Lessons of Darkness

Great? Evil? Or Just Mediocre?

Some of my colleagues at Slant think it’s the worst movie of the year, if not of all time. NY Press’ Matt Zoller Seitz and LA Weekly’s Scott Foundas (among others) more or less agree. Meanwhile, Roger Ebert and Oprah – to name just two high-profile figures – think it’s phenomenal, brilliant, and the best film of 2005. To which polarizing piece of cinema am I referring? Why, that’d be Crash, Paul Haggis’ Los Angeles-set racism drama that’s garnered numerous Oscar nominations, tons of other (largely meaningless, in my opinion) accolades, and a swift, brutal backlash from those who are convinced that – should it upset Brokeback Mountain at this Sunday’s Academy Awards to nab the coveted Best Picture trophy – it’ll become the most undeserving gold statuette winner in a category historically rife with undeserving winners.

Back in May, I wrote a rather schizophrenic – but ultimately positive – review of the film for Slant, claiming that although the characters were unrealistically forthright in their vocalizations of racist attitudes, and that although its narrative had too many connect-the-myriad-storyline coincidences, Crash’s “head-on depiction of people’s mistrust and disgust for those not like themselves is uncompromising.” I praised the film’s “confrontational bluntness” while stating that its “point about the complexities (and contradictions) of racist generalizations remains bracing,” and even went so far as to call it a “blistering and incisive portrait of urban alienation and intolerance that's largely unsullied by…painful didacticism.” All pretty bold statements, especially considering my stated reservations about the film’s visual style, its aping of Magnolia and, in my drawn-out opening reference to an Upright Citizens Brigade episode (which I still think is a hilarious bit of cinephile-skewering), its dunderheaded dialogue-delivered explanation of its own title.

An okay film that both stimulated and aggravated me – nothing wonderful, nothing awful. Yet half a year later, with the praise and vitriol amplifying to equally ludicrous degrees, I felt compelled – despite my disinterest in doing so – to revisit the film. And what, pray tell, did I discover? Pretty much what I expected. Crash isn’t as good as my three-star review rating implies; two stars, maybe two-and-a-half on a really generous day, would more than suffice. It’s a heavy-handed slab of moralizing moviemaking cut from last year’s well-worn cinematic liberal guilt cloth, and its solid performances from Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton are largely overwhelmed by the film’s unrealistic, pretentious and often-patronizing preachiness about race-relations. The cinematographic slow-motion still drives me nuts, the coincidences are convenient to the point of unbearable, and for all the blunt talk about those-who-are-not-like-us – which I still think, despite the lack of a believable context, has a provocative power – it winds up merely confirming the not-very-shocking fact that everyone harbors some unseemly stereotypical opinions.

That said, I nonetheless don’t see what all the fuss is about. Crash’s detractors act as if the film is a malevolent force corrupting our national conscience with dangerously misleading ideas about race, rather than simply going overboard in earnestly attempting to tackle how various societal groups think about, and interact with, each other. Even stranger is the argument that the film is so clueless about how true racism really manifests itself – not a contention I completely disagree with, mind you – that it could only be believed by a sheltered boob who’d never actually experienced racism first-hand – a patently absurd claim that’s pretty funny when coming from light-skinned intellectuals. Unabashedly manipulative it may be (especially with the child-in-peril scene, which I admit gets to my still-blossoming protective-dad heartstrings), and graceless at regular intervals, the film nonetheless seems to be driven by decent intentions, something one could argue isn’t true of The Constant Gardener or Syriana, two other misguided attempts to address pertinent issues.

So to recap: Paul Haggis’ movie is neither the best or worst film of the year. It exists in the same place as most of last year’s new releases – somewhere in the boring, forgettable, mediocre middle. Although I have to admit that, having now written 700 more words about a film I don’t really care about, I’m slowly beginning to develop my own case of Crash-aphobia…

Fata Morgana (1971): B+

A near-silent documentary journey through (and over) the Sahara scored to Leonard Cohen songs and narrated by both director Werner Herzog and German film historian Lotte Eisner (reading from the Mayan “Popul Voh” creation myth), Fata Morgana is one of Herzog’s earliest – and most evocative – cinematic essays on the uneasy relationships between man and Earth, unaffected reality and orchestrated drama. Initially conceived of as a science-fiction project, the film captures the vast African wasteland in all its overwhelming, ominous glory, the big sky portentously hovering over the rolling sand dunes and the husks of modern machinery that litter the ground like relics from an obsolete civilization. When his gaze turns to the desert’s residents, Herzog seems to be consciously testing the limits of non-fiction filmmaking’s policy of non-intrusion, with these scenes exuding a deliberately staged quality that somewhat undermines the air of authentic, otherworldly mystery begat by his seductively roaming cinematography (some of which was reportedly shot by attaching a camera to the roof of a VW van driven by Herzog himself). Still, there’s a beguiling poeticism to Fata Morgana that, even in its slightly redundant latter third, is awe-inspiring, whether it be the majestic shots of shimmering mirages – images that beautifully encapsulate the director’s own bordering-on-surreal documentary aesthetic – or the comments of a man whose admiration for a rare reptile’s ability to survive the harsh desert embodies Herzog’s own career-long fascination with the contentious but vital relationship shared between the natural world and its inhabitants.

Brief Hiatus

I'll be MIA for the next week or so (taking a trip with the Missus and Little H), but I wouldn't think of leaving without first supplying a new batch of reviews. Thus, here are my thoughts on this weekend's dogs-in-peril Disney adventure Eight Below, as well as four upcoming films: Dave Chappelle's music-and-comedy concert doc, Sidney Lumet's latest (with Vin Diesel), a middling Australian import, and Jean-Pierre Melville's stunning 1969 Army of Shadows, which will be getting its first-ever U.S. release come April.

This Weekend:
Eight Below (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Dave Chappelle's Block Party (Slant magazine)
Army of Shadows (Slant magazine)
Find Me Guilty (Slant magazine)
Look Both Ways (Slant magazine)

When Titles Go Wrong

Really bad movies may be a dime a dozen, but really bad movie titles are surprisingly rare. Nonetheless, two upcoming films - one that's definitely happening, and one that seems to be little more than a rumor - have the potential to make bad movie title history. How studios decided to finance projects with such names is beyond me. But hey, I guess that's why I'm not a studio chief.

Snakes on a Plane - From the director of Cellular (?!?) comes this Samuel L. Jackson (?!?) vehicle about an assasin who, in order to kill a witness on a plane, opens up a crate full of snakes. No, I'm not kidding. I feel like I could spend hours making jokes about this film. The good people over at the Internet Movie Database's forums, however, have more than done the job for me.

Brutal Deluxe - If there's a God, I'm sure He wants to see this movie. Seriously. This simply has to happen.

Lessons of Darkness (1992): A-

An unearthly companion piece to Fata Morgana, Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness presents a haunting, hellish vision of post-Gulf War Iraq in which burning oilfields, technological rubble, and lakes of black gold litter the vast desert. Via soaring, surreal aerial photography and a symphonic score of Schubert, Verdi and Wagner, Herzog’s poignant anti-war documentary approaches its landscape as if it were an alien planet, exuding a combination of bewilderment, horror and despondency as it gazes upon the tragic nature-related consequences of man’s destructiveness. As a serene shot of a slumbering city hours before the conflict’s commencement gives way to images of rising plumes of smoke, spouting geysers set ablaze, and men – some of their ruddy faces covered, like astronauts, by shiny, reflective masks – trying to contain the fires and drain the wells, the film becomes a hypnotic depiction of man’s irresponsible unwillingness to achieve accord with both his fellow man and the world in which he exists. And though his trademark overblown narration is slightly more portentous than usual, Herzog’s eventual silence during the film’s majestic, unforgettable second half seems born from the same grief that plagues an interviewed Muslim woman and a small, cowering child, both of whom claim to have been literally struck dumb by their exposure to the foul violence of war.

Black Christmas (1974): B

Pioneering many now-familiar slasher film tropes a good five years before John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (with which it shares an opening POV shot from a murderer’s perspective), Black Christmas corrodes jolly yuletide cheer with some cruel prank calls, sexual tension and sorority girl slayings. Director Bob Clark works through his grisly premise – part When a Stranger Calls, part Slumber Party Massacre – with deliberate sordidness, the most vulgar (and frightening) example of which involves an insult-filled conversation between Margot Kidder’s slutty alcoholic and a shrieking, squealing telephone pervert that ends with the calm-voiced promise, “I’m going to kill you.” A head wrapped in a plastic bag, a homicide laced with penetrating coitus imagery, and a horrendous haircut sported by the unbearably overacting Keir Dullea (2001) all contribute to the film’s nastiness, and it’s surprising how much mileage the director gets out of his gore-free set pieces and schizophrenia-plagued killer’s incoherent phone tirades. Ultimately, though, Black Christmas is a somewhat uneven holiday horror treat, its scares having aged reasonably well but its intriguing gender warfare dynamic – found in the contentious relationship between pregnant (but abortion-craving) Jessica (Olivia Hussey) and frustrated pianist (and wannabe daddy) Peter (Dullea) – a victim of woeful underdevelopment.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003): B+

Admirably living up to its illustrious pedigree, Looney Tunes: Back in Action is like a pop culture-gorged Hope-and-Crosby buddy flick hopped up on mescaline. Working in the same rapid-fire vein as Gremlins 2: The New Batch, director Joe Dante (with a script by Larry Doyle) crams his delirious film so full of cinematic allusions, fourth wall-shattering gags, and jabs at Hollywood and American consumerism that there’s almost no time for a plot, which is fine considering that the nominal story – about Bugs, Daffy, security guard/stuntman/movie star’s son DJ (Brendan Frasier), and Tinseltown producer Kate (Jenna Elfman) – is just a cross-country-traversing vehicle built to carry a heavy load of self-referential jokes and WB icon cameos. Its hit-or-miss bits succeeding at least as often as not, the overstuffed film manages to keep itself from exploding through a combination of faithful voice work, superbly blended live-action and 2-D animation, a go-for-broke slapsticky dynamism that would make Chuck Jones proud, and a shrewd awareness that the heart and soul of classic Looney Tunes cartoons resides not in Bugs’ omnipotent cool but, rather, in Daffy’s second-banana inferiority complex. Aside from Steven Martin’s spectacularly cartoony buffoonery as villainous ACME boss Mr. Chairman, the film’s human characters are no match for their hand-drawn counterparts, with Fraser and Elfman’s tit-for-tat Grant-and-Hepburn chemistry routinely undermined by the presence of the significantly more entertaining rabbit and duck. Still, whether it’s a priceless disguise-unzippering gag involving a former space-jammer, or the film’s Louvre-set pièce de résistance, Looney Tunes: Back in Action’s wascally zaniness is tough to resist.

Funny Ha Ha (2003): B+

Andrew Bujalski’s no-budget indie Funny Ha Ha is many things, but humorous – in the playful, jovial vein implied by its title – it is not. A sympathetic portrait of recent college grad Marnie (Kate Dollenmayer) as she uneventfully wanders to and fro in search of a job, a beer and love, the film affects a brand of improvisatory realism, its largely unprofessional cast’s performances and winding hand-held cinematography exuding the impression that we’ve been granted brief, privileged access to this lonely young woman’s private life. Bujalski is least successful at faithfully reproducing the “like” and “um”-punctuated idiom of higher-educated 20-somethings, who even in their dullest moments generally don’t sound half as scatterbrained and self-involved as these characters. Yet though their solipsism is more irritating than appealing, Marnie and company’s rambling conversations – in which deflection and misdirection are achieved through stammers, topic changes, and outright lies about prior statements – shrewdly reflect a more paralyzing fear of commitment, whether it be to romance, career or (as in the superb opening scene) a tattoo. And in a stunning instance of passive-aggressive anger enacted by Marnie suitor Mitchell (self-effacingly played by the director) or the perfectly abrupt climax of (potential) maturation, Bujalski’s subtly well-constructed film – its lackadaisical rhythm obscuring a quite calculated narrative and thematic composition – reveals a charmingly idiosyncratic sincerity.

Why We (Enjoy) Torture

David Edelstein, formerly of Slate and now of New York Magazine, has long been one of my favorite critics, and his latest feature “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn” is right up my ally, not only because it has the word “multiplex” in its title (just like this blog column!), but because it addresses a question I regularly grapple with: namely, what’s so appealing about brutal horror films? In tackling the subject, he quotes Stephen King, discusses how the best scary movies implicate their viewers as complicit participants in on-screen violence, and even includes The Passion of the Christ in his new torture porn sub-genre. Unfortunately, in evaluating the recent batch of “sadistic” horror flicks through the prism of our terrorism-plagued times, he comes up with no answer to the query his article raises. Although a self-avowed “horror maven,” Edelstein claims to be repulsed by this spate of films – which he negatively describes as “extraordinarily cruel” (Wolf Creek), and not “art by any definition I can think of” (The Devil's Rejects) – and doesn’t understand why others aren’t as well. Falling back on an obligatory “post-9/11” reference, Edelstein avoids positing a substantive theory as to why these films are so popular, instead simply admitting to dealing with such unpleasant stuff by staring at an EXIT sign, closing his eyes, or distracting himself in some other way because, as he puts it, he doesn’t want to identify with the films’ victims or victimizers.

Somewhat akin to New York Times reporter Caryn James’ (often strained) attempts at cinematic trend analysis, Edelstein’s piece is, I think, generally correct in saying that a number of current horror films utilize scenes of torture to push the boundaries of sadism and gore into more extreme realms. And while I’d surmise that it’s probably something of a coincidence that all of these films have been released in such close proximity to one another, I also agree that, at least in relation to their immediate predecessors, these latest scare-a-thons do, in certain ways, reflect a national consciousness shaped by disconcerting global events. It’s only natural for societal unease to manifest itself through the cinema and, particularly, through the monsters-and-murder-infatuated genre, where our deep-rooted fears of death and torment have always found a comfortable home. Horror has an illustrious history of delivering piercing, highly politicized allegories – just check out any of the work by Joe Dante, Larry Cohen or George A. Romero – and especially with a film like Hostel, pertinent geopolitical subtexts and metaphors about America and its role and perception abroad are, thanks to director Eli Roth’s ham-fisted obviousness, laid right up on the carving table for all to dissect.

I don’t care to defend half of the movies Edelstein cites (Irréversible, this means you). But I would contend that, in the cases of The Devil’s Rejects, Wolf Creek, and Hostel, the fears being exploited – while influenced by the past five years’ terrorism-tinged tensions – have nonetheless long been part of the fabric of horror films. As with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, the aforementioned three movies share a steadfast belief that the world is a fundamentally unsafe place. Far from Disney’s cheery and secure “small world after all,” these exploitation flicks posit an unpredictable, untamable environment populated by human monsters with little care for notions of morality, propriety or any of the other trappings of modern civilization. Whether it be Wolf Creek’s teenage trio gallivanting around the Australian Outback as if it were their personal playground, or The Devil’s Rejects’ Banjo & Sullivan troupe believing that a dusty country motel is a safe haven, or Hostel’s backpackers treating Eastern Europe like a bacchanalian wonderland custom-made for their every carnal whim, these films’ characters painfully discover that skepticism and suspicion should be an ever-present facet of one’s interaction with the world. To behave otherwise, the movies warn us, is to be an arrogant fool, and one fated to learn a very hard, very painful lesson.

Thus, rather than being merely “masochistic,” a film like Wolf Creek functions as a stark cautionary tale about life’s inherent nastiness, and one that – considering events like the recent Danish cartoon controversy – also relevantly relates to our present-day climate. That said, Edelstein’s comparison of the current horror output and 24 – both of which share an infatuation with torture – is off-base, since the latter offers up justified torture as a comforting fantasy (i.e. watch heroes pull off fingernails to safeguard freedom!) and the former dish it out as a haunting nightmare (i.e. watch girls have their dangling eyeball sliced for no justifiable reason!). Furthermore, Edelstein’s statement that, “as potential victims, we fear [serial killers], yet we also seek to identify with their power” is accurate mainly with regards to those films (everything from Friday the 13th to Saw) in which one is meant to enjoy the viciousness of colorful, creative villains. Truly disturbing horror films, however, scare us by effectively forcing us to identify not with serial killers but with their victims; if we’re magnetically drawn to murderers’ powers, it’s primarily so that we might amplify our own terror. With a Devil’s Rejects, that terror comes with a self-reflexive element; with Greg McLean’s Australian import, it comes with a component of culture-vs.-savagery conflict. But in their finest moments, I’d argue that horror films – including those that trade in torture porn – fundamentally appeal to us as unsettling reminders to be wary, to be cynical and, most of all, to be afraid.

Land of Silence and Darkness (1971): A

His straightforward, austere direction corresponding with his subjects’ difficult interaction with the world, Werner Herzog masterfully conveys the logistical, emotional, and psychological burden suffered by the hearing and sight-impaired in Land of Silence and Darkness. Fini Straubinger, a woman who lost both sight and hearing during a severe staircase fall at the age of nine, is the primary focus of Herzog’s documentary, which begins by joining the 56-year-old on her first plane flight before following her around the Bavarian countryside to meet and help those with similar disabilities. Remarkably competent and well-spoken, Straubinger communicates via a tactile, hand-touching technique that remains elusive for many of the impaired individuals she meets, from two young boys born blind and deaf to a 22-year-old man so neglected as a child that he never learned to walk and now spends his days spitting and slamming rubber balls against his mouth. Sensorially trapped inside themselves and, thus, cut-off from their surroundings and fellow man, these tragic figures are treated with modest sympathy by Herzog, whose directorial reserve bestows the film with an attitude of fascinated detachment. And yet Land of Silence and Darkness ultimately benefits from the filmmaker’s refusal to overtly express his sympathies (or lack thereof), as it instead allows its organic mise-en-scène – including the heartbreaking image of a braying calf running back to its mother, an echo of many deaf-blinds’ yearning for familial contact – to speak volumes about the intrinsic human desire for empathetic communion.