Zorba the Greek (UK/USA/Greece, 1964, Mihalis Kakogiannis)

Ben begins (and middles and ends):

My categorization of Zorba the Greek as a comedy enabled me to critically observe what I took to be a tourist worldview. The latter might seem an unwarranted interpretation on my part considering that the film was based on a book by a man from Crete, the setting of the story, and directed by a man from neighboring Cyprus. Opps!

In my defense, I introduced the point about a tourist worldview in the context of suggesting why the film was a big hit in the USA when it was released and has been a perennial favorite ever since. This noted, it is true that I ascribed a tourist worldview not just to this audience but to the film itself. Clearly, this is mistaken insofar as tourists are by definition visiting outsiders, whereas the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, and director, Micheal Cacoyannis, are definitely indigenous insiders. Duh!

This leaves my assertion that the film employs a city-slicker negative stereotype about rural society. In my estimation, this does not require retraction. But it does need to be refined further given the fact that the creators of the book/(film) are drawing on first-hand, concrete knowledge of Cretan culture specifically. So it would appear to follow from this that they are not imposing a stereotype.

Yet the fact remains that the Cretan village is shown to be populated by, as I said, "dull-witted peasants out for the sort of retribution that only the most ignorant tribalists could practice." The degree to which it is appropriate to label this a city-slicker point of view depends on the extent to which it appears ideologically cliche that such backwardness is necessarily to be found out in the provincial boonies. To generalize along this line is in effect the same as imposing a negative stereotype about rural society, which just happens to be Cretan in this case.

Be this as it may; again, what remains is the depiction and I presently feel that my previous treatment of it was inadequate. I indicated that I found it difficult to reconcile the tragic elements in Zorba with it being a comedy overall. It looks to me in retrospect that my observation of this comedic primacy prevented me from better assessing the meaning of the tragic elements. The pathos that is featured does more than merely display the moral shortcomings of the two protagonists. It also, and even more so, makes obvious that the local Cretans are indeed "ethical cretins."

I quote myself to indicate that I perceived at least that much before. But what I wish to add here is that this negative depiction is not the outsiders insult I took it to be. It is rather an insiders critique. I referred to the character of the Greek played by Quinn as well-traveled and therefore enlightened. This is something of an exaggeration. But it is correct enough. And it is hardly a big interpretive leap to recognize that Zorba best represents the perspective of the author (and by association, the director). Zorba provides a critique of Cretan small town life by a once-insider who migrated to Athens to study law, Paris to study philosophy, the Soviet Union to observe the revolution, Spain to observe the republican movement, and elsewhere before dying in Germany and being buried in the capital city of Crete, (thank you Wiki).

Clearly, Kazantzakis addresses his rural upbringing in his homeland not as a bourgeois, jet-set snob but rather as a socialist-inclined citizen personally concerned with the development of his countrymen. At the same time, he is religiously informed and this in connection with his political orientation brings us to the real object of his critique; the dominant organized power in the society - the church.

There are two cursory moments in which a policeman appears in the film but so much on the periphery of the scene as to be entirely insignificant. The only institution of authority to receive attention in Zorba is the church. While this observation is focused, the critique entailed in it is askance, as befitting a comedy. In all instances of this sideways attack, however, the church is plainly revealed to be utterly useless with respect to providing moral leadership in the community.

If the villagers are ethical cretins still stuck in Old Testament-style tribal backwardness, it is because the church completely fails to advance the true Gospel of Jesus. Appropriately enough, the original meaning of the word cretin was literally Christian; as in, still recognized by Jesus as one of his followers despite not having enough human intellect to be faithful on purpose. For the true Gospel is not superficially intellectual but deeply emotional. The spiritual core of faith is love. This has to do with the Passion of the Christ through which individuals must find love; for each other, for life, for God.

Hence, the live-life-to-the fullest theme running through Zorba is an expression of Humanist Christianity. All of the sage lessons the Greek teaches to the Brit about the necessity of passion amount to rejection of theology as such. To get at this ironically, the cretin - the non-intellectual lover of the sheer existence of everything- is the real Christian according to the film.

Wiki informs me that by one vote Kazantzakis lost the 1957 Nobel Prize to Camus. The two are certainly peers. Unlike the gloomy Algerian, the uplifting Cretan is no atheist but his religious temperament is existentialist through and through. Some time after the publication of Zorba, he was officially condemned by the Greek Orthodox Church, (as in the next decade he would be more immediately by the Roman Catholic Church following the publication of The Last Temptation of Christ). Clearly, the patriarchs of the eastern church saw the critique in Zorba that I initially missed when I failed to make sense of the pathos in the comedy.

Not that the critique of the church in Zorba isn't sometimes blatantly humorous. The portrayal of the order of monks in town is pointedly satirical. In one scene, Zorba fools them into believing that some water has actually turned into wine. Upon the basis of this supposed miracle, he ingratiates himself among them to his later commercial advantage. In the action climax of the film, they are funny like Eric Idle is as a nun on the run. While timbers - pretty much stolen off their property - come tumbling towards them in a mess of collapsed engineering, the monks' flight is hilarious. They are, then, buffoons on the margins of the town who are hopeless non-starters when it comes to improving the moral fiber of the people. And speaking of being a once-insider, Kazantzakis himself took a shot at being a monk. That lasted six months. Say no more.

But the serious critique in Zorba attends the tragic elements in the story. When Zorba's lover is dying, she takes a cross from the drawer of her nightstand and clasps it for salvation. After she has died and all around her corpse the crones plunder her luxurious possessions, part of their hatred for her is explained as stemming from her being the wrong kind of Christian. It is said that as a westerner she literally holds the cross incorrectly according to the eastern church. The schismatic cleavage of the church is a striking indication of the lack of love in the ecclesiastical institution as a whole, displaying its incapability of providing moral guidance for the children of Christ.

This is driven home most dramatically in the murder scene of the widow. Rather than attend the funeral service being conducted by the priest inside, much of the community congregates outside in the churchyard. They skip church in order to bar the widow entrance to the service so they can collectively get on with the business of killing her. To say that the clergy proves ineffectual while this is going on is a gross understatement. No attempt is made to stop this tribal "justice." The priest is no doubt utterly oblivious that his parish is elsewhere committing murder while he mechanically goes through the motions of performing a corporate function. The Brit - who is no small catalyst in the mob's action against the widow - is disgracefully impotent when it comes to intervening on her behalf. Zorba comes close to saving her but his efforts prove futile in the end, revealing the limitations of his passion. Only the church had the power to provide the proper leadership, to make the crowd choose compassion, to offer loving forgiveness like Jesus would do. In this capacity, Zorba exposes the church to be null and void.

In my original review of the film, I saw in it an outsider's point of view. I was right about this but in a confused way. What Kazantzakis is outside is not Crete but rather the church. This is well symbolized by the material fact of him being buried, Wiki reports, "on the wall surrounding the city of Heriklion near the Chania Gate, because the Orthodox Church ruled out his being buried in a cemetery." In his lifetime, he responded to the religious conservatives who excommunicated him: ""You gave me a curse, Holy fathers, I give you a blessing: may your conscience be as clear as mine and may you be as moral and religious as I," (Wiki, of course).

But what about the status of women in the film? That they are mostly invisible is easy to explain as an accurate reflection of the male-dominated culture at the time, especially considering that the book came out in 1946. On the other hand, they are not absolutely invisible. They are shown (as are children) at the beginning of the film when the protagonists first show up. They are also shown at the end of the film, out in the fields working. And perhaps similarly in other bits I cannot recall.

More germane to the question, Monica has brought to my attention that they are present - albeit as a minority - during the terrible execution of the widow. So much for the potential sisterhood I found absent before. Besides, the widow is like an orthodox Jew insofar as she refuses to assimilate just as much as she is ostracized.

As for Zorba's lover, I have already touched on her alien standing as a French Catholic. Recall her relative class position as the sole entrepreneurial proprietor in town and there's no chance for the likes of her receiving solidarity and support from the locals, female locals included. The upshot of all this is that I find myself unable to substantiate my feminist objection to Zorba.

Nevertheless, I continue to be bothered in this regard. I adhere to the impression that the two love interests in the story are at bottom plot devices and not worthwhile personalities in their own right. This is not to suggest that they are crudely objectified. Yet it is to say that their subjective human agency is not allowed to fully articulate itself.
While there is nothing necessarily misogynist about homo-eroticism, and while the homo-eroticism in the story is far from explicit, I wonder if I am detecting a sexist strain in Kazantzakis' theologically infused existentialism. One thing is definite, Zorba's benign heterosexual masculinity manifests itself in a tender but patronizing macho manner. But as I have only seen Cacoyannis' film and not read Kazantzakis' book, I feel it would be intellectually irresponsible of me to venture further on this topic.

Zorba's Famous Dance:



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Waste Land (UK/Brazil, 2010, Lucy Walker, Karen Harley, Joao Jardim)

Ben begins:

Could the title be any more misleading? Fuck Facebook and the movie about it. This film is the real social network. This film is not about garbage at all. It is not about a dump at all. It is about human dignity. At its most essential core and therefore in its most profound expression. And just as essentially and profoundly a part of this, it is about community. Deep and serious social solidarity. Jesus Christ - it's about love.

Yet, this love is not the mealy-mouthed, Sunday sermon sort. It is the all-through-the-work-week, class conscious sort. I do not have to elaborate on this, develop arguments to advance it as a thesis, provide evidence from the film to support the observation - for it is absolutely obvious throughout the film, on bold display from start to finish, saturating the screen non-stop from each and every pore of the document.

Waste Land is soulful. "Soul," not as: that which might get to heaven by the grace of God. No, "soul," as in: of the people, by the people and for the people; here, now and most of all, tomorrow. The achievement in the present that the film shows is truly inspiring. It delivers a promise for the future. This is not just your run-of-the-mill human interest story at the end of the evening news, a smear of feel-good icing on top of the nihilistic cake served up by the media to keep everyone "informed," that is, personally terrified, socially alienated and politically lame. No. Waste Land gives hope.

Did I make my kids watch Waste Land? You know I did. It's authentically educational. I believe it should be required viewing in high school social studies classes; for its ethical heart, to be sure, but more concretely how this heart beats in practice. The film is powerful for its activism, its cross-culturalism and its penetrating insight into the work and meaning of recycling. It is the latter which compels me to say that Waste Land should be required viewing in high school art classes as well.

There is a direct line from the anti-bourgeois, anti-nationalist, anti-colonialist anarcho-radical aspirations of Dadaism to Waste Land. But unlike so many post-Dada developments informed by it, Waste Land does not take that first fateful individualistic step that mostly tends to existential absurdity and despairing irony. In the film, recycling is a collective act in more than one sense of the word "collective". The associated labour process that reclaims materials previously designated as useless non-property entails the re-appropriation of these materials as useful. What is more, this transformation is from stuff not having use-value as privately owned property to stuff having use-value as collectively owned property. At the level of use-value, then, the art work is socialist property.

What about the exchange-value of this new property, is it also collectively owned? The film does not explicitly address the ownership of the artworks created by the associated producers once they get commodified. It is probably fair to assume that the originator and leader of the project, Vic Muniz, holds the copyrights. But he certainly incorporates his fellow artistic workers in a profit-sharing scheme. Over all, the political economy of the project is tending towards socialism if not there yet. It's one hell of an excellent social democratic cooperative.

Admittedly, unlike the class consciousness obviously beating in the ethical heart of Waste Land, this take on the political economy of the project it documents is an ideological interpretation on my part. In case my interpretation is found to be forced, compare Waste Land to another recently released documentary about public art, Exit Through the Gift Shop. Of course, Exit is not a real documentary at all. It is a faux-doc. Even so, it packs a considerable punch of punk politics.

Or does it? In my estimation, at the end of the day Exit is yet another footnote to Warhol and Warhol is ultimately part of the problem and not part of the solution; i.e., he's a prophet for profit by way of the reduction of art to advertising. Exit certainly tweaks the art establishment for colonizing street art for yet another sector of the big bucks art market. But as the full title ironically confesses, the buck stops there and so does the critique. Banksy hides solitary in the shadows in order to laugh all the way to the bank, see?

Vic Muniz, exactly opposite, gives something back, eh? He steps out of the gallery in order to step right back in, united with other people, people who would otherwise never make it in there. Not in a million years. The guy is a mensch. He remembers where he came from, he respects his roots, he returns to give something back. Yet he ends up taking as much as he gives. He employs, he enlightens, he empowers and he also eliminates some economic poverty. But damn if those dump-diggers don't raise his consciousness too and enable him to make art he could never make on his own. Not in a million years.

And Dan:

The Waste Land of the title is Jardim Gramacho, the "Garbage Garden," world's largest garbage dump, and the setting for one of the most touching ruminations on relationship between art, artist, subject and society that I've ever seen.

Vic Muniz, the artist--well, one of the artists--at the center of this film's action, had the luck and good grace as a young man growing up in Brazil to get shot in the leg by someone with enough money to allow Muniz to flee his troubled life in the homeland and head to America. It is there that he eventually became a successful artist, and one day decide to return to his roots. As Waste Land begins, Muniz is planning to head back to Brazil to start his next art project, where he wants to transform garbage into art.

And if this was only a film about this project, it would be a fine film indeed. But it is so much more than that.

Returning to Rio, Muniz goes exactly where one might expect an artist looking for garbage to go, the aforementioned Jardim Gramacho. Here we meet the pickers, or catadores, the men and women who make a living sifting through this city of refuse in order to glean valuable recyclables, and reclaim them, all for the equivalent of about $20 a day. It turns out that the wretched refuse of the world, who make their living out of what others reject, are anything but. The pickers do more that just find value where others see trash, they build an entire community out of it. This is, it turns out, not just a great story about how these people take care of the environment, but also how they take care of each other, how they build a real community out of other's waste.

And if this was only a film about this group of fascinating people, it would be a fine film indeed. But it is so more than that.

Because it turns out that Muniz has more in mind than a simple conversion project. He chooses as his subject matter not just the garbage in the world's largest dump, but the pickers of this dump as well. He hangs out with the people who work in one of the world's most foul places, and he gets to know them, and the world they have built for themselves. Waste Land begins to build its not insignificant emotional power throughout this portion of the film, as the wonderful humanity of catadores like Tiao and Suelem takes centre stage. Then and only then does he enlist their aid in the construction of his art projects, crafting artistic statements that reveal not only the character of the individual in question, but also placing each of those individuals in an artistic lineage that connects them to figures and forces of socio-political and historical significance.

And because Waste Land a film about all of this and more, it is a great film indeed. What begins as an interesting experiment, turning garbage into art, becomes a sociological study of the transformative power of art on people, and of people on the art and the artist. Waste Land shows us how people can be bound together through work and art, not only to each other, but also to their larger socio-political and historical legacy. It is a film about the ways humanity and beauty can be found, thrive even, in the most challenging and unlikely places, when people have the resolve, and the love, to make it so. Most importantly perhaps, is the fact that Waste Land is a real treasure, the sort of heartwarming and life affirming study of people, lacking in both sentimentality and cynicism, that uplifts the audience and elevates the art form.

Waste Land's trailer is below




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Marwencol (USA, 2010, Jeff Malmberg)

Ben Begins (and ends):

Hogancamp's camp is full of Hogan's Heroes. Sure, I say this to make the pun, but not just to make the pun. Indeed, had the pun been my top priority, I would not have capitalized the word "Heroes" to indicate a proper noun. A lower case spelling would signal that the heroes were merely those of Mark Hogencamp, the significance of which is entirely personal for him, privately idiosyncratic. Quite the opposite, the characters who animate his doll house truly are Hogan's Heroes, which I now italicize to make it that much more plain that I am alluding to the TV show.

Point being, the artist is tapping into what is unquestionably the default historical narrative of the modern American patriotic psyche. WWII is THE Good War, THE Just Cause of all just causes, used to justify all subsequent war-making, however obliquely - or not. The cultural centrality and ideological resilience of this narrative is perhaps best demonstrated by the remarkably diverse versions of it, especially comedic. From Ernst Lubitsch to Mel Brooks to Quentin Tarantino, with the lesser likes of Hogan's Heroes thrown in too, clearly; ironic ridicule is as effective as any other approach when it comes to having the Nazis symbolize Pure Evil.

The artistically fascinating aspect of Hogancamp's doll house is that his particular appropriation of this societal devil incarnate or Platonic ideal of national sin is communicated through a media that is screaming out kitch, but the episodes of Hogan's Heroes he storyboards and photographs are dead serious. A working-class folk artist, it is reasonable to speculate that Hogancamp's educational exposure to sophisticated treatments of the WWII narrative has been minimal. Be this as it may, his use of GI Joe action figures and Barbie dolls reflects his very modest economic means when it comes to procuring the necessary material supplies for his artistic expression. That he is able to overcome the popular perception of these objects as automatically signifying nothing more than toys for kids - without a trace of irony - is of itself testament to the power of sincerity in art.

The degree to which this sincerity of itself is enough to establish the merit of Hogancamp's art could be a matter of debate. This is to suggest that it seems unlikely anyone could grasp it's profundity without having background information about the man's biography. It might be possible to uphold as a corollary of the art-for-art's-sake rule that any circumstances surrounding the art's creation should be disregarded. In the case of Hogancamp specifically, however, this corollary should itself be disregarded because in the first place it is beyond debate that he is not creating art for art's sake.

It is a hackneyed metaphor to hold that an artist's work is for him a form of personal therapy but on this occasion it is literally true. The real story of Hogancamp's life is absolutely essential to know in order to properly appreciate his art. Hell, it's absolutely essential to know to respect him as a person, an outstandingly courageous, inspiring human being. In his way, Mark Hogencamp is the heroic equal of Aron Ralston, who has recently and deservedly been celebrated in the film 127 Hours.

I liked that film alright, but in my estimation, Marwencol is far superior. What most impresses me about it as a documentary is the way it paces its deliverance of the facts. The film immediately intrigued me and made me sympathetic to its subject. Yet it refrained from asking and answering certain questions at the outset, instead waiting until the best possible moment to reveal crucial information. We are told at the beginning about the brutal attack Hogancamp experienced, the brain damage he suffered and how the doll house came about as a self-help program to restore mental faculties, manual dexterity and... next thing you know - we're entering the fantasy world itself and becoming enchanted by it.

Even so, it soon becomes a curiousity. OK, we get the theraputic purpose of the form of the project, but what about its content? What's with the particulars of Hogancamp's fantasy land? The documentary speaks to this just in time. It is made clear that Hogancamp requires not merely an escapist retreat in which to feel secure but also a make-believe world where he can dramatize his revenge. He must have for himself a zone wherein it is absolutely impossible to be sceptical about the bad guys being bad. They must be Pure Evil. That's right, Nazis. Hence, Hogencamp's unconscious but easily understandable need for a WWII scenario.

In order for the audience to be morally comfortable enough to allow this, though, we need to return to the scene of the crime. It is vital that we overcome whatever reservations we may have about Hogancamp casting his assailants as Nazis. Otherwise, any distain we might feel for the fetishistically perverse impulses of the artist will obstruct our connection with him as an artist and possibly even as a victim in need of his therapy. In short, it has to be explained to us why Hogancamp was savagely beaten to near death outside the bar that night.

Hence, the film eventually reveals his alcoholism and his transvestism, in that order, and the result is a documentary that is ultimately a very moving statement about sexual identity, repressive violence and art that is for a fuck of alot more than it's own sake! On every conceivable level, Mark Hogencamp is right to cast his bad guys as Nazis. While only a bit of sensitivity is required to realize that homosexuality and transvestism are not the same thing, such sensitivity would not have been displayed by those busy gasing gays in the ovens along with Jews, Gypsies, Communists...

Close to the end of Marwenecol, after receiving enough encouragement, when the artist finally wears a pair of his women's shoes to his gallery show - I cried. Even more than what this indicated about his own healing process, I was emotionally overtain by the moment as a political act. As for his own healing process, the film-maker saves the best for last. In a meta-statement that would make the director of Sherlock Jr. proud, we are shown the dolls of the dolls. We see Hogancamp manipulating the now big doll of himself, manipulating the new little doll of himself, being filmed in a documentary about the referent of the referent that is the actual man. You'd think that artifice upon artifice would constitute a further retreat from reality. But dialectically, the exact opposite is happening. Not as some ironic twist either. By allowing his emerging post-trauma experience into his pretend kingdom, the man is reconstituting his self-consciousness, reclaiming the dignity of his whole mind, recovering his soul. This is incontrovertibly confirmed we we see him bringing in to the picture his post-post-trauma experience.

It's easy to by cynical about individuals who have triumphed over adversity. I've seen footage of Aron Ralston mountain climbing with his prosthetic device and he makes it look like an advantage over an organic limb. Plus the business he generates as a motivational speaker ain't too shabby. Along this line it could be said that the five guys who almost killed Mark Hogencamp did him a favour. Beating he took, best thing ever happened to him. Got him over the booze and out of the closet. Made him a minor celebrity on the way to being a pretty rich man.

Personally, I do not believe in Pure Evil. But nor do I believe in God and the ultimate Goodness of His Plan for all us, including the torturous path of the fate assigned to particular persons. So I'm having none of any kind of grossly deterministic consequentialism, the cynical sort included. If I had been trapped in Aron Ralston's spot, I would have died there. And if I had been in Mark Hogencamp's shoes outside the bar that night, I would not be standing here today in his shoes again, ladies footware this time around. I say it once more, these men are authentic heroes. No wonder all of his real life friends from around town are honored to be incorporated into Hogencamp's camp. I would feel just as flattered to be one of Hogen's heroes, as any heroism assigned to me could only be fictional.

And Dan:

Such a thorough review, and so thoroughly reflects my thoughts on the film that I have little to add beyond this very minor quibble. Sometimes the filmmakers engage in a bit of narrative sleight of hand, withholding information from the audience in order to have their "tada!" moments, suddenly springing key developments upon the audience in a rather unnecessarily manipulative way.

Still, as I said, I minor quibble given the overall quality of this film. I love Hogancamp, and I love this movie.



The trailer for Marwencol:



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Fish Tank (UK, 2009, Andrea Arnold)

And, for a change of pace, Dan:

Fish Tank is about, and told through the eyes of Mia (Katie Jarvis, in a stellar debut), a hard-bitten, angry 15 year-old girl with vaguely-formed dreams of being a dancer, but whose life is rife with so much pain, bitterness and disappointment that such hopes are either kept secret or held at arm's length, for fear of suffering even

more disillusionment. Behind the bravado, there is a sensitivity and vulnerability that comes out in quieter moments, but which determinedly refuses to let other see. Mia carries this broil of emotions on her sleeve, the smallest provocation away from exploding in acts of verbal and/or physical violence.

The story takes place in the dilapidated housing projects of Essex. Yes, this is another fine British film where the degraded urban landscape matches well the grim lives of the characters who populate it. Here is where we will find Mia, who lives with her little sister and her mother Joanne (Kierston Wareling), who is of an age that suggests she was about Mia's age when giving birth to her elder daughter, and of such dubious character that she spends most of the movie boozing with and bedding men. Wareling gives a brave performance in Fish Tank, somehow managing to imbue her off-putting character with enough humanity to keep her just on the right side of monstrous. When Joanne brings home a seemingly decent chap named Conor (Michael Fassbender, who is predictably great) whose attentiveness extends beyond his sexual interest in Joanne, the movie enters an even more troubling phase. At first, Conor's kindness makes Mia wary, but eventually he wears down her reserve and distrust, leading both Conor and Mia into some challenging territory. To say more would be edging towards plot spoiler-ville, but suffice to say that as things get complicated, the film's central relationships become explosive.

Writer/director Andrea Arnold (Red Road, 2006) utilizes a rigorously naturalistic style, signified by some stark symbolism (a chained up horse, a fish out of water), ample use of hand held camerawork, a gritty location shoot and an unblinking lack of sentimentality, all of which reminds us of the work of her countrymen and antecedents, Lynne Ramsay, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Fish Tank is dire, but there are moments of hope, which lead to a moderately upbeat ending that some may accuse of being falsely uplifting, except that any thoughtful anticipation of what happens next should reveal that any optimism at this moment should be, at best, tentative.

Fish Tank is a very strong effort at every level, and should signal great things to come for all involved.

Then Ben:

Bloody good movie. Started to write a review and couldn't get into it, for reasons unknown to me. Lots of things might be said, including comparisons to Sweet Sixteen, Rat Catcher and Winter's Bone, all bloody good themselves and I believe Fish Tank deserves to be counted among them. All I can manage to say beyond this is that the complete lack of sensationalism and the very emotionally challenging committment to character complexity makes Fish Tank a very solid work of realism. I was seriously affected by it, really hit me in the guts. I didn't even recognize Fassbender until my family pointed out to me after the fact that it was the same actor as the guy who played Bobby Sands in Hunger. Monica tells me the guys is rocketing to the A list, got a bunch of splashy product in the can. But he is two for two in my book.

Last thought, it was no surprise to read in the credits that Fish Tank was written and directed by a woman. The female POV informing the film is beyond some liberal lip-service to abstract feminist platitudes. It enters into the lived concreteness of the opportunity-less working-class just hovering above lumpen-proletarianization as it pertains specifically to the circumstance of women.

Bloody good movie.

Fish Tank's trailer:



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Barney's Version (Canada, 2011, Richard Lewis)

Ben Begins:

There's lots to like about Barney's Version but not enough to make it worth caring about. Monica read the novel back when it came out but remembers it well enough to inform me that a big weakness of the film is its plot downgrading of the murder mystery and concentration on the love story. Apparently the book balances the two of these very well.

What is more - and this is probably the heart of the matter - Richler's stylistic achievement was to accurately and movingly present the voice of a narrator speaking with Alzheimers disease. So the protagonist's "version" is emotionally fascinating and ethically problematic, the historical facts coming as they do from a sympathetic but unreliable source of information. Clearly, the film does not even begin to capture this artistry.

It also has to be said - and I hate to have to say it because I really respect his work here and elsewhere - Giamatti is not right for the role. This might seem to be because he is not a Jew. Monica expressed this view. It is not my view, however, and I appreciate that the actor did not adopt stereotypical schtick mannerisms and cliche Yiddish expressions to sell himself as Hebrew.

In fact, he creates a real, complex person and not some stock figure and this shows yet again what a fine character actor he is. Yet, the portrayal fails to deliver that special spark. Sex appeal, charisma, charming wit; whatever it is, it's missing. So unlike Dreyfuss as Duddy, Giamatti as Barney is just not attractive enough to care about, really care about. This undermines the whole show.

Had a few good laughs, nonetheless, and I couldn't help enjoying Hoffman, who does have that special something - duh! - that just makes him light up the screen effortlessly.

And Dan:

I had a slightly more positive reaction to the film, as I both enjoyed the film and cared enough about the people in it to recommend it. However, before digging into the areas of our disagreement, let me get our areas on concurrence on record.  The film doesn't quite pull off the transition of the titular character from cogent narrator to dementia victim. And so, while I felt for Giamatti's character (and enjoyed Giamatti's performance, and felt he was up to the challenge, which you felt was lacking because the man lacks the charisma or sex appeal to make him believably appealing),  the nuanced sense of Richler's engagement of the whole narrative (un)reliability question does not come through on screen. Rather, we are presented with two aspects of the story--the pre- and post-Alzheimer's figure--as if there were a clear demarcation between the two, instead of a gradual movement from one to the other, which should necessarily cast into doubt much of what we have come to assume is a factual, if necessarily subjective, version of events. As you say, we like Barney, but can we trust him? The film doesn't really grapple much with these sorts of ambiguities, and is lesser for it. 

That said, I really dug the way that Barney's story played out on screen, largely because the actors in question, particularly Giamatti and Hoffman, were so much fun, and they were tied to a narrative that never flagged. Indeed, there is sometimes such a feeling of narrative propulsion, that you'd wish that the director Lewis would apply the breaks from time to time so that we could sit with some of the finer moments in the film. Also, while you think that the downgrading of the murder mystery may have been a weakness in the film, all I can say is that any storyline that ends with a twist straight out of an urban legend is one that I could do with less, not more of. 

All said, Barney's Version may have suffered from a few flaws do to its overly ambitious scope and underdeveloped narrative nuance, but overall I found it a satisfying experience. 

Here's the trailer for Barney's Version:

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The Idiot (Japan, 1951, Akira Kurosawa)

Ben Begins (and ends):

The denouement for both the main character and another was so abrupt and perplexing, I made Monica do some reseach on her handheld device.  An explanation she was unable to locate, but she came upon this general assessment at the site, Criterion Confessions, with which I must agree:

 

"The Idiot (166 min. - 1951): The passionate labor of love Kurosawa made after the breakthrough Rashomon, this adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's nineteenth-century novel is a strange mess. Grasping for something lyrical, Kurosawa ends up clutching at a narrative that often slips through his fingers. Transferring the story into his time and his country, he creates a fable for a world whose morals have gone off-center. It's just that the film itself is off-center, too. Despite moments of intense brilliance, The Idiot is scattered and almost too narrow in its structure. Perhaps the director's original four-and-a-half hour cut had far fewer gaps in it, but the final studio version feels riddled with holes.

 

Kameda (Masayuki Mori) is an epileptic whose lifelong illness and the trauma he suffered in the war have made his mind a tad bit soft. Newly released from a prison camp, where he narrowly escaped execution, he goes to live with his uncle (Takashi Shimura again) in Sapporo, hoping to find some peace and quiet to recharge. Once there, however, his brutal honesty disrupts the social order of the town. His absence of malice and his pure moral thinking, providing a skewed Christ-like example, call attention to the townspeople's own bad behavior. Attracted to the town harlot, Taeko (a smoldering Setsuko Hara), as a healer is attracted to a wound, he becomes embroiled in criss-crossing love lives. Kameda's greatest rival is also his first civilian friend, the primal rich boy Akama (Mifune). As the two wage a mental battle for Taeko's hard, Kameda is also drawn to the more chilling but caring Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga).

The Idiot is essentially a long string of talking-heads sequences that, despite being elegantly framed by Kurosawa's cinematic eye, tend to all run on longer than seems necessary. Motivation switches on a dime, and the story takes the long way around to get anywhere it's going. Yet, as I said, individual scenes can be amazing, and all of the performances are remarkable. The power of the actors kept me glued to the screen, and the marvel of seeing a great auteur digging deep for something meaningful makes The Idiot worth sitting through. Its goals may be mightier than what Kurosawa could get on film, but there is something fascinating about watching him try."

 

Or could it be that the film was simply butchered?  I suspect not.  But even so, Wiki provides information that makes it reasonable to wonder: 

 

"Originally intended to be a two-part film with a running time of 265 minutes, the film was severely cut at the request of the studio, against Kurosawa's wishes, after a single poorly-received screening of the full-length version. When the re-edited version was also deemed too long by the studio, Kurosawa sardonically suggested the film be cut lengthwise instead.  According to Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, there are no existing prints of the original 265-minute version. Kurosawa would return to Shochiku forty years later to make Rhapsody in August, and, according to Alex Cox, is said to have searched the Shochiku archives for the original cut of the film to no avail."

Here's a glimpse of The Idiot':

 

Kes (United Kingdom, 1969, Ken Loach)


Ben Begins:

Having just watched 12 Godard films in a row, it was quite a queer sensation to look at a Loach.  Oddly enough, at first I felt that the Englishman was abnormally naturalistic, prosaically true to life when he should be jump cutting my head off and blasting my face with intertitles.  It didn't take too long, however, before I was drawn into the mundane facts of the matter, in all their power.  (Mind you, I could have used subtitles, so thick did I find the dialect.)

 

KES is a bloody good movie.  It's impressive how fully formed Loach was early on.  I'm not familiar enough with his work to say, but I suspect that there is little absent from KES that appears in his subsequent output.  The performances he draws from unknown "actors" are remarkably affecting. *  These he presents with an unflinching bare-knuckle candor, in bare-bones proletarian environments, not one spoonful of fairy-tale frosting to be had.  It takes a strong back to carry the weight of what Loach loads on the film-goer.  Nothing fancy.  Just very, very sad facts.

 

What a heartbreaking story.  On the other hand, as Frank Zappa sings: "Broken hearts are for assholes."  If a person's heart is broken by the tragedy of KES, that person is probably missing the point.  There was never any hope.  Brief moments of human contact not brutal for a change.  Flickers of compassion that allow folks to drop their guard for an interval.  But never any actual optimism, a sense that progress is being made, that's there a decent chance for happiness.  No.  It's tough going all the way and plays out accordingly.  This is, of course, to the credit of the film and I presume the novel upon which it is based.

 

It is because Loach so respects the working-class lives he presents that he is able to show the complexity of simple people.  The protagonist of KES is terribly sympathetic.  He proves to be more intelligent that anyone suspected but even more, he finds within himself an ability to nurture and honor another living being without ever having been so nurtured and honored himself.   Yet the isolation he experiences is not simply due to the cruelty of others.  The lad is intellectually and socially dim-witted to the point of being off-putting.   And everyone around him is just as much a person whom we can fault and forgive.

 

With this in mind, the portrayal of the British educational system and by extension the whole welfare state is clearly critical in the film, but not dogmatically.  The teachers and the occupational case worker are not unreasonable, not just sadists out to inflict punishment and humiliation.  Those of us who work as teachers today would do well to be honest with ourselves when speculating how we might have conducted ourselves in this vocation back in 1969, out in some English county organized around a mine.

* FROM WIKI: Loach makes great efforts to help the actors express themselves naturally and honestly. He believes that shooting in order, from first scene to last, helps the actors to find a response to their circumstances. Many actors in his films are often not given the full script at the beginning of a shoot, but rather they experience the story just as a fictional character might do. He will often give actors their scenes a couple of days in advance so they can learn their lines, but they still won't know what comes after that. If a scene involves shock or surprise for a character, the actor might not know what is about to happen. In Kes the boy actor, discovering the dead bird at the end, believed Loach had killed the bird, which he had become fond of during the filming (the crew used a dead bird found elsewhere). What is more, in the scene where Mr Gryce is searching the schoolboys, the small first year holding everybody else's cigarettes was under the impression that he was to give the headmaster a note and leave the office. Subsequently, when he is searched and found to be "a right little cigarette factory", he is caned alongside the other boys; hence, his look of shock and tears of pain are real.

 

Monica believes this is exploitative.  I'm thinking about it.  Tarkovsky was really tough on those horses in Rublev too...

And Dan:

As many socially conscious filmmakers had before him--perhaps, most famously, Sidney Lumet in America--Ken Loach got his start in television, honing his craft in this medium at a time when many programs were broadcast live, requiring the cast and crew to be particularly well-prepared and capable. This allowed Loach to ply his trade on the run, and develop skills that would transfer well to the sort of low budget film-making that soon would be his future.

Enter Kes, the his second feature film, is an adaptation of Barry Hines' novel, A Kestrel for a Knave, wherein Hines recounts the medieval practice of attributing categories of  birds to human social classes. So, emperors should own eagles, peregrine falcons are for princes and kestrels are for knaves, the working classes.

Clearly in Kes we are meant to see that the film's protagonist, a plucky and appealing Yorkshire teenager named Billy (David Bradley gives a remarkably sincere and convincingly naturalistic performance), is the bird that he captures and trains. Like the kestrel, Billy is constantly being manipulated, trained, herded, and eventually, it is implied, broken by the system that he bucks so hard against. Also, like the bird, Billy does have (a very few) people in his life who  have his best interests at heart, even if they are too limited or flawed to make his life measurably better. And, in an interesting mirroring effect, those involved in the "training" of the boy, such as his teachers (an empathetic Colin Welland, who is the only trained actor in the cast, and bullying Brian Glover are terrific in very different roles), his principal (an at his wit's end Bob Bowes, in an excellent cameo), his employer and even even the employment counselor, are much like Billy themselves. That is, they are generally speaking well-intentioned, yet ultimately ill-equipped for the job. 

Billy is a loner, partly due to familial circumstance, which sees him often left to his own devices by his carousing mother (Lynne Perrie) and brutish brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher), and partly due to his own social ineptitude, which leads to predictable scenes of bullying by a larger, fierce classmate. Billy may gain our respect by refusing to back down, but the boy is, despite his pluck, as in most matters, in well over his head. The fight between the two ends, symbolically and appropriately, with the two wrestling on a huge pile of coal, something that will figure large in each boy's future, it would seem.

Throughout, Billy's central source of joy, of escape is in this relationship with the bird. He doesn't see larger patterns, a macro-cosmic metaphor at play. He is simply at play, being a kid, indulging a passion. The rest of the time, Billy is simply trying to survive the attempts of the adult world and its systems of control to force him into the life everyone in Yorkshire is born for, life in The Pits. 

Yet, we are trained by conventional cinema to hope that the boy will find an escape hatch, an elevator to the stars that will allow him to escape the inevitable plunge into mines. After all, Billy is an appealing figure, a tough little terrier who refuses to buckle under any sort of pressure, a kid with a passion, and the will (if not the intelligence) to see things through. And therein lies the grim truth of Kes. While we want to cheer for Billy, the film makes it plain that, despite his many positive attributes, he simply does not have the wit or wisdom to rise above the tremendous limitations of his circumstance. When Billy is ultimately betrayed not by an agent of the system that has been trying with only moderate effectiveness to batter and bully him into submission, but by his own brother, we see just what a bleak world it is when you betray and are betrayed by your own kith and kin.

The film's naturalism is essential to its effectiveness. Kes has an elegiac feel largely because it refuses to indulge in the sort of standard liberal cyn-ematic sentimentalism that is typical of such treatment of the working poor. Instead, Loach and his cinematographer Chris Menges opt for a realistic, grainy, rough documentary look, which makes us in the audience feel as though we are voyeurs, bearing witness to what Godard had famously proclaimed cinema to be: truth 24 times a second.

While Mike Leigh has arguably surpassed Loach as the best practitioner of British social realism with a left wing bent, there is little doubt that, without the prior success of Loach, which all began with this great film, Leigh would have had a much harder slog of it getting financing for his particular brand of social realism. Regardless, there is little doubt that Kes is a terrific film, an honest and unvarnished look at the life of working people, that has been rightly identified by the British Film Institute as one of the top ten films that you should see by the age of 14.

And now here's the original trailer for Kes: