As I mentioned in the War Inc. thread, I’ve been watching several movies that are featured in the excellent documentary Z Channel, which I re-watched and loved.

So far the most surprisingly good one was Turkish Delight (1973), an early Dutch film by Paul Verhoeven starring Rutger Hauer as a sculptor. Funny, sexy, sad, believable. Alas, that led to another Verhoeven/Hauer rental, Flesh+Blood , which was bad enough to leave unfinished.

But speaking of really bad films - or films that have the reputation of being really bad - what do you kids think of Heaven’s Gate? We watched the usual cut of it (219 min) over the past two nights and I shake my head in disbelief at the idea that this could rank on anyone’s list of “worst” movies (except Joe Queenan, who is a born fuckwit (let the Google linking of Joe Queenan and fuckwit commence!)). More specifically, let me ask you this: Why is Heaven’s Gate considered a disaster and Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven a masterpiece?
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…won’t win hearts or minds, but it’s a dandy little nasty entertainment with enough wit and style–and a kick-drum wonder of a final shot–and I think it’s worth a look. Andy Serkis and Reece Sheersmith (familiar to many of us from “The League of Gentlemen,” whose name itself seems a product of said League) star as brothers involved in low-level criminal thuggery, a foolish kidnapping of a boss’ daughter, and the film opens somewhere north-northeast of nastier comic noirs by the Coens or Ritchie. They’re imbeciles, if relatively likable. And then the film takes a left turn toward those Hills with eyes, and things get violent, genuinely creepy and suspenseful, and still generally likable and funny. Again, nothing spectacular–the director, one Paul Andrew Williams, is coming off a well-received and annoyingly-unavailable-in-the-States thriller called London to Brighton, and he displays far more patience, visual wit, and structural clarity than the aforementioned Ritchie. This may be more my cup of joe than Gio’s, or most of youse, as I remain a sucker for homicidal mutant hicks and needless chopping and spurting, but the leads are funny and fun to watch, and … well, there you have it.

James goes rogue like Sarah Palin
I sat through 100 minutes and man I am a ailin’

But seriously . . . noisy and incomprehensible, the new Bond film can’t be recommended. It seems to have something to do with South American water futures and a clandestine shadow organization–a nefarious agency of evil hitherto unknown to MI6, the CIA, and, for good measure, the KGB. It’s a cold, impersonal film without a jot of wit or humor or even, god forbid, joy (Bond is in full-tilt revenge mode and the Bond “girl” is surly not sexy). Still, it moves at a fever pitch, and most (Chris) won’t mind suffering through the swift ninety-nine minutes. There was a cool sequence that took place during a mammoth, postmodern production of Puccini’s Tosca, and I did appreciate Forster’s eye for catchy architecture, but that’s about all I got.

Jose Padilha’s 2007 crime film pivots from the ground traversed in the excellent Bus 174 (see comments 3, 4, & 5), turning away from the criminal trapped and interpellated within a rigid, pervasive system of inequality toward cops, just as trapped. The film got a lot of love in Brazil, and certain international festivals, but my plot summary seems more cogent–and a lot more thrilling–than I found the film. I liked its thesis, and disagree entirely with Manohla Dargis’ critique of its politics, even as I fully accept her critique of its aesthetics. It perfectly defines “lugubrious,” trudging through the mechanics of a crime & corruption thriller, without any of the dynamics. And this makes me bring up, for the 100th time?, Fernando Meirelles’ superior (and I think superlative) City of God.

My apologies if someone has already posted on this movie.  War, Inc. is a blast, the most fun I’ve had watching a movie all year. It is an absurdist take (clearly indebted to Dr. Strangelove) on the corporatization of war and nation-building. A fictional Halliburton (the Tamerlane Corporation) has an exclusive contract to rebuild, privatize and generally rape the central asian country of Turaqistan, and every aspect that we have seen in recent years in Iraq is ramped up to 11 to comic effect. The politics of the movie are crude and brutally funny, with moments of real power and poingancy. In particular, a scene in a bombed out town at night, as assorted military contractors and local militias fire blindly at each other, explosions rake the landscape and refugees flee, bring to mind the bridge-building scene in Apocalypse Now.

John Cusak is the corporation’s hit man with a heart of gold, and the movie elicits hysterical performances from Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei and a host of minor characters. The story of redemption for John Cusack is hardly original, but the movie still pulls very few punches, and occasionally hits you right in the gut. The choice of eschewing ernest characters offering their critiques of American imperial power and instead relying upon images and humor makes this even stronger. I suspect that there will be less of this kind of movie in the next couple of years as the afterglow of Obama’s victory lingers. This one is well worth watching, if only as a reminder of the world Obama has inherited.