Norse People

Two great pieces of entertainment -- last night the psychotically good first episode of HBO's Game of Thrones and tonight out at the theater amazed how good and suspenseful I found Joe Wright's Hanna. In both cases, crucial stretches of the movie are in some snow covered forest, the northern something or other, and what living in a land like that forges into people.



Starting off in an arctic place, Saoirse Ronan is now the first serious action star of her generation:



Really a treat in the theater -- particularly Cate Blanchett so nasty and some amazing long, flowing action takes, one with Eric Bana in particular -- great to watch. Bond with a soul.

Leave it to the northerners to bring. it.

Finally Coming Back

Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig might just make a great Bond together.

Post-WWI Masks

I started my very first Facebook discussion thread here, on Richard Harrow (Jack Huston), the mysterious and lethal disfigured WWI veteran taken in by Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt) in the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. We don't see much to Harrow even when he's in a scene, due to his habit of hiding in the shadows and, mainly, behind the mask that shields the world from the true horror of his injured face. If you can handle it, here's how Harrow looks on the show without his mask. And here's with the cover-up (and Jimmy):



Thanks to the Facebook discussion, I've been connect to this fascinating article, "Faces of War" (by Caroline Alexander in Smithsonian magazine 2007) on the origin of these masks in two studios, one in England and one in France (the latter run by an American sculpter, Anna Coleman Ladd), which went to painstaking ends to help make these wounded soldiers as whole as possible. It was the new technologies of the war which gave rise to this need:

The large-caliber guns of artillery warfare with their power to atomize bodies into unrecoverable fragments and the mangling, deadly fallout of shrapnel had made clear, at the war's outset, that mankind's military technology wildly outpaced its medical: "Every fracture in this war is a huge open wound," one American doctor reported, "with a not merely broken but shattered bone at the bottom of it." The very nature of trench warfare, moreover, proved diabolically conducive to facial injuries: "[T]he...soldiers failed to understand the menace of the machine gun," recalled Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France. "They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to dodge the hail of bullets."

The detail work of these studios were huge and actually took a lot longer than today's plastic surgery to achieve the desired results:

In Ladd's studio, which was credited with better artistic results, a single mask required a month of close attention. Once the patient was wholly healed from both the original injury and the restorative operations, plaster casts were taken of his face, in itself a suffocating ordeal, from which clay or plasticine squeezes were made. "The squeeze, as it stands, is a literal portrait of the patient, with his eyeless socket, his cheek partly gone, the bridge of the nose missing, and also with his good eye and a portion of his good cheek," wrote Ward Muir, a British journalist who had worked as an orderly with Wood. "The shut eye must be opened, so that the other eye, the eye-to-be, can be matched to it. With dexterous strokes the sculptor opens the eye. The squeeze, hitherto representing a face asleep, seems to awaken. The eye looks forth at the world with intelligence."

This plasticine likeness was the basis of all subsequent portraits. The mask itself would be fashioned of galvanized copper one thirty-second of an inch thick—or as a lady visitor to Ladd's studio remarked, "the thinness of a visiting card." Depending upon whether it covered the entire face, or as was often the case, only the upper or lower half, the mask weighed between four and nine ounces and was generally held on by spectacles. The greatest artistic challenge lay in painting the metallic surface the color of skin. After experiments with oil paint, which chipped, Ladd began using a hard enamel that was washable and had a dull, flesh-like finish. She painted the mask while the man himself was wearing it, so as to match as closely as possible his own coloring. "...Details such as eyebrows, eyelashes and mustaches were made from real hair, or, in Wood's studio, from slivered tinfoil, in the manner of ancient Greek statues.

Here's one of the before-and-after photos accompanying the article:



The success of these masks were huge, per this testimonial:

"Thanks to you, I will have a home," one soldier had written her. "...The woman I love no longer finds me repulsive, as she had a right to do."

Facial disfigurement is one of those topics that grows in the imagination. So much of how we communicated, how we recognize, how hold our self-image has to do with what's above the neck. Appearance seems to matter almost as much as functionality, as the loss of an eye may be hidden with a patch or prosthetic eyeball, but a severely disfigured face calls attention to itself, especially on first apprehension.

I wonder if this is one of those, "there but for the grace of God" type emotions it evokes. Dear Lord, please spare me in your mercy. In a certain way, aging disfigures us in slow motion. I recently looked at photos of myself from twenty-odd years ago, and wondered where that confident-looking young guy was when I was in my twenties.

As for the show, so far Richard Harrow has only killed someone who richly deserved it. We have yet to see him in actual rage, and perhaps he has none, just a technical approach to assassination. Perhaps the development of his character will lead to his disfigured face somehow becoming mirrored by a disfigured soul.

For now, Harrow is our angel, if an angel of death. We're in sympathy to him, and we like Jimmy more for bringing Harrow aboard, even if for self-serving purposes. Loyalty does count for something, after all.

I leave it to the creators of Boardwalk Empire to make the most of Harrow, and continue to surprise us.

Hurt Me

Director Kathryn Bigelow made a name for herself thirty years ago as a Columbia film student with her thesis, a twenty minute scene of two guys beating each other up in an alley as two Semioticians deconstructed the lure of cinematic violence on the soundtrack. As a friend of mine pointed out, a similar scene of two men pounding on each other is a highlight (and humorous respite) in the middle of her current release, The Hurt Locker, while the deconstruction is now all in the rest of the pictures. Taking place during the most lethal stretch of our Iraq occupation, the film is, one one hand, an essay-like deconstruction of what it takes to be a risk-addicted soldier specifically trained and tasked to disarm IED's, the bombs anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgents use(d) to blow us up. On the other hand the movie is a highly successful entry into what may be my favorite genre, the serious action film actually about something real and significant.

Emphasis now on the action and, from the very first scene, monumental suspense.

I've had my issues with Bigelow's films in the past. Her proto-True Blood indie vampire flick, Near Dark, made her the potential punk crossover director to watch. However her follow up, Blue Steel, was made laborious with it's use of metronomically cut static/graphic shots and a plot that collapsed into numbing cliche by the end. She can be credited with giving us the compulsively watchable Point Break, which also gave us the Keanu Reeves persona that paid off in The Matrix, and while she's filled in with some admirable television directing assignments, her ensuing films seem mainly ill-fated.

Until now.

One hopes that Bigelow is at the start of a streak, because all of her talents and unique style -- often confused with being a "male" style when it's much more clinical, perhaps that of a woman fascinated like an anthropologist with male rituals and camaraderie -- have paid off. The superlatives are easy to come by. This is easily the most entertaining movie made about the Iraq conflict, without sacrificing an ounce of realism, and for me the best American movie I've seen in a theater this year. She's also introduced a new star, lead actor Jeremy Renner, and gotten a career-best performance (thus far) from Anthony Mackie.

What makes The Hurt Locker work starts with the setting, which is essentially a 24-hour livewire situation where literally anyone not in an American army uniform can be a deadly enemy, whether the local merchant or the kid with the soccer ball. The picture is structured as a series of high-suspense set pieces, each one essentially an escalating variation on man vs. bomb (or insurgent). By very nature this is a looping existential situation, where literally one moment to the next can be there you see him, there you don't. The actual story engine is a classic platoon tale, where a hotshot cowboy (Renner) joins Mackie and crew as team leader, a.k.a. the man in the barely protective bomb suit with the fingers free and vulnerable so they can do the detail work on the bombs themselves. And at the center is Renner's character, who is clearly better at war than he is at peace, which may be more dooming to him than any shrapnel.

One of the tricks and grammatical tropes of the movie is how we learn the geography of the bomb experts world, what it means to be 200, 100, 50 meters away. Bigelow does an expert job of keeping the geography straight in each individual set piece, no small feat considering the you-are-there handheld documentary shooting style. Another piece of grammar that grew with the picture is how during the defusion scenes there will be a cut to the point of view behind a high window, indicating that we're likely with someone who has the ability to detonate the bomb, locking the dread factor right in place.

I won't be surprised to see The Hurt Locker deconstructed further by filmmakers in the future who want to figure out how to put together their own action sequences for maximum impact. How did she do that will be the question each time, and one hopes they have a fraction of the serious content that Bigelow reveals. While there is nothing right/left partisan in the picture and no spoken words of political positioning, there are those moments where you just start asking yourself, if this is such a seemingly low value environment in the first place and everyone around seems so damned hostile to us, why the hell did we come here in the first place?

Finally there's the substance of the main character. Screenwriter Mark Boal was an embedded journalist in the Iraq War, which is what gives the characters and situations their foundation in reality. For Boal and Bigelow the courage of these servicemen and the lead in particular is unassailable. One could even interpret the ending of the film as as gung-ho as Top Gun, but which I believe would be missing the obvious point. Yes, these are America's bravest and most willing to sacrifice; however there's something about either what made them want to be there or something about the experience of the war that changes them, something that makes them not 100% whole as a human being. And it's that chasing after a piece that makes an IED defusion specialist.

The most reassuring aspect of the movie is that when the main character settles in we know he's the able rebel, the kind of John Ford character who can break the frontier where others can't, but will never be comfortable as a settler. As enigmatic as his character's inner life might be, we know him from movies of yore, he's in our cinematic DNA. It's to Bigelow and Boal's credit that we learn something new about this character, as grounded by the context of our nation's Iraq experience.

For larger metaphors you can take what you will, but if you're looking for the most gripping action film of the summer, it ain't Transformers 2.

Bastards

If the new Romanian movie that won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days is playing in a theater near you, and you want to experience the most suspenseful cinematic drama in years, go immediately lest you lose the chance to see it on the big screen.



The story takes place over the course of a single day in 1987, two years before the overthrow and execution of evil bastard dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

But under Ceausescu's 24 year rule, abortion was punishable by 3 to 10 years in prison:

New laws are introduced to engineer an increase in the size of Romania's population. "The foetus is the property of the entire society," Ceausescu states, "Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity."

Abortion and contraception are outlawed, childless couples face higher taxes, divorce is discouraged, and sex education prohibited. The birth-rate almost doubles, but is accompanied by a leap in infant mortality and unwanted pregnancies, with the rising numbers of handicapped, orphaned and abandoned children being placed in decrepit institutions under state care. After the fall of Ceausescu in 1989 over 100,000 handicapped and orphaned children are discovered living in horrific conditions.

None of this is in the text of the movie, it's all just baked into the noirish atmosphere that drenches this movie as we follow college student Otilia as she helps her friend, Gabrita, get clandestine abortion. Every advance is fraught with dread and danger, as it gradually becomes clear that Otilia is putting herself way, way out on a limb for a friend, and we're wondering whether it's that maybe the friend isn't so deserving, or maybe by making this act illegal, their rulers have put the most basic form of human bonding, that of friendship, into permanent contradiction.

Anamaria Marinca, who plays Otilia, turns in the best female performance of the year. We're with her every nerve-wracking step of the way. In the middle of the picture there's a single hint of why she's so much stronger than the passively damaging friend for whom she chooses to go through the ringer (Laura Vasiliu, also riveting although not who we bond with): she's a soldier's daughter. It's never mentioned elsewhere, and there aren't any pyrotechnic heroics. But in that repressive, terrifying and deadening world, she is Orpheus on a journey through hell, damned if she looks back.

Director Cristian Mungiu evidently rehearsed heavily for two and a half weeks, then along with Cinematographer Oleg Mutu made the decision to shoot every scene in a single shot, no cuts. Usually the camera is fixed in the perfect spot, most notably in the dinner scene where Otilia is unspeakably lonely in the midst of the celebratory chatter of her boyfriend's family friends, all of them clearly having accepted life under the regime, the generation getting by just fine, just playing by the rules and pretending to have normal bourgeois lives. But other scenes, particularly following Otilia on the move, go for long, heart-pounding handheld takes, yet always maintaining the unique claustrophobia of her situation at that moment in history in that society.

If you ever want to see a movie to make you hate Communism, this is the one.

The abortion issue is not treated lightly, nor (as I've indicated above) is Gabrita portrayed as a saint. As the title indicates, this isn't the first trimester, and the movie is far from supportive of abortion so late in the gestation period. But what I think gives the movie such resonance is the depiction of how loyalty gets so twisted under a fascist regime, down at the street -- or dorm -- level. Even the heavy of the piece, abortionist "Mr. Bebe" (Los Angeles Film Critics Award winner Vlad Ivanov), seems to operate per a kind of perverse survival strategy in the republic.

I don't want to give too much away and hope I haven't so far, but I'll just say that the first shot of the movie begins on two goldfish swimming around a tank, sitting on the dorm room table as the women make their preparations to leave. It's no accident that glasses of water echo this image at the end of the film, albeit in a subtle and clever way. These women are trapped just as transparently as their goldfish, as unaware of a world outside the glass, as vulnerable to surveillance as them as well.

As Otilia's experiences Mr. Bebe, the devastating cost of her friend's transgression and her own divided loyalties, it's fair to wonder which animal, 1987 Romanian or goldfish, has the better deal.

Bummer

Look, I want Obama to win in the end, but most of all I don't want Rodham go get the nomination uncontested and untested. There shouldn't be a coronation, king or queen.

The best possible outcome would be for the two of them to trade off states for awhile, pretty even after Super Tuesday, and then Obama lands a decisive blow before the convention. Based on Hillary's success with the female vote, Obama's not so much up against a wall of racism as a wall of women, who want their turn and have been waiting 235 years for it. Regardless of whoever the other guy is, but particularly a younger one as-of-yet untested on the national stage.

As usual lately, I'm in general agreement with Andrew. To wit:

... She was knocked off her pedestal in Iowa and people prefer candidates not on pedestals. We will hear more about the Bradley effect, but I have no evidence it was actually there. I sure hope it wasn't. And South Carolina will give us more data.

I am now listening to her victory speech. It is my penance. Two great lines:

"I found my voice. And let's give America the comeback that New Hampshire has just given me."

But I would still note: this is still a very close victory. Compared to what we were expecting two weeks ago, it's amazingly close...

I do think that both Obama and Clinton have benefited from this campaign as candidates. Democracy works; and we need to pause and honor its findings...

As for Obama, class all the way:

"You know, a few weeks ago no one imagined that we'd have accomplished what we did here tonight in New Hampshire," he told supporters. "For most of this campaign, we were far behind. We always knew our climb would be steep.

"But, in record numbers, you came out and you spoke up for change. And with your voices and your votes you made it clear that at this moment in this election there is something happening in America."

He congratulated Hillary Rodham Clinton on a hard-fought victory and asked the crowd to give her a round of applause.

"All the candidates in this race have good ideas and all are patriots who serve this country honorably," Obama said.

Back at his place, it's still a political party. He so damned loose, you just want to hang around with him. Solving global and domestic problems.

We'll see what he comes back with, next up Saturday, January 26th in South Carolina.

Suspensed

Tell me something. What's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss?

I've read the Cormac McCarthy book, certainly his most accessible to then, that the Coen Brothers made into their latest release, No Country for Old Men, and read most of the screenplay, so I was prepared for the crazy violence, the Texas desert and, most of all, the un-Hollywood ending, so when I was watching it in packed Century City AMC on Sunday night at 8:05pm I was not only caught in the relentless suspense of the story, at the same time I was thinking about how to describe the work.

At one level, it's simply a perfect literary adaptation, true to the source material in both plotting and spirit, true down to the offbeat, ruminative ending, bringing it alive in jackpot images not unlike the successful adaptation of Tolkien by Jackson.

At another level it's a sterling set of actors, roles, performances, not a weak link in the bunch, with high-wattage bigscreen performers including Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Steven Root and, best of all, Javier Bardem as the ruthlessly principled boogie man, Anton Chigurh.

Sure, the picture has a lived-in authenticity while still delivering the crystalline Coen Bros imagery, by way of DP Roger Deakins. Yes, the level of control is astounding, yet the performances seem fresh and three-dimensional. Yeah, maybe the ending is striving for a certain literary quality that we can debate whether it merits.

What's really at the core of the movie's appeal, and credit McCarthy for laying out all the brutal beats in his own semi-elliptical style in the source material, is the suspense. As one NYC friend and reader wrote me after seeing the movie pre-release, "them Coen boys are badasses."

I can't recall the last time I saw such detailed playing out of extended suspense, essentially one long chase stretching across all three acts. The audience I saw it with was completely rapt, with groans and expletives and inappropriate laughter at all the right moments (okay, maybe that was me with most of the inappropriate laughter). The Coens are so at the top of their game, the lessons of Blood Simple and Fargo echoing throughout their unimpeachable command, that they easily win the heir to Alfred Hitchcock mantle with this one.

It's Hitchcock with shotguns. Sawed-off shotguns. And a cattle puncher.

Beside the cliche infusion of L.A. cinema geeks/unbearable Coen fanipshers (there was a tiny group in the audience, middle left, who applauded when the credits rolled, one member endlessly, that was completely inappropriate to the way the Bros leave us), I realized that the rest of the crowd is there not so much for "quirkiness" or "Art"; we came because this looked like a serious Americana noir, and we know the Coens know how to deliver on that.

So in the middle of this essentially nihilistic movie I remember the quote Fellini made about Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, another masterpiece suspense picture with a dangling, deliberately unsatisfying ending -- he called it, "An apocalyptic tone-poem."

This one as well. Those critics seeing a larger metaphor talk about the apocalyptic undertones to the story, the way Chigurh represents and whole never wave of future violence tearing apart the old world (set in 1980) or maybe our terroristic world of today. What I love about the movie is that it allows that the violence is actually ancient an reoccurring, per Chigurh's lopsided Buster Brown haircut and Jones' visit to an old, disabled lawman towards the end of the picture.

But at some level it's an existential art d'object, a Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) screening, stills of running, bloody, at night, or fishing in air ducts with tentpoles, or standing in by the counter in the filling station, all Warholized on the wall. It's an invitation to look deeper and the possibility that nothing's there, that it's the surface you have to watch, for clues and warnings, and god-bless quick reflexes.

McCarthy himself seems twice inspired by Sam Peckinpah movies, with Blood Meridian like a "Mirror, Mirror" version of The Wild Bunch, and No Country echoing Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. In the Bros hands, it's a brilliant combination. Long stretches of Alfred laced with startling explosions of Sam, then a couple John Ford-class speeches by Jones, who's arguably the protagonist of the piece.

When the lights go up, the movie's still with you. Stop clapping, asshat, because this one's bigger than the self-importance of your self-valorizing opinion.

Ethan Coen turned 50 this year, and the team of he and his older brother, Joel, is here to stay; the biggest professionals on the lot, hitting a peak. What I think they're reaching for here, that maybe they weren't fully feeling before, is a real mortality. Still young men relative to McCarthy, they deliver his darkening vision of aging and passing beautifully. It gives their characters, which appear as seamless additions to the Coen cannon, a weight that hasn't been so certifiable before.

That's right. They may have made more than their share of classics already, but with this one they've grown up.

Ethan & Joel Coen have made their first 100% movie for adults.

Kingmaker

The key to every David Cronenberg movie is, of course, the body; specifically, it's limitations, mutations and mutilations. So it should be no surprise that the bravura sequence in his sharp new thriller, Eastern Promises, is the one where Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a Russian gangster with a hint of a conscience and brand new gangland tattoos, is ambushed naked in a London bath house by two fully dressed thugs with short curved knives.

There's something James Bond about the scene, Connery or maybe Craig Bond. Perhaps I'm just influenced by being in the middle of Fleming's most celebrated episode, From Russia with Love, back when Bond had an animal side as well, often described naked or in boxers when alone at home or in a hotel room. In what may have been an intentional way, Cronenberg's fight scene plays like a mirror image of the one in that book and movie, when Russian agent Red Grant (Robert Shaw) finally attacks Bond (Connery) in the claustrophobic train compartment, on the elegant Orient Express. The Russian had a suicide blond buzzcut. Bond was jet black, neat with just a touch of rake.

In the bath fight, Mortensen's doo is jet black and cut like Connery's

That wall-banging, to the death hand-to-hand Orient Express fight scene set the standard. Until now.

As always, in the fight and in the opening sequence, Cronenberg takes the gore that touch over-the-top, to look-don't-look and look again. He punishes the audience because he knows it's what they want/don't want. But most of all, it's a signature, a throwback to his 1970's experimental horror days of The Brood and They Came from Within where the body mutations were, shall we say, visionary, and he needed them to stand out.

Who can forget the "New Flesh" of Videodrome, the psychotic twin gynecologists of Dead Ringers, or Jeff Goldblum literally falling apart in The Fly. Heads exploding in Scanners. Judy Davis mainlining into her breast near the start of Naked Lunch.

The new flesh, indeed.

What's happened over his last two pictures is an extraordinary late career turn where he's become the most exciting director of movies for adults of his generation, that kind of lost generation after the Movie Brats (Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas) that also includes David Lynch, but with a much more steady output. Thanks to working mainly outside of Hollywood in his home city of Toronto, and now twice in London, he's put out nearly a picture a year.

These last two have been from screenwriters other than Cronenberg himself, a reversal for him, and one that seems to have opened his wings. They're linear and accessible, fairly new for David, but the payoff for all his years laboring in his own post-structural macabre has yielded the best director of pure suspense tension maybe alive today.

From the opening credits with Howard Shore's foreboding, Continental score, and right into the first scene, in a barber shop, it's Hitchcock all the way, absolutely tense grand master work, in total control except for when he lets the out-of-control slip in, as Hitchcock yearned for but only glanced at, as in Psycho and Frenzy.

The basic story, of midwife Naomi Watts discovering the diary of a fourteen year old girl who dies in childbirth and how it mixes her up with the 100% ruthless Russian mob, is simple and nerve-wracking. But as with the diner and climax scenes in A History of Violence, screen idol Viggo Mortensen is the perfect vessel for Cronenberg to allow the kind of cathartic fight scene deliverance he previously eschewed. We're the richer for it.

Now always attracting impossibly great casts, including Armin Mueller-Stahl and Vincent Cassel as father/son mobsters, and the aging Polish-born director Jerzy Skolimowski, Cronenberg gets spot-on performances, all in a nifty 100 minutes, tight.

With their previous movie, Cronenberg and Mortensen explored the body as a vessel for identity. As Tom/Joey, Viggo slid effortlessly and convincingly between two men, one we started the movie with, the other who barges back in from long before the movie began. Here he slides effortlessly into his Siberian accent, having done the trips to Russia and individual research. There's a question of identity here as well, although maybe on an even more spiritual, brooding level. But even the naked fight harkens back to the previous movie, echoing the bumpy, crazily erotic staircase sex scene, and Viggo has even called it "Maria Bello's revenge." This time with overtones both homoerotic and classic male figure.

The spirit may divide but the body is static, the backstop, the stumbling block.

It's the pre-story miscarriage that makes Watts' Anna so protective of the orphaned infant. The first time we see the baby it must be a prosthetic newborn, a Lynch-like practical, but somehow all the more spellbinding for it. The real child is allowed to stare out at us, breaking the fourth wall, then drawing us back in again.

It's the order given by Cassel's Kirill to see actual intercourse, explicit voyeurism, and all of us implicated.

It's the blood of identity, the proof that just as easily pools on the hard tile floor.

But most of all it's the prison and gangland tattoos on Viggo's body, raw semiotic signifiers of pain and of membership. Viggo's age, pushing 50, is his ally, the thinking man's action hero of his generation. He's the king, after all, the title monarch of J.R.R. Tolkien's/Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and there's no doubt that Cronenberg knows it. In his standout line, Nikolai explains, "I can't become king if someone else already sits on the throne."

Just as Aragorn battled Mordor and Tom returned to Philadelphia, there's something that Nikolai can only take by wit, blood and strategy.

If Martin Scorsese has Robert DeNiro (and now Leonardo DiCaprio), in Viggo Mortensen, David Cronenberg has finally found his heroic onscreen alter ego.

And not a moment too soon.