Too Many Movies: Bringing Back The Cold War

This week, Joe McCulloch swung by the theater to catch Salt, while Tucker got his proletarian retread on at home, with a copy of Codename: The Soldier.

Salt
Thursdays at 9:00, 2010
Joe McCulloch

By far the most enjoyment I got out of this thing was via Matt Zoller Seitz’s review at Capital, hard-driving presumptive dissent layered with velvet-smooth preemption. Don’t you know it features “Jolie’s most multilayered, carefully calibrated performance in ages (though so minimalist and unassuming that inattentive critics won’t notice),” -- ha ha, wake up lazybones! -- and indeed “may not fit the unimaginative viewer’s definition of a substantive film,” you barren, arid thinkers, you tiresome square sticks in grey cold mud, unless you happen to like “big, loud, incoherent, derivative action film[s]” (that are also plastic), which I think means you are tasteless. What fun!

Regrettably, I was pretty bored by this, though I do admit the copious action scenes were assembled cleanly, in a manner that does not distract with evidently intrusive CG (a la the tumbling physics demo at the center of the A-Team’s climax) and pays due heed to the physics viewers (imaginative or otherwise) might expect from the picture’s posited world. When Angelina Jolie dramatically throws herself atop a truck zooming below -- and then atop successively smaller vehicles passing by -- she rolls and scrambles and bounces side to side, and part of the movie’s fun becomes puzzling out which properties of her environment will become convenient fodder for action hero escapades. Common cleaning solutions? A bottle of vodka? A hapless policeman’s leg and a convenient taser? A very, very convenient domestic arrangement with a German expert on exotic spiders, several of which are helpfully crawling around at home, in the service of a plot twist that unfortunately did not keep me guessing?

It’s amusing, as is the picture’s poking at Jolie’s femininity; Zoller Seitz notes the usage of panties and tampons as evasive items -- the latter stemming blood from a bullet wound! -- and I’ll add our introductory image of Jolie sweating and beaten in her underwear as a quick sneer at gazey expectations, even as director Philip Noyce shows an early and rather Tarantino-like appreciation for Our Heroine’s bare feet. But I can’t sign on to this thing as the sophisticate’s keep-‘em-guessing thrill ride, mainly because I wasn’t particularly kept guessing - the mystery surrounding Jolie’s character is effectively over by the close of Act 2, at which time the value of family and the power of love is duly offered as superior to political conditioning, not that you couldn’t puzzle out Salt’s status as a troubled kind of double agent super heroine by her reluctance to kill assorted cannon fodder foes. Like the Phantom or Mark Trail or Mr. T’s preferred B.A. Baracus, she shoots to wound and knocks guys out a lot, only lapsing into deadly mayhem once as a centerpiece revelation of what she holds dear, walking along in slow motion as the movie suddenly erupts into a theme song, background singers chanting Salt! as Jolie brings the violence. After that it’s off on a prudently cut and bog-standard mission to save America, enlivened mainly by the arch-foe struggling with half a dozen fail safes and slow load times in attempting to launch our nukes. Bureaucracy!

None of this is to say Salt is particularly bad - it’s sometimes clever and always competent, but let’s not mistake efficient genre programming of an aesthetically withdrawing sort for superior engineering. Jolie’s sort-of-enigmatic-but-actually-very-easily-recognizable-motivations speak mainly of an easy-to-adapt lead character for some cable action series, background bits and hot emotions to be filled in by the writer’s room later. Even the picture’s runtime, sleek as it is, becomes reminiscent of a two-hour pilot short of commercial breaks. At least until the dreadful non-ending, which I guess might speak of a nation’s lingering anxieties in a post-Cold War world of mutually subsumed destruction, but really comes off as a blunt pitch for the title character’s potential as a franchise-heading woman of adventure - new casts every week! Exotic locales! Recurring threats… or are they!? It felt like one of those rent-us-out advertisements my theater chain runs before the trailers, where all the crowd is cheering for -- surprise! -- your next corporate meeting! Ah, but who can begrudge a quick commercial after a show’s big pilot?

Codename: The Soldier 
Zeljko Plays A Lady Bomber, 1982
Tucker Stone

[Being the first in an occasional study of the film catalog of Zeljko Ivanek]

The opening credits of Codename: The Soldier (or "Soldier", depending on when/where you're watching) make things nice and blunt: this is a film about Stars, and the evil with which they struggle, represented by Sickles. In case the bright colored iconography of Russia (hiss!) and the United States of America (yay!) don't make it clear, the words "DEMOCRACY" and "COMMUNISM" are there as well. And while you might hold your breath, waiting for that Zeljko Ivanek name to flash--well, something else is probably going to steal that held breath right out of your lungs, just like Trey Martin did with my F-Zero, and that's the letters that form the name "Klaus Kinski".

That's right, kids and kittens--in 1982, Klaus Kinski was snatching up bit parts in Ken "I Was On Wiseguy, Which Some People Remember" Wahl movies! Kinski's performance in Soldier isn't very long or interesting, but it's there, and like any classic crazyman actor (Timothy Busey, Cassavettes, cocaine-era James Caan), Kinski's brief explosion of blistering charisma and incomprehensible uniqueness are able to spice up the mundane in a way that American movies are nearly incapable of if Nicholas Cage and his wigmaster aren't on board. Most of Kinski's opportunities are attributable to the film's unusual script--many of the scenes are wordless, but only a quarter of those silent scenes involve fighting--so you end up with a lot of time spent watching people staring at each other. When one of those duets is between the uncreased brow of the unthinking Wahl and a psychopath like Kinski, you're in for something. It's fun, even if it's not as much fun as watching Kinski do other things, like this:

(Soldier doesn't have anything like that.) It does have an engaging opening scene, where a limousine hits a woman pushing a baby carraige and some onlookers run to her aid, only to end up being executed by machine-gun fire--because the women, and the onlookers, are all Russian assassins--and the machine gun fire comes spitting forth from the glorious guns of our silent American mercenery squadron, led by Mr. Wahl. The sight of a covert ops team, all dressed in black, lined alongside a Philadelphia street at "5:42 AM", firing hundreds of rounds into a multicultural group of assassins, on American soil: that's pretty much the best way possible to open a movie. (There's something to the idea that a Russian hit squad would be made up of a young hispanic mother, a black businessman, an elderly white utility worker, and a forty-something white lady dressed like a teenager that makes for incredibly charming viewing.)

But after our boys clean up the carcasses with watering cans, Solider runs out of gas almost completely, which is a real problem when you're only at the 3 minute mark on a 96 minute film. There's a few bizarro moments left in the film to make the trek worthwhile, as long as you've never seen it before and have the time to kill. Kinski's cameo, Zelko's wordless portrayal of a bomber dressed both unconvincingly and unnecessarily as a woman, and an extended and openly pointless round of fisticuffs between two close friends who greet each other by stabbing one another--all of these will serve as worthy roadsteps for any hardy soul making the journey. Hell, depending on how politically sensitive you are, the portrayal of Israel as a nihilistic apocalypse-seeking nation willing to sacrifice the global oil economy out of spite might even be entertainingly anachronistic, like old tar baby stories are for the morally repugnant. But like the Cold War itself, the film cuts to the credits without ever really explaining how the scheme was going to last, what was accomplished in the first place, and how, exactly, you're supposed to get along with a country for any extended length of time when you're always living a crisis away from nuking the fuckers into wet stains on their homeland's concrete.

-Joe McCulloch & Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[sean witzke]

Aw, man, Noyce directed Salt? I really wish he would have followed The Quiet American with anything worth a damn.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Ed Danvers in the house!

[mateo]

In my neighborhood, there are three or four 6 foot+ black dudes dressed TOTALLY unconvincingly like women, but necessarily in that without the get-up, they would have little chance of duping slumming college kids and crack-seeking construction workers into believing the back door is actually the front.

HINT: it is not.

[moose n squirrel]

"the portrayal of Israel as a nihilistic apocalypse-seeking nation willing to sacrifice the global oil economy out of spite might even be entertainingly anachronistic"

"Anachronistic", you say?

[Marty]

I saw what you did.