaving the boat to never be mentioned again, lol. Brings to mind a later popular tune, Kenny Rogers’ Coward of the County, wherein young Tommy’s sweetheart is gang raped by local roughs and then excused from the story to make room for the real substance: how much shit Tommy’s gonna fuck up. Yeah, swingin’ ‘60s hard-dick heroes of Pirate Radio - they fucked some shit up, man!

Alive
It Probably Helped That They Were Athletes, 1993
Tucker Stone

If you have to put the smart money done, you don't look to the story of the Uruguayan rugby team, you look to the Essex. The Essex crew may have eaten less people, they may never have gotten a professionally made film, but those guys have set the bar impossibly high in the race to most primal survivor horror tale. But you can only read In The Heart of the Sea about four times a year before it starts ruining your REM sleep, so it's good to take a break every now and then to watch Ethan Hawke say "You didn't eat my sister, did you?"

Whether Alive is a "good movie" or not--that's a question that's never crossed my mind. Roger Ebert made a good point when he observed that a movie about 72-day survivors should've depicted them as having lost a lot more weight, but that's because Ebert's a film critic with no small amount of concern about whether Alive is a decent piece of art. For those of us who want a trip down the sidewinder, a little vacation in the fields of Would I Have What It Took fantasia, Alive just has to be 1) fucked up and 2) accurate. On the accuracy front, it's got some problems, but on the fucked up front, it's aces. They fill up the dirty socks of the dead with frozen chunks of human flesh, and they got those chunks by using broken glass to saw away at their dead friends. Some of them used their fervently held faith in Catholicism to assuage the guilt of cannibalism. Then the toughest sons of bitches sewed up a sleeping bag, filled up on dead friend jerky, and went mountain climbing without any gear. And the shit worked! And none of them went all Owen Chase crazy! Make a checkmark, baby bear: the medication is working.

The Flying Doctors of East Africa
Directed by Werner Herzog, 1969
Tucker Stone

Flying Doctors doesn't have a subtitle, but if it did, that subtitle would probably be something along the lines of "Communication Is A Fucker". Why does an infant die after a successful surgery? Because the local tribe ignores the don't-give-the-patient food rule. Why don't the elder members of one tribe stop rubbing their infected hands on their eyes? Because the nurses are using signs they can't comprehend.

Herzog doesn't hide his anger at colonialism in this one, he lets it go in a stream at the end of the film, but it's been made clear long before. It doesn't start that way--Flying Doctors focuses on the meat and potatoes, the work, it doesn't shy from looking at the situation with some complexity. The doctors are doing heroic, thankless work, they're at it for hours, risking their lives in tiny little planes to land on first time airfields, and they aren't able to do much but stem a bit of the tide. The locals can veer from some uncomfortable customs--like refusing to allow small children to return to its family if the child has been saved from a fatal illness, or falsely claiming medical expertise when they have none--to unexplainable strangeness, like when an entire tribe still fail to comprehend stairs despite years of immediate availability. It's at that point--when an out of sorts Herzog focuses his camera on some irritated adult women, still wavering as they attempt to navigate a four foot tall staircase--when the film does a backflip, and his argument begins to gel, his point of view begins to develop.

They aren't the problem, they're alive, they have been for years. The trade they've been given--the medical care, the drugs, the surgeries, the nurses--it's demanding an adaptation they're not obligated to make. For the trade to work, they have to change, and while the doctors and nurses never come across as smug racists, attempting to educate the native hordes, they're still forcing a group to become more like them. Use their technique, their invention, their visual language, change the way you see, abandon your tradition, become like us, and you can live, like us, longer.

It's a twist, in a way. He never actually criticizes anybody in the film, he merely points to what's being demanded, asking a five-year-old "why" to the question of whether it's so much better to enforce progress upon a group. Because they'll be better served by medical care? A medical care that isn't actually being taught to them, but rushed to them in tiny planes by foreign hands, before it's rushed quickly away? What are they losing in exchange? He's smart enough to realize the vague nihilism to his own attitude, and he never tried to imply that the charity on display isn't valid, that it isn't useful despite the shortcomings he witnesses. At the close, the successes of the medical team haven't been assaulted, but the inherent attitude--that progress is always better--has.

Lord of the Flies
Kill the Pig, 1963
Tucker Stone

Here's the thing about Piggy--he really is an obnoxious little bastard, and even before you know he's going to die, you sit there thinking "shut up" and he keeps talking, and then somebody tells him to shut up, and he does for a little while, but then he starts up again and it's...you want him to die. That's the point, that's the way the story works. Lord of the Flies isn't going to click for you unless you have a moment where you really, really want Piggy to shut the fuck up and go away to the other side of the island and never come back, and if he gets eaten by a boulder, good on God for that one. If you don't feel that irritation, and that irritation doesn't bounce off the wall of actual hatred at some point, then you spend the movie sneering at how quickly everything deteriorates into savagery, and you're missing the general point, which is that you're part of the club, you're not on a furlough. Hell, you're probably obsessing over Simon, because Simon says so little and seems so gentle and wise, and that's why putting Simon in the story is problematic because Simon doesn't really fit, he's just a weird little baby Jesus who never believes in the monster. Actually, Simon works better in this film version than he ever did in the book, because he screams right before they kill him, and the way he screams makes him sound like a real human being, albeit one with a really high pitched voice, and you can't hear that scream in the book.

Forty Guns
Sam Fuller Created America, 1957
Tucker Stone

Would've watched this sooner, but the DVD box art makes it look like a trip to the grandpa factory by way of the too much Jesus express. It's actually black and white, far more violent than the most optimistic expectation, and features a cast made almost completely out of ugly people. (Or people whose beauty has melted down their face to rest in bubbles of pockmarked fat around their chins.) While it has a dash of pro-female to its plot, with the rich-landowner-with-a-gang character being handled by an obviously exhausted Barbara Stanwyck, most of that is dispensed immediately in the song's first song, the lyrics of which boil down to "there's a woman who runs this town, but since she's a woman, she'll get broken by a man eventually, because that's how it is, i bet this ugly guy will teach her some lessons."

Which, of course, is what proceeds to happen. But! It's still a pretty unusual western, and it's Sam Fuller. While Sam was working back in the decades where you couldn't insert lingering shots of the damage that point blank bullet wounds cause, he isn't shy about the violence. (Except for one key assassination, which takes place at a wedding, everybody who gets shot in the film gets waxed at close range.) It's a dandy drink at the well of brutality, a film that displays zero concern for anything other than showcasing the cost that people have to pay if they wish to embrace a better way of life, even if they never appear to be capable of enjoying that better way of life in the first place. Under a different hand, the film might have attempted to expand upon the nonsensical love story that pretends to motivate the characters, but Fuller doesn't care at all whether or not any of what his two leads have to say to each other. Instead, he dumps their romantic jousting into a scene set inside a raging storm, gives all of the sexual innuendo to an ill-fated pairing of side characters who spend a third of their screen time masturbating a rifle and rubbing each others faces with a block of wood, all while the film's main antagonist slaps every woman he can find. "She's pregnant? Slapping will handle that! My sister? Looking like she needs a slap!" At the end, a fun game you can play at home is to make a list of the characters and then try to determine if you would ever want to see any of them again. You won't, but it's a fun game nonetheless.

White Mane
Has A Pony, 1952
Tucker Stone

While White Mane had other goals besides educating this particular viewer on why small girls are regularly stereotyped as being hard core horse fiends, that was what was most captivating about this 1st time White Mane experience. Gorgeous movie, the sort of thing that's probably never going to get made again outside of a high definition nature show, but its timeless and altogether satisfactory. It's always a bit silly to make up a list of things one might conceivably show to one's future children, as that particular line of thought seems to exist mostly so that one can excuse away the purchase of an inordinate amount of childish things, but yeah, White Mane: kids would really like this!

The Blood of a Poet
Surrealistically Poetized, 1930

There's a part in this movie where a little girl crawls around on the ceiling and screech-laughs. That part is pretty scary. Otherwise, this is a movie that you can watch, and after its over, you can say you watched it.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone 2010

Comments

[John K(UK)]

Mr Joe McCulloch, after your review of that there Richard Curtis film your face now adorns the £100 note in the imaginary benign dictatorship of my mind. That's a compliment, son. Brilliant. I thank you, I do. Horrible film.

[Damon Blake]

I read this while watching Newswipe S2E3, which was nice and sympatico.

[Mario M.]

I hated Piggy from the moment he introduced him self as "Piggy". I mean, have some self respect for god sake.

[Chris Jones]

Would you guys review "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" next? I found it completely abysmal but I'd be curious to see what you guys thought.

[Tucker Stone]

Ha, i was totally planning to already, i was one of the few people in the theater on friday who stayed for the whole runtime.