The Face Knife

Even though I graduated from Fight Club University and studied at The Matrix Institute for Advanced Studies (though I dropped out after year 2, like a lot of people), my mind was still not properly prepared for the fucking given to it by Wanted , the latest self-help movie catering to dweebs seeking enlightenment and/or a hot, kind of crazy girlfriend with inscrutable tattoos. I think there’s a near-universal tendency to believe that there’s a hidden order behind the world, and that history is approaching a singular moment of crisis, and that our own inner existential torment is unique and special and therefore the fact that we’re required to, like, wake up on time and pay for stuff is a sign that something has seriously gone wrong with the sacred order of the universe and our Fate. My strong preferences for what I think reality should be like would totally be coming true right now if it weren’t for the world, and you, and you, and YOU just totally fucking with me. Honestly, didn’t you roll into work this morning, look at your meager surroundings, sigh, and think “won’t someone rescue me from all these forces of Control and control me in a new, hot sadomasochistic way, and then turn me into an Entemann’s cake?”

Wanted gives hope to those whom the invisible hand of global capitalism has pinned into a cubicle and fingerbanged their faithless girlfriend. All it’s gonna take for you to muster up the courage to break the shackles is a few extended sessions of being tied to a chair and punched in the face before you, too, can become a fully-actualized asshole capable of inflicting grevous bodily harm with pistol and ergonomic keyboard alike. One of these days you’ll be filling your Ativan prescription and meet cute with a raccoon-eyed fembot, and after a brief and post-modern gun battle you’ll learn how you were noble-born into a legacy of bitchin’ assassins with vague superhuman powers and a penchant for fruitily ornate weaponry, exactly like what all those kids currently daydreaming about being drafted into Hogwarts will be fantasizing about once they start getting embarrassing erections during trig class.

A beautiful assassin who clearly studied this video will drive your ass to an urban castle-cum-textile factory where a profound black man will introduce you the secret story of your life and also the secret story of history. Soon, in between beatings and archiving, you’ll have the run of the place, which includes an octagonal library, a romantic candle-lit spa complete with tubs full of wound-healing frosting, a garment sweatshop manned by killers, and a meatpacking facility*. All you have to do is admit to your tormenters/saviors that “I don’t know who I am!” (after they slap you around).

Sure, your face will get broken every day, and you’ll get stabbed a whole gang of times by various ethnic stereotypes, and soon you will be begging for that hot chick to hold a gun to your head so that you can “do that thing,” but compared to office work it’s at least…interesting, right? Even more so when you fully accept the fact that your lot is to simply to kill based on the word of God.

Well, not quite God, just his Word manifested through a mystical, long-lived…um, Loom, that weaves the story of reality, which looks a whole lot like a rough, featureless beige rug. Although beneath that bland surface of things, it appears that Loom works in mysterious ways, as some clever Druid or prophet figured out that God was communicating not through cross-stitch messages (as he does in cozy kitchens across the land) but through a binary code cleverly disguised as errors in the fabric of the weave (there’s an excellentLuddite joke in here but I can’t quite get it to where it should be). Dude, to me that totally sounds like the Demiurge’s steez but I guess I would kill for him too if, like, given the choice between that and waking up at 7am to go to an office job every day or some such bullshit.

Particularly if Loom’s instructions for me are to get revenge for the death of my daddy. You know, the one who abandoned me when I was a wee child. I loved that dude! His killers have to die, for some reason! Possibly so I can impress that chick! Or win back my cheating girlfriend! Or Both! Damn, don’t I look hot with this gun?

Wanted is kind of berzerk with unwholesome creativity. The mayhem is varied and absurd, and I’ll not spoil it by detailing all of the silliness. (okay: live rat-bombs). It’s the first Hollywood movie by Timur Bekmambetov, the director of the cult (in this country) sort-of-vampire films Night Watch and Day Watch. I’m not going to say that it’s not entertaining, particularly if you have the “over” in a gentlemen’s bet about the number of “flying cars” to occur (note to future bettors: trains count as cars, one per carriage), but I think there’s something kind of wrong about a film that more or less defines self-actualization by the attainment of the ability and desire to do extreme violence on other people at whim, and at the behest of a higher power than yourself. Coupled with the over-the-top sadomasochistic depiction of pedagogy and the claim that since your dad has been spying on you constantly since he left your family when you were a child, he really, really loved you (and someone else can connect the Foucauldian dots here, if you miss grad school), the structure of the universe in Wanted is extremely twisted. Which, if the film was actually some sort of parody of Fight Club-ian stuff, would be sort of interesting, but I don’t think it’s quite coherent enough to manage that. Anyway, I guess my takeaway from the film is, if I see the Buddha coming around the corner, I’m gonna curve a bullet and blow that fucker away.

* The only explanation for which I can think of is that the Chicago Meatpacking Union still has a lot of juice.

Please refer to my review of The Black Dahlia over at The Movie Binge.

For a film that has as its background The War on Drugs, Miami Vice is curiously devoid of political or social context. There’s a little intimation that people in the FBI might be up to some good, and for some reason the Aryan nation seems to be stockpiling RPGs, but that’s about it in terms of implications beyond which vehicles are associated with the drug trade (apparently there’s a type of boat called “go-fast boat”. It’s much popular than the “float-there boat” ).

Even stranger, if you didn’t know what drugs looked like before seeing Miami Vice, you’d think they were color-coded packages about the size of ream of paper. Not once do any of the characters, main or peripheral, snort, shoot up or smoke any of the wares (though we are given a long, redundant laundry list of what the drug kingpin has for sale). There’s not even one of those charming scenes during a drug deal where one of the principles sticks a knife in a kilo of coke and tastes it to make sure it’s real. A drug film without coke-tasting must be a first.

For a buddy film, Miami Vice is completely devoid of homoeroticism, which is a tricky thing to do. There’s never any meaningful looks or pats on the butts between the principles; I don’t think they even look each other in the eyes, at all. They certainly don’t seem to like each other all that much. They’re just co-workers whose shared office space is a Ferrari or private jet or beachfront house.

I can recommend Miami Vice for really only one thing: The unintentional comedy factor is through the roof. The dialogue is atrocious, and poor Jamie Foxx is only given lines when he’s piloting a plane (he does a nice job with those coordinates) or whenever someone has to remind one of the drug dealers of the existence of AWACS, whatever those are. Anyway, here’s some samples of the hilarity, which caused my friends and I no end to laughter, though it seemed the rest of audience was only laughing when someone got shot in the head (in that case, I don’t laugh - I just say “Oh, SNAP!” really loud. I’m a horrible theater citizen, it’s true).

“Patch me through to your SAC”
(Colin Farrell, on phone, with intensity)

“You hire us because we guarantee loads”
(Colin Farrell, to Gong Li, mixing business with pleasure while bragging about his and Jamie Foxx’s services)

The Face Knife Endorses the Use of Spoilers
The X-Men, who by the way are a revolving band of Superheroes who also teach at prep school, have this practice facility that goes by the poetic name The Danger Room. The Danger Room allows them to hone their skills, powers and witty one-liners while experiencing a likely scenario (such as a giant robot attack), under parameters that almost infinitely fiddle-able (the giant robot attack may occur in the dark, with smoke and fire all around, or the giant robot may have been dispatched by an overzealous government, or the giant robot might be a manifestation of their DEEPEST FEARS) with the help of cutting edge CGI. While some of our mutant heroes just take the Danger Room exercise as a chance to blow off steam by indulging in some consequence-free environment, others take the simulation far too seriously. And I guess, to spell it out, some of us fall somewhere in between.

Although I like to think of myself as a fundamentally silly individual, I take movies seriously, sometimes even those that have no business being taken seriously. ¹ Some movies and genres sit up and beg to be taken seriously, and Science Fiction in particular has a history of using speculation or amplification as a lens to examine How We Live Now (as the NYT would put it), and the X-Men series of films has been more explicit in this regard than most. So when X-Men: The Last Stand makes allusions (some more graceful than others) to the ex-gay movement, The War on Terror and employs an actor that makes me think, god, what the hell is Vernon Jordan doing in this film, it makes me bracket my “holy shit is that poor green screen work” and “I soooo would join Magneto’s (Sir Ian MacKellen) ‘Brotherhood’” reactions and think about the film in a social context, and maybe I’m a huge dork but I think it’s just as fun to react to movies this way as it is to cheer when a blue-furred Kelsey Grammer whacks some guy in the face. On second thought, maybe there ARE dorkier dorks than I.

As I understand it, and this is based on an early teenage immersion in the Paperverse, the X-Men were Marvel Comic’s most popular property for two reasons: a realistic portrayal of the mindset of the outcast and an unprecedented level of interpersonal psycho-sexual melodrama (that often veered into what now looks like to be really kinky territory). The films have tried to replicate that formula and have had much more success with the former than the latter, which has been hampered by in some cases poor characterization and in some cases poor casting.

The filmmakers early on boldly jettison major character and fan-favorite (fan of the comics, that is) Cyclops, who it becomes apparent met his demise during an offscreen session of reunion boning. Cyclops was the heir apparent to run the team after Professor Xavier (Patick Stewart) died/retired/was trapped in another dimension, but as he had progressed from tight-ass whiner to, um, even more tight-assed and whiny during the period between the last sequel and this, his presence as leader would have dragged the Team as well as the film down into maudlin bullshit. So, even before his atomization, the Professor turns over the reins to Storm, played by bona fide major star Halle Berry, who must have been cast when the filmmakers were all like, “Hey, she’s black, and a woman, she’s perfect.” Berry is completely charisma-free (except for her hair) so it only makes sense when she more or less lets Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) the loner-rebel dude, make all the major decisions when it comes to how and where they should fight, etc.

While the X-Men makes the female characters powerful in terms of the ability to kick ass, their personal lives are still more or less characterized by reactions to the male characters in the film.

Part of the film’s plot centers on a ‘cure’ for the mutant condition, and two of the female characters are directly affected by it in profoundly sexist terms. Rogue (Anna Paquin), the touch of whose skin is like being slipped a Roofie, sees the cure as a chance to be able to lock down her wandering dweeb of a boyfriend by becoming able to, you know, “kiss.” After being admonished by Wolverine (who says he is not her father) to not do it because of “some boy” she goes ahead and does it. When she returns sans powers and but ready for action her boyfriend says “this is not what I wanted,” but the fact that what provoked Rogue to leave the school was seeing her BF ice-dancing with another girl puts all of this in perspective.

Mystique, played by Rebecca Romijn in full-body makeup that makes one expect her to hurl herself against one of Yves Klein’s canvases, is forcibly denuded of her powers by the government, and promptly turns traitor because she is a “woman scorned.”

Jean Grey, the only class-5 mutant on the planet (mutants are ranked like Twisters) is more or less the love-interest of not the virile Wolverine (in fact, her sexuality proves to be WAY too much for him) but the point of a love triangle between a dude who is paralyzed from the waist down and a crypto-gay. Telekinesis, which is one of Jean’s powers, has a cinematic tradition of appearing in female characters at the onset of sexual maturity, and in this case, her supreme power is explicitly linked with “joy and lust and destruction ” (or something like that). The male characters result to all sorts of gambits to restrain her but her power proves to be too much, that is until Wolverine manages to penetrate her with not one but 3 foot-long appendages in a patriarchal recuperation of the scenario at the end of Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 2.² Go Team!

Only Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde manages not to land herself in a sexist predicament, and that’s probably because she’s supposed to be like 14 and she’d cut your balls off if you tried.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise then, that the X-Men become more or less counter-revolutionaries and defenders of the status quo, more or less reflexively so. Magneto, who in addition to being a bundle of charisma is right about nearly everything including the reflexive perfidy of the government, is stopped when the X-Men use the ‘unfair’ weapons and tactics of the enemy against him.

In spite of all this revolution recuperatin’ and woman subjugatin’, I enjoyed this movie, though I’m glad I’m writing about it the day after I saw it because I’m sure the details will soon fade from mind, like the first two, which I can barely recall. The film gets high marks from me because of the relatively short run-time and decent pacing - and it’s really rare that you see an action movie combine those two qualities these days. The CGI was acceptable except for a few moments of really shitty green screen (Angel flying?), and I guess that’s all I can ask for from CGI, is to be acceptable. But that’s a subject for another day.

¹ My favorite justification is that films are “things to think with” and although I sometimes try to get into criticism about form or style, none of those things are as important as what the movie makes me think about (and I hope it goes without saying that some of these thoughts are far more tongue in cheek than others). Call it philosophical criticism, biographical criticism or just good old self-obsession, that’s largely what you’re going to get here. Oh, and spoilers. Tons of spoilers.

² Not the only call-back to Buffy. As Matthew pointed out to me, in a weird mobius strip of pop-culture red-heads, Famke Jannssen is inflicted with the “Dark Willow” make-up from Buffy 6, which was directly inspired by the Dark Phoenix X-Men comic books

Night Watch plays like an entire season of Angel condensed into less than two hours and minus all the great characters of Joss Whedon’s series, or maybe a grim retelling of Ghostbusters. Even still, it’s pretty entertaining, although a bit lacking in hot vampire on vampire action for my taste. It’s a bit far-fetched to compare it to Bulgakov, as Hoberman does in the the Voice, or to Stalker, as I’ve seen somewhere (there’s one scene reminiscent of the deserted buildings of the Zone, but then the Vampire with the terrifying alias “The Hairdresser” and his girlfriend pop up).

Probably the most interesting thing about the film is the way it pre-empts the inevitable cross-over with the video game world by offering a scene in which the head baddie (whose power is apparently to remove his spine and use it as a sword. FATALITY.) hones his reflexes for the final conflict by gaming it out on a PS2. Maybe the whole film was story-boarded as a Machinima, which might explain the odd use of props (flashlights?). Hopefully, the remaining episodes in the series will take a bit more advantage of the Moscow location, particularly the “Stalin Gothic” skyscrapers that would look great being destroyed by the Sta-Puffed marshmallow man.

It seems oddly retrograde to be talking about “the battle of the sexes” in the post-feminist landscape of 2005, (unless we’re discussing the latest Road Rules/Real World challenge), but fundamentally, the dramatic conflict of the heteronormative relationship is as essential to cinema history as gangsters or vampires and just as gory. Comedy, the screwball comedy, is predicated on a power struggle leading up to, within, or post- marriage. The terrors of married life, as Guy Maddin puts it in the epilogue of Cowards Bend the Knee (review forthcoming), are most explicitly evoked in the comedies of Preston Sturges, where the strong female character of the pre-code comedies has devolved into a capricious force of nature capable of destroying a man’s life at a whim.

The post-feminist evolution of the comedy brought the male/female protagonists to equality - but what an equality! All the rough edges were shorn away, and the conflict resolution of these films had the mates fitting together like sticky, overdetermined puzzle pieces. Recently, especially in your standard TV sitcom, we often see a new paradigm - the ineffectual man-schlub and his bossy (but hot, very hot, wife).

The problem with these reversals and “subversions” of gendered traits is that they’re boring and predictable, and most of the joy of going to a movie is in being surprised. While an explicitly homosocial screwball is theoretically possible, the audience for such a comedy still remains slim, not to mention the other hazards involved. How can a non-sexist, non-boring power dynamic (for power in a relationship is always dynamic. No two partners are equally successful, equally talented, equally good-looking - unless they’re Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) be created in a relationship comedy?

2003’s Secretary hinted at the answer: Turn the implicit power relationship explicit, whether in an S&M context, or with the husband and wife trying to blow each other up with bombs, shooting each other with guns, or literally kicking each other while they’re down. Moreso than the overrated Sin City was a “hyper-noir,” Mr. and Mrs. Smith is a “hyper-screwball,” and it doesn’t make a lick of sense. This tale of married paid killers ends in a re-marriage - an orgy of gunfire and faceless corpses. How does this restore balance to the male/female relationship? Well, it doesn’t. It establishes an equilibrium of Asshole and Douche in a relationship with the World - the profane universe outside the sacred marriage - as Hammett.

Director Doug Liman was responsible for 1996’s Swingers, perhaps the clearest example of Asshole/Douche confusion in recent cinema history. The lead character in that film, who I will call Jon Favreau, acts like he is a Douche - trying to maximize his douche behavior for personal success. However, this strategy clearly does not work out for him. It is only when he realizes that he is fact an Asshole and acts according that he gains power (ie, women). The key to knowing which role one plays in a relation is to figure out what you want:

What does Asshole want?
The Asshole wants her way. She cares about how getting her way or not getting her way makes her feel.

What does Douche want?
The Douche wants his partner to feel how he feels. When the partner doesn’t feel the same way, the douche is hurt. The Douche’s primary concern is how the other person is making him feel (about himself).

As my gendered pronouns indicate, in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the male characters is the Douche, the female, the Asshole. Brad Pitt’s douche is constantly setting up needy “trust tests” for Mrs. Smith to take (ie, not kill him). He is passive-aggressively giving up power (the power of life and death) in order to find out how his partner really feels about him. So he puts himself in a booby trapped elevator, lays down his gun, asks the Asshole to tango. Asshole Angelina Jolie, who is explicitly a “dom” in one scene, totally edits out any information that Pitt’s character might have a different opinion than hers. She is completely focused on her self and her work.

It is only in the heat of combat (and sex) that the Asshole and Douche are able to lay aside their conflict and “switch” a bit. The part in the movie that got the biggest laughs was when Pitt repeatedly booted a fallen Jolie (though she was behind an overturned sofa) in a sissy-esque manner. At the end of the film, after the carnage, we’re treated to a scene where Pitt brags about how much sex he’s gotten recently.

Obviously, a world in which people act as Assholes or Douches is a nihilistic one. There’s no outside referent to the rectitude of behavior. The fact that the characters occupations are Assassins is telling. At one point, they reveal to each other that they never lose sleep over killing someone. In earlier Assassin comedies, for example, Grosse Point Blank, the Assassin at least has some bad feelings about what he does, though the wholesale slaughter is still played for laughs. Here, the film goes all the way, taking the “Us against the world” theme of marriage comedies and turning the outside world into literal nobodies, who can be killed with no consequences whatsover. However, at some point, the killing has to end. Am I right? At that point, this relationship is going to be in deep trouble.

What’s clear is that in order for this relationship to thrive, there must be a Hammett involved, and I’m not talking about the therapist (all Hammetts, incidentally). May I suggest Mr. and Mrs. and Junior Smith?

Mr. and Mrs. Smith has joined the Summer Movie Comparison Chart. It’s playing everywhere.

As well as being an excuse for routinely showing Barbara Stanwyck in her underwear, William Wellman’s Night Nurse is a comedy about ethics. It’s not for nothing that we’re shown Stanwyck’s probationary nurse Lora Hart proudly take her nurse’s oath, various doctor’s declaim about their obligations to patients and other doctors, and even bootleggers talk about what is or isn’t ethically acceptable to them. The conflict in the story is between professional obligation and personal morality, and it’s ironic that the only character in which these spheres overlap completely is the bootlegger, a swell sociopath on the model of Cagney’s gangster in Wellman’s The Public Enemy of the same year.

From taking a punch from Clark Gable to giving a child a milk bath (with stolen milk supplied by her gangster pal), Stanwyck brings her tough girl style to the role, though it’s a shame there’s not as much soft-focus heat as in, say, Baby Face. The picture is filled with vivid supporting characters, from the throat-clearing head nurse, to the pyschotic doctor with the twitchy eye, and Nick, the chauffeur, Gable in jodhpurs.

Fans of Stanwyck and pre-code comedy should definitely see this if it’s playing in repertory near you. I saw it at MoMA this weekend in a restored print. Incidentally, a MoMA membership is the best $75 value in New York City. It entitles you to a year of free admission to the museum, as well as free admission to all screenings, as well as reduced admission for guests.

First off, the infamous octopus eating scene? Really cool. I’m not some sort of raw food iconoclast and I don’t self-identify with Renfield or anything but I can see that after a decade and a half of fried dumplings, one would want to eat something fresh, you know what I mean? I suppose the symbolism of the octopus has to be linked with the other being that protagonist Oh-Dae Su promises to eat alive - his tormenter, the guy who kept him imprisoned for 15 years without explanation and who must have metaphorical tentacles in every corner of Oh-Dae Su’s life, but just as Oh-Dae Su chokes on the octopus, he….

Let’s stop here for a second. Part of the tendancy I like to call creeping Fincherism, beside the over-fondness for sick greens and mauves in the production design and the desire to move the camera like a spastic playing a car racing video game, is the purposeful insertion of plot “spoilers” (to use the geek argot) that preclude any serious discussion of why or why not a film works, story-wise, unless you want to give the game away to potential viewers. On the one hand, placing the viewer on the same epistemological level as the protagonist (various levels of ignorance) is, you know, in line with certain of my modernist sympathies, but on the other hand, how many times can one’s fictional world get TURNED UPSIDE down before the gesture becomes rote and meaningless? There is a certain kind of nihilism evident in this tendancy - that the agent in the world of the film will never, ever know anything until it’s too late - never know who is controlling their fate, why their fate is being controlled, and just how extensive fate is being controlled. As far as that goes, it’s sort of baby-grade existentialist, but then the conventions of narrative filmmaking require that the plot MUST be explained, and heck, its the work of a superheroically intelligent and/or rich individual WHO FUCKS WITH YOUR REALITY, man, and I can’t abide by that. There’s no DUDE like that, just like you don’t like in God’s potemkin village. The “reveal” is philosophically and cinematically meaningless, and as such these films more or less suck. There’s no need to treat your audience like children in order to build “suspense.” I’m firmly on the side of dramatic irony, where the audience knows more or less what’s going to happen to the protagonist but is forced to look on in horror as he tries and fails to avoid his fate. THAT’s suspense.

So what do you get from Oldboy besides this Fincherism? Not a whole lot. The plot, as such, doesn’t make a lick of sense, unless you buy that there are people out there who really CAN control you and have the whim to do it. The violence can be excrutiating, and the denouement, well, is totally expected and gruesome. It’s a well made film, within the context of it’s genre, but I certainly don’t think it’s a very good film.

There’s nothing more disreputable than fundamentalism, even when the infallible holy text to which the devotee pays obeisance is the Word of a half-crazy* anarcho-libertarian with a severe design sense and a warped sense of humor. The literal, humorless** fidelity of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) to Frank Miller’s comic books somehow manages to warp to the parodic sentimentality and brutality of the source to such an extent that they’re no longer parodic - they’re bathetic. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the take-away of Sin City (the film) is that, as two of the protagonists say, there’s some things decent people*** weren’t meant to see, but they’re necessary in the pursuit of justice. That’s a fascist message, even if we, the audience, are implicated in the category of not-decent people since we’re watching the carnage on screen and presumably getting a kick out of it.

It may be too much to expect a responsible politico-moral stance from the Rodriguez/Tarantino axis. The early films of Tarantino were dismissed as being reprehensibly violent but at least they coupled that violence with a knowing, ironic distance****. Kill Bill and Sin City are all about KICKS, but the former is not as irresponsible as the latter because the former’s mission of vigilante justice is altogether personal, while the vigilantes of Sin City are a reaction to the amoral WORLD of Noir (and presumably, early 21st century America). It’s a political statement even if it’s unwitting, even if the point of the film was to be about the art.

Which, I have to say, is pretty good. It could have been better, as Rodriguez is not a great director, but the effects were marvelous. I have no problem with the movie itself; my problem is with the project, and it’s hard to take a moral stand against something without coming off as Bill Bennett. But although my lifestyle and tastes would most likely be considered as degenerate by much of the U.S., I feel like I have to object to the mainstreaming of the ethos that lead, not altogether hyperbolically, to Abu Ghraib and the idea that being Right is license to do anything in the pursuit of justice. Sure, the protagonists of Sin City are psychologically sick but they’re be more or less normal in the context of contemporary political discourse, and the further normalization of the anti-rule-of-law position without explicit (or even much implicit) condemnation is an unwise project.
— – ———-
In addition to the faithful reproductions of comic book panels, there’s another interesting kind of reproductive dialogue going on here, with Sin City being shot on digital, produced digitally, distributed digitally and (when I saw it, though obviously not widespread yet) digitally projected. Someone want to go Benjamin on this?

* though not as comic creators seem to go
** the movie itself, however, can be funny
*** in the film, all women
****though this creeping Tarantinoism was the bane of 90s cinema just as creeping Fincherism is turning out to be the bane of the 00s.