GOTTA SEE IT #23 - "BULLY"

“BULLY”

Starring: Brad Renfro, Rachel Miner, Bijou Phillips, Nick Stahl, Michael Pitt, Leo Fitzpatrick, Kelli Garner, Daniel Franzese, Natalie Paulding.
Written by: Jim Schutze (book), David Mckenna, Roger Pullis
Directed by: Larry Clark
Colour – 2001
113 mins
U.S.A.

In sports, it can be risky bringing a promising young athlete into the pro leagues before he’s ready. The shock of competing at a higher level can shatter his confidence and leave him second guessing himself into failure. Hopefully, he eventually hits his stride and finds his way, but sometimes, the damage is permanent and he never recovers and a once future superstar is done in by self-doubt and just done period. In life, the equivalent is rushing a child into adulthood before they are ready to deal with the responsibilities that come with sexual awareness, readily available drugs and alcohol and the cool belief that one is beyond the crushing boulder of consequence. Master at documenting the wild ways of American teens is director Larry Clark’s forte and, in "Bully", he has taken a real life story as the inspiration for his finest, most disturbing film to date.

The real story is how a group of high school friends planned and then carried out the brutal murder of a bully who was tormenting them. This flesh and blood portrait - you don’t know how appropriate those words are until you see the film - of this tragic real life incident is, in one way, straight forward, but its’ much more than just the story of the killing of a High School bully. It’s about children at play in an adult world - high and oversexed, disconnected from consequence, fantasizing about violent retribution without realizing just what that means and how it will feel when it all goes down.

In Larry Clark’s work, there’s a feeling of hyper-reality, of a world in which he traps the truth like some wild dog and then unleashes it in his own sweet time and in his own unique way. He adds something of his very own to what are essentially docu-dramas. And its’ this addition that gives his films a fire that burns them into your memory – leaving it charred and smoking for days afterward. He doesn’t pull his punches. He doesn’t soften any landings. He doesn’t sugarcoat a single stinkin’ speck. He strips sentiment and tastefulness from his films like skin from a bone - all that’s left is for that wild dog to gnaw on.

The other night I watched a modern Hollywood film - big name cast and budget - which seemed to be made as if the 70s and Scorcese, Peckinpah, Coppola and all had never happened. Watching this dull, phony, pointless and expensive exercise in photographed dress-up, I was amazed at how much it resembled those stale, past their due date Hollywood dramas that preceded the truly great, passionate, gripping works of realism of New Hollywood - films such as, “Scarecrow", The Conversation" and “Taxi Driver." Then I realized that there are still a few current filmmakers who are continuing in that bold tradition and, yes, I count Larry Clark as one of them. He’s making films that are alive with energy and anger and truth. They are not decorated with cop-out niceties to make all the ugliness more palatable, but free of all that polite wrapping – raw, naked, brutal living, breathing things.

Now, there is explicit sex throughout, with plenty of bare bodies twisting and writhing on soaked sheets, yes, but the bruised and beaten heart of this film is its’ truly astonishing murder scene that chills as it details the mixed reactions of the assembled teens - their confused, emotionally messy execution exposing them for the terrified and lost kids that they are underneath all that bogus boasting.

The entire cast is remarkable, but Nick Stahl muddies his hands a bit more than the others to dig up the cruel, sadistic, self-hating soul of Bobby - smearing his way into every shot with a kind of grotesque grace.

One dimensionally depicted parents aside, “Bully” is one jarring ride. See it with someone you love, because onscreen, it’s in short supply.

GOTTA SEE IT # 22 - "SMOKE"

“SMOKE”

Starring: Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Harold Perrineau, Forest Whitaker, Stockard Channing, Ashley Judd, Michelle Hurst, Clarice Taylor.
Written by: Paul Auster
Directed by: Wayne Wang and Paul Auster (uncredited)
Colour – 1995
112 mins
U.S.A.

Connections - have’em and you’re in business. Don’t and you won’t be able to go on-line or won’t be able to hear that catchy song through those old speakers of yours or, worse yet, won’t ever know what it means to be part something bigger than yourself. When connections are made, wonderful and/or horrible things can and will happen, but without that meeting and giving and taking and fighting and loving and more fighting, nothing will happen - absolutely nothing. "Smoke" has little to say about nothing, but something significant to say about those hard to come by connections and its’ as satisfying as a fine Cuban cigar - minus its’ toxic, life threatening ingredients.

The Big Apple is the setting for this story of the down and out and scarred and soul sick. They all, at one time or another, step into the little neighbourhood corner cigar store owned and operated by Augie Wren (Harvey Keitel). Now, Keitel can play scummy and creepy and he can do it all with a kind of soiled grace, but, here, he flexes much more pleasant muscles playing simple and extraordinary as a shopkeeper with the heart of a poet.

Now, you may have noticed that I haven’t shared any of the plot with you. And I don’t intend to. How do you like that?!? Now, I’m not doing this to be difficult or lazy. No, I am simply doing this to keep this film as much of a mystery to you as possible. Sometimes, you just have to have a little faith…in me. Amen.

Instead, let me tell you what “Smoke” pulls off here: turns two acts of petty thievery into two separate moments of soulful, aching beauty; introduces a dazzling new talent in Harold Perrineau; gives Tom Waits his best video yet; and features Ashley Judd in her finest, albeit, briefest performance. Not bad, huh? Oh, and it also features Forrest Whitaker Jr. (the best thing in ”The Crying Game”) playing wounded and weary with so much grace and skill and warmth and humour he just about walks away with the whole damn thing tucked under his one good arm.

So, what Auster and Wang are getting at here is that connections are born out of a choice that each individual makes. They are not accidental. You choose whether to connect to another person or not. Heck, you can spend most of your life with another person and never connect, but, again, you’ve made that choice. All of the principal characters in “Smoke” face that choice, and, they fully understand that with it – no matter if it is a yes or no – come consequences. Life, as gracefully and whimsically as takes shape in these 112 minutes, is never simple, but always a matter of choice.

The art and artifice of storytelling also comes in for some scrutiny as well and it is best expressed and celebrated in a beautiful moment first spoken and then visualized in the dying moments of the film. It involves a Christmas story to end all Christmas stories and it is a stunner that also explains the genesis of Augie’s life’s project and movingly illustrates how life can take you down some strange and wonderful roads as long as you allow it to – there are those pesky choices again!

It’s all about connections, like, the one I hope I made with you, enough so you’ll take my word for it and race down to the nearest quality video store and rent this film. Now, go, now, choose ‘yes’ and I’ll wait for your thank you in my comments box.

GOTTA SEE IT # 21 - "WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS"

“WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS”

Starring: Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Reiko Dan, Tatsuya Nakadai, Daisuke Kato, Ganjiro Nakamura, Eitaro Ozawa, Keiko Awaji.
Written by: Ryuzo Kikushima
Directed by: Mikio Naruse
B & W – 1960
111 mins
Japan

Mama: Bars in the daytime are like women without makeup.

You can’t pretend to feel something you don’t genuinely feel. You can come close to replicating the feeling and fooling others, but you’d have a hell of a time pulling the wool over your own eyes - the few who can become sociopaths, murderers and entertainment reporters. We all pretend to feel something we don’t, from time to time, to avoid awkward or potentially volatile social situations. Or we engage in pretending to keep our raw emotions from busting loose and turning us into a tear-eyed, red-faced mess. It’s a survival mechanism. We pretend because, sometimes, being our real self is just too much to take. But, we never fool ourselves. We always feel the gap between pretend and real. The wider that gap gets, and the longer we feel it, the more we are separated from our true selves.

Mama (Hideko Takamine) is what you could call a professional pretender. She is a hostess at the Lilac Bar in post war Japan. A hostess is a woman who is employed by a bar to pretend to be interested, charmed, sexually attracted to the wealthy businessmen who come to get drunk and have their very formidable egos stroked. The women are not exactly prostitutes, though, a sexual relationship can develop. They are more like pretend girlfriends who are always perky and attentive and dazzled by every single word that comes out of a man’s mouth. One of the finest hostesses at the Lilac bar, Mama (Hideko Takamine)has been doing this for 5 years and she has only lasted that long because she hasn’t allowed her real feelings to surface. She is all smiles and fake warmth and it all functions as a sort of therapy that has helped, and continues to help her, if not get over her husband’s death, at least keep the pain at bay. She is in a suspended state – between old emotions she hasn’t fully processed and new emotions she continually pushes away.

The men depicted in this film are all pathetic in one way or another. They are cruel, deceptive, exploitive, hypocritical and parasitic. This is no surprise because the bulk of these men are customers or managers of the hostesses and, therefore, see them as an object to exploit for completely self-serving reasons. But the truly sad thing about Mama’s life is that, even far away from the hollow hostess world, both her mother and her brother treat her just as badly. So, Mama has fake relationships with strangers inside of the bars in which she works and fake relationships with family outside of the bars in which she lives. In one sad scene, her brother, coming to her, yet again, to borrow money, promises her that this is the very last time. To prove it, he tells her that he’s decided to cut ties with her all together. So, he’s willing to end the relationship with his sister just so he can prove to her that he’ll never ask for money again in order to get her to give him money this time. It’s a cold and cruel moment, made all the more so by his casual demeanour and complete ignorance of the pain he’s causing.

A sober study of male dominance, female objectification and the limited options that women faced in post-war Japan, WAWATS is a straight forward, low-key film featuring measured performances and a simple, uncluttered plot. In quietly assembled scenes, shot in beautiful black and white widescreen photography, what is proven is that, sometimes, pretending is one's only real option.

GOTTA SEE IT # 20 - "SHERMAN'S MARCH"

“SHERMAN’S MARCH: A MEDIATION TO THE POSSIBILITY OF ROMANTIC LOVE IN THE SOUTH DURING AN ERA OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROLIFERATION”

Starring: Ross McElwee, Patricia Rendleman, Burt Reynolds, Charleen Swansea.
Cinematography and Direction: Ross McElwee
Colour – 1986
157 mins
USA

Claudia: And that’s where they’re going to put the tennis court, right down there.

Ross: So, they’ll be able to play tennis in case of a nuclear attack?

Claudia: Right, they’ll have everything they need up here in case of a nuclear attack to survive in style.

You never know what you will find, if you are just open enough to look. Words of wisdom? Well, who knows? Maybe more like something you’d hear in a Disney film or any song sung by Celine Dion. I guess that makes me some kind of sappy hack. My apologies - now, back to the sappy hackery. Either way, this sentiment does apply to life, though in an admittedly simplistic way, and it fully applies to this charming and disarming documentary.

After receiving a grant to make a film about American Civil war general William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating march through the south, filmmaker Ross McElwee proceeds to make a film about a different kind of march. Call it McElwee’s March Through Southern Womanhood While Contemplating The Nuclear Obliteration Of The World or McElwee’s March Through A South Sprinkled With Starry-Eyed, Narcissistic, Completely Bonkers Dreamers And End-Of-The-World, Little House On The Prairie Re-Constructionists, Civil War Obsessives And Also, Thankfully, Some Normal, Complicated Folk Living Their Lives The Best That They Can. Titles aside, this is what happens when a bright, thoughtful, funny man picks up a film camera and allows his subjects the opportunity to reveal themselves with a minimal amount of interference.

No matter where McElwee goes with his camera, every woman he knows – his step mother, sister, and especially his brassy friend Charleen - regards his filmmaking as a waste of time and wants to save him from this lost life by setting him up with a good southern woman. Only a good southern woman, they argue, can set him straight. Well, the southern women he is introduced to are quite pretty, some even sexy, but very few of them seem capable of setting McElwee “straight.” This is due to the fact that quite a few of them are just down right loopy – dreaming of a surreal Hollywood stardom not of this world, or preoccupied by end-of-the-world bible prophecy or just plain confused about love and life and holding on to unhealthy relationships with men who are either emotionally immature and possibly violent or just plain odd and intellectually suspect. McElwee’s back and forth with longtime friend/would-be-lover Karen is especially fascinating and hilarious when it is revealed that this beautiful, intelligent, accomplished lawyer is obsessed with a man who collects life-sized plastic animals with his friends. Talk about a mismatch. Somehow, though, she thinks that this guy is the one. McElwee’s dry observation of the man who beat him out is a beautiful bit of hilarious understatement.

Now, even though the film strays from the original purpose for which McElwee was granted the money, he still fulfills the Sherman’s March requirement and does it in an articulate and passionate way. He visits various Civil War landmarks and battle sights and delivers dramatic, half-whispered late night monologues about Sherman and what he faced before, during and after the war. It is clear that the Civil War and Sherman are ghosts still cackling down the corridors of McElwee’s dreams as well as those of much of the South. Apart from the comical and real life dramatic departures, the Sherman section alone is compelling - not to mention the fact that the whole “Southern Womanhood” part of the film is a comical recreation of Sherman’s original march. Yes, very much so a recreation, though devoid of its’ brutality, blood and relentless devastation and destruction. Well, at least in a literal sense.

The film is also a study of how one can use a camera as both weapon and shield, as McElwee does here - sometimes simultaneously hiding behind it and using it to knock his subjects off balance. Others, and he himself, comment on how his camera keeps him from connecting with the women he is supposed to be wooing and also forces them into uncomfortable confession and cross-examination type situations.

What emerges from this, one man’s idiosyncratic and personal portrait of the South, is an impression of land at once crazed, paranoid, exuberant, angry, joyous, complicated, colourful and never even two miles close to dull. This is the South, the American South - at least as Ross McElwee found it and coaxed it to open up to him in all its’ off-kilter, wacked-out glory. Enjoy.