Leonardo DiCaprio & Armie Hammer in the lead roles.
By Jason Apuzzo.THE PITCH: Director Clint Eastwood and star Leonardo DiCaprio bring the colorful and controversial life of legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to the big screen, in a sprawling and complex biopic covering some 50+ years of American domestic history.
THE SKINNY: Eastwood’s relaxed, naturalistic directing style combines with a charismatic performance from DiCaprio to create a mostly sympathetic portrait of Hoover, albeit one that traffics in shopworn clichés of ‘50s anti-communist ‘paranoia’ and Kinsey-style sexual repression. J. Edgar bites off far more history than it can chew in 2 1/2 hours, however, and suffers mightily from its slow pace.
WHAT WORKS: • Leonardo DiCaprio has finally begun to hit his stride as an actor, delivering a voluble, eccentric take on Hoover – treating him as a dapper, genial workaholic with an occasional tendency to overstep his bounds. DiCaprio’s enthusiasm for the character is palpable, however, and mitigates the film’s sporadic tendency to belittle Hoover’s accomplishments.
• Eastwood’s direction softens some of the sharp edges in Dustin Lance Black’s script, keeping the focus on the characters rather than on Oliver Stone-style political showboating. Ideologues of both the left and right will not get out of J. Edgar what they want; the film is much more a Citizen Kane-style character study (complete with flashback structure) than a referendum on the anti-communist cause or the legacy of the FBI and its methods. The film is far too fond of Hoover to be considered left wing, yet too ambivalent toward Hoover’s politics to be considered right wing.
• The question of Hoover’s sexuality is broached tastefully, basically depicting him as too tightly wound for relationships of any kind. In fact, throughout the entire film he receives a grand total of one kiss – forced on him awkwardly by his friend, Clyde Tolson. As presented in the film, Hoover’s greatest passion is quite obviously his work.
• J. Edgar otherwise features strong supporting performances by Armie Hammer as Hoover’s colleague and companion Clyde Tolson, Naomi Watts as Hoover’s long-suffering secretary Helen Gandy, and Judi Dench as Hoover’s mother – the steel in J. Edgar’s spine.
By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Commercial and music video director Tarsem reinvents the ancient Greek Theseus myth in Immortals, featuring rugged Brit star Henry Cavill (the new Superman) and coming from the same producer, Mark Canton, who revitalized the Sword & Sandal genre with 300.
THE SKINNY: Jettisoning any actual Greek mythology from his story, Tarsem repurposes Theseus’ ancient heroics into a violent, vacuous cross-cultural mash-up for the video game/UFC generation – a stylized ballet of severed limbs, senseless plot devices and wild costuming. Immortals – which likely deserved an X rating – is a film neither for the faint of heart, nor the lively of mind.
"No, John Galliano didn't design my helmet!"
WHAT WORKS: • Although the film’s costumes and production design – which extravagantly blend North African, Indian, Persian and occasionally even some Greek influences – make little sense in the context of the story, they bring a visual novelty to the film that grabs one’s attention. The garb of the Olympian gods, and the armor of the Titans, deserve special praise.
• Years of bizarre behavior and dissipated living have made Mickey Rourke into a good hire to play a wicked tyrant. His King Hyperion, who bears no connection to any Theseus myth I’m aware of, is nonetheless a formidable and interesting villain – a kind of Colonel Kurtz of the ancient world, decked out in bronze bunny ears. As an interesting side note, the disjointed terrain of Rourke’s face has begun to resemble a Paul Klee painting – fascinating to look at (particularly in 3D), even for long spells of time.
WHAT DOESN’T WORK: • Having drained the story of any meaningful connection to Greek mythology or history (which, one assumes, he finds dull), Tarsem has nowhere to go with the Theseus story excerpt to turn it into a generic, head-chopping ‘hero’s journey’ like a thousand similar films before it. Immortals, trite in the extreme, shows less respect to the core cannon of Greek myth than your average comic book movie shows toward comic book lore.
• Outside of Mickey Rourke, Immortals features not a single noteworthy performance – including those of Henry Cavill and Freida Pinto, who make for a handsome but pitifully dull couple. And although Luke Evans is passable as a young Zeus, the rest of the Olympian gods are almost laughable, like something out of a high school performance of Godspell. Continue reading Labyrinth of Woe: LFM Mini-Review of Immortals
[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today on the front page of The Huffington Post.]
By Govindini Murty. Few directors are as willing to venture into the abyss as Werner Herzog. His prolific body of work has ranged from intense dramas like Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Woyzeck that plumb the depths of the human soul to documentaries like Encounters at the End of the World and Grizzly Man that examine humanity’s fragile place in the miraculous and terrifying world of nature. The astonishing breadth of Herzog’s filmmaking conveys the humanist’s sense of wonder at the world – what he describes as the “ecstasy of observation.”
Herzog’s latest film, Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life (opening this Friday, November 11th) is a compelling look at the contentious issue of the death penalty. Producer Erik Nelson has stated that the film is intended to inform the current Republican presidential debate over the death penalty, in particular with regard to the candidacy of Texas Governor Rick Perry. Herzog himself has issued a Director’s Statement expressing his opposition to capital punishment – though in keeping with his lifelong aversion to political interpretations of his work, he has also asserted that Into the Abyss is not a political film. These apparent contradictions point to the enigma of Werner Herzog himself – on the one hand a sensitive humanist with strong moral convictions, yet on the other hand an artist who resists being defined by political activism or party ideology.
Into the Abyss embodies these contradictions. The film tells the true story of a brutal triple murder committed in Conroe, Texas. Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, intending to steal two cars owned by Sandra Stotler, killed Stotler in her home and then lured her son Adam and his friend Jeremy Richardson into the woods and executed them. Perry and Burkett subsequently went on a joy ride in the cars, before winding up in a bloody shoot-out with the police. Perry and Burkett were convicted of the murders, with Perry receiving the death penalty, and Burkett receiving a life sentence.
Herzog interviewed Michael Perry just eight days before his execution, and also interviewed Jason Burkett in prison. Other interviews include those with Burkett’s wife Melyssa Thompson-Burkett, who contacted Burkett while he was in prison and subsequently married him; Fred Allen, a prison captain who worked in the execution chamber and who assisted in over 125 executions before resigning in moral crisis; and most significantly, the relatives of the victims themselves: Lisa Stotler-Balloun, the daughter of Sandra Stotler and sister of Adam Stotler, and Charles Richardson, the brother of Jeremy Richardson. Stotler-Balloun and Richardson in particular provide the most heartbreaking testimony of the film, as Herzog does not shy away from depicting the shattering effect of the murders on their lives. As a result, Into the Abyss exists in a complex tension between Herzog’s avowed position against capital punishment and his impulse as a storyteller to depict both sides of the story and allow readers to make up their own minds.
I had the opportunity to meet with Werner Herzog in Los Angeles recently and discuss with him Into the Abyss and his extraordinary body of work. Part I of this interview appears below.
Documenting the crime.
GM: I’d like to ask you about the title of your movie, Into the Abyss, because I’ve seen you refer to the concept of ‘the abyss’ quite a few times in your work. In Woyzeck you have a line “Every man is an abyss, you get dizzy looking in,” and in Nosferatu you have a line “Time is an abyss profound as a thousand nights.” This is a concept you keep referring to – what does ‘the abyss’ mean to you?
WH: It’s a good observation, and when I came up with the title Into the Abyss – it dawned on me that it could have been the title of quite a few other films. Like Woyzeck could have had that title, or The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner or even the cave film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, because I’ve always tried to look deep inside of what we are – deep into the recesses of our existence, of our prehistory – like in Cave of Forgotten Dreams. So it is some sort of a theme that runs through quite a few of my films.
GM: I want to ask you about the relationship between humanity and the universe. There was a wonderful quote at the end of Encounters at the End of the World where Dr. Gorham asks, and I paraphrase, “are we the means through which the universe becomes conscious of itself?” This reminded me of a quote from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées:
“A reed only is man, the frailest in the world, but a reed that thinks. Unnecessary that the universe arm itself to destroy him: a breath of air, a drop of water are enough to kill him. Yet, if the All should crush him, man would still be nobler than that which destroys him: for he knows that he dies, and he knows that the universe is stronger than he; but the universe knows nothing of it.” (Trans. A.J. Krailsheimer)
This seems to apply to Into the Abyss and its depiction of human beings within this world. In the film you go driving down country roads and you show the trailer parks, the run-down stores, the boarded up gas stations, the bars. It looks like a wasteland that God is somehow absent from, and there are these people in the midst of it who are in a terrible state of pain and confusion – in an apparently indifferent universe.
WH: Let me address Pascal first. Yes, I like him very much. I even invented a quote for the film Lessons of Darkness. It starts with a Pascal quote “The collapse of the universe will occur like the creation in grandiose splendor,” and underneath it says Blaise Pascal, but I invented it – and of course Pascal couldn’t have said it better. [Laughs.]
But, it’s interesting. The wasteland, this forlorn landscape, has become fascinating for me – this lost kind of Americana. And one of the death row inmates with whom I spoke – not in this film but in another film I’m already finishing – he said to me how he saw on his very last trip forty-three miles between death row and the death house where they are being executed in Huntsville. And in this cage in the van he sees a little bit of an abandoned gas station, he sees a cow in the field, and all of a sudden for him, everything is magnificent, and he says: “It looked like Israel to me, it all looked like the Holy Land.” And I immediately grabbed my camera and I did this voyage of the forty-three miles and indeed the most forlorn landscapes all of a sudden look like the Holy Land. So I look at these forlorn landscapes all of a sudden with fresh and different eyes. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: A Conversation With Werner Herzog, Part I: Into the Abyss
By Joe Bendel. They are singing about revolution. They are not really doing anything about it, but that was still more than enough for the Communist government. Considered by many the first Chinese indie film, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards has been censored, banned, and roundly condemned – but thanks to Fortissimo Films, the international independent film production and distribution company – it reached a global audience. Still gritty and subversive after nearly twenty years, Bastards screens this Saturday in New York as part of MoMA’s new retrospective series, In Focus: Fortissimo Films.
Cui Jian is one of China’s most famous underground rockers. In Bastards, he plays himself or a thinly fictionalized version. He has fans but no gigs, because he cannot secure a venue for a prospective concert. He also lost the lease on his rehearsal space for no apparent reason. Though never outright stated, it is clear that the powers that be want to close him down.
Karzi owns a venue, but his rock bar is no great shakes. Neither is he. His pregnant girlfriend Maomao disappeared after he insisted she have an abortion. He doggedly hunts for her, subjecting her friends to outright harassment, but more for reasons of ego than love. Morally ambiguous, Karzi is not the image of Chinese youth the government likes to project, but in 1993, he was the shape of go-go me-me things to come.
A contemporary of Jia Zhangke, Zhang is considered one of the godfathers of the Chinese independent film movement and a forefather of the Digital Generation. In fact, Bastards bears a strong aesthetic affinity to the subsequent dGeneration films. Shot guerilla-style with most of the director’s friends serving as the ensemble cast, the film follows its roundabout narrative from a fly-on-the-wall perspective. This is a street level film, unvarnished and unsentimental. Continue reading The Birth of Chinese Indie Cinema: LFM Reviews Beijing Bastards @ MoMA
By Joe Bendel. Yoshihiro Tatsumi could be called the Japanese Will Eisner. Tatsumi was the leading exponent of Gekiga, or serious manga that tackled adult story lines. Americans who are very hip or awfully geeky will already know Tatsumi’s work, particularly his Eisner winning graphic novel-autobiography, A Drifting Life. For the rest of us, Singaporean Eric Khoo’s Tatsumi (trailer here) serves as a compelling introduction to his career and stories. Singapore’s official submission for best foreign language Academy Award consideration, Khoo’s animated tribute-biography screens at the San Francisco Film Society’s upcoming 2011 San Francisco International Animation Festival.
Tatsumi was ten when World War II ended. Somewhat logically, the American occupation and economic revival of Japan would factor prominently in his life and that of his characters. Khoo intersperses five notable Tatsumi stories, mostly in black-and-white, amid his vivid color adaption of the Gekiga pioneer’s memoir. Psychologically complex and deeply flawed, it is clear how Tatsumi’s characters were shaped by their creator’s experiences. In fact, it is easy to conflate them with Tatsumi, particularly the unfortunate artist in Occupied.
Each of the five would stand alone as satisfying self-contained short films. However, the most powerful of the collected stories comes first, by virtue of chronology. Hell forthrightly addresses the horrors of Hiroshima and its aftermath, but it takes viewers to some unexpectedly dark places, undercutting simplistic moral judgments. Throughout all five stories, there is a profound sense of alienation, often prodding the protagonists to commit shockingly anti-social acts out of existential compulsion, but their actions are always understandable, in a sadly human way.
From "Tatsumi."
Though his life was never as lurid as that of his marginalized characters, Tatsumi’s early years were marked by considerable pain and want. Khoo structures the film in a way that really emphasizes how these struggles instilled a humanistic empathy in Tatsumi, embracing those who were downtrodden and even grotesque. Ultimately, it is rather inspiring to see the artist rise from such mean circumstances to become an acknowledged leader of his field. Continue reading SF International Animation Fest: LFM Reviews Tatsumi & Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
The Minotaur goes to work on Theseus in "Immortals."
By Jason Apuzzo. • Immortals is upon us, opening this Friday in 3D. As LFM readers know, I love the Sword & Sandal genre – it might actually be my favorite type of movie, among the many that we discuss here at Libertas – and so I’m looking forward to seeing the film. I grew up on films like Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts, the Steve Reeves Hercules films, and Ben-Hur – so it takes absolutely no effort for me to get revved up about a film like this. Especially when there’s a Minotaur involved.
At the same time, based on how Immortals is being marketed, I’m a very long way from believing it’s going to be anything other than a vacuous exercise in style, a kind of Chanel commercial in togas. Having watched/read recent interviews (see here and here) with the film’s director, Tarsem Singh, I have no sense that the film has any kind of personal meaning for him or anybody else involved. Nor do I sense as yet that the film is anything other than a cash-in on the ongoing popularity of 300, from which it obviously draws its inspiration.
Part of this, I confess, has to do with the cast – none of whom is really grabbing my attention. Henry Cavill, who is currently shooting the forthcoming Superman reboot, is someone I haven’t seen before except in 2002’s The Count of Monte Cristo, a film that did nothing for me. He doesn’t look all that interesting, frankly. As for the rest of the cast – Stephen Dorff, Luke Evans, Kellan Lutz – I barely even know who these people are. And as far as the women in the film, Isabel Lucas was appealing enough in Red Dawn, and in the second Transformers movie as a sexually aggressive alien robot … but having her play Athena? The goddess of wisdom? That seems like quite a stretch, like something you’d see in a high school play – along with cardboard swords and paper-mache busts of Caesar. As for Freida Pinto, my sense is that her 15 minutes of fame are rapidly dwindling – prior to her inevitable cash-out three years from now as a Bond girl.
And then there’s Mickey Rourke, wearing what appear to be bronze bunny ears. I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Mickey Rourke in bronze bunny ears as King Hyperion in "Immortals."
• One of the best rumors of late in the Sword & Sandal world – indeed, one of the best movie rumors overall, of late – is that Steven Spielberg may direct Gods and Kings, an epic revolving around the life of Moses. I think this is a fabulous idea, assuming it can be made to happen. Deadline Hollywood reported recently that Spielberg has already read the Gods and Kings script by Michael Green and Stuart Hazeldine, and that the film would be made by Warner Brothers – likely with involvement from DreamWorks.
Where to begin? To have the director of Schindler’s List and Raiders of the Lost Ark take on the life of Moses would seem to make perfect sense. Spielberg would bring an old-fashioned, humanistic warmth and sentimentality to the project that very few directors have anymore, while also bringing a sense of spectacle, adventure and showmanship into the mix, as well. So for what it’s worth, I love the idea of him doing this – although I hope he’d change the title; Gods and Kings sounds a bit too anodyne, for my taste – or maybe just too close to Gods and Generals, I can’t tell. And anyway, aren’t we really talking about ‘Prophets and Pharaohs’ here?
Charlton Heston as a young Moses.
Spielberg is also a major admirer of Cecil B. DeMille’s (watch any documentary on DeMille and you’ll always see Spielberg singing his praises), and I strongly suspect that Spielberg would love to have a DeMille-style religious/family epic of this sort under his belt to cement his legacy – the type of film that could be watched on holidays in perpetuity, much like DeMille’s Ten Commandments. Adjusted for inflation, incidentally, The Ten Commandments is still the #5 movie of all time at the box office, and would’ve made over a billion dollars domestically at today’s ticket prices.
Of course, I don’t know a lot about Gods and Kings; it could be that the screenwriters have opted for a less traditional take on the story than what I’m expecting. Be that as it may, it seems likely that with a project of this kind Spielberg would be swinging for the fences, trying to hit a major home run at the box office and also tell a story that would – in our increasingly fractious times – unite audiences worldwide.
Were I to guess, I’d say that he will likely do some kind of Moses film – although the script will need to match his personal agenda, more than the screenwriter’s. It’s conceivable that this project will remain in development for a while, if he doesn’t like what he sees initially, but I’d bet he’ll give the Moses story a try before too long.
By the way, do I dare mention the possibility of parting the Red Sea … in 3D?
