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.

(this is suddenly timely again, given the film’s release on DVD/onDemand. So I am plopping it here even though the Face Knife is still not 100%. For more ephemeral stuff, visit How’s Yr Face? until stuff gets reorganized here.)

Wong Kar-Wai’s first English language film is an epic, in the sense that the scope of the bad decisions made regarding story, dialogue, shot choice, editing, casting, and music cues place it in a class by itself among films made by highly regarded, established auteurs. It is an utterly terrible movie and therefore I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and I wish to see it again, immediately. It’s not often that you can enjoy such an extreme collection of miscalculations by one of the most respected filmmakers in the world, and as such the film deserves to be treasured and studied for all time.

Ostensibly a film about lost souls and the geographic and emotional distances between them, My Blueberry Nights is also a road movie - if one were to take a standard road movie and:
(a) elide 90% of the actual travel
(b) pare down the usual number of Significant Encounters With Strangers to about three; and
(c) feature a main character whose capacity for introspection is stymied by an intellect capable of being confused by the difference between meatloaf and pork chops.

Played by famous musician Norah Jones in her first acting job, Elizabeth is an ultra-naif who makes the aimless Scarlett Johansson character in Lost in Translation look like Hillary Clinton in comparison. Don’t get me wrong - I have nothing against ultra-naifs, but they also need to be cutely retarded (cf Chungking Express, Amelie, most of the career of Samantha Morton) in order to sustain interest in their antics. We don’t really get a whole lot of quirky shenanigans in this film, and while that might seem to be a good thing in light of the recent overwhelmingly “twee” trend that has threatened to engulf cinema like a comfy, woolen tidal wave made during someone’s L Train knitting sessions, shenanigans would have been preferable to watching a total blank slate try and fail to come up with an identity for herself over 90 minutes (and however many miles/days the intertitles claimed for this beige night of the soul).

The story (as such) is set in motion when handsome and totally unbelievable restaurateur Jeremy (Jude Law) inadvertently reveals to Jones, via his charming ability to remember customers by their food orders, that her boyfriend is cheating on her. She freaks out and repeatedly visits the restaurant in order to semi-stalk her ex, an opportunity Law siezes to ply her with free pies and free metaphors about pies (as well as keys and other really obvious bullshit - god help them, they live in a world where people communicate solely through bad short story level symbolism - it makes the “dropping Dad’s luggage” scene in The Darjeeling Limited look fresh by comparison). The turning point of their would-be meet-cute romance occurs when both characters simultaneously acquire bloody noses from separate acts of random violence and Jones devours an entire Roofieberry Pie, which causes her to fall unconscious, thus allowing Law to lick ice cream remnants from her face.

Waking up with no memory of her formerly a la mode face and how it came to be cream-free, Jones decides to run away from her life by heading on a bus to Memphis. Her Hero’s Journey from depressed ultra-naif to not-depressed ultra-naif is symbolized by the adoption of various versions of her first name (Lizzy, Betty, Beth, Zabby, E-Liz, etc.) during her stint as a cross-country waitress. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to acquire a personality in the process. For someone who spends a year on the road waitressing she surprisingly only meets three totally fucked up characters who might Change Her Life: Alcoholic cop David Strathairn, his ex-wife Rachel Weisz (I think we are supposed to assume she is somewhat crazy because she left him) in Memphis, and conniving Texas Hold’em master Natalie Portman somewhere in Nevada. Jones is apparently waitressing to save up money for a car, which sort of doesn’t make any sense because she seems to be pretty mobile via bus, and the first thing she does after buying the car is drive straight back to New York City.

During Jones’s titanic journey, an inexplicably haunted Law tries to track her down, first by calling every bar and grill in Memphis (his efforts are stymied because, duh, she changes her name) and then by sending the exact same handwritten postcard to every bar and grill in Memphis. His year-long obsessive compulsive creepiness is interrupted only by his Russian ex-girlfriend Katya (Cat Power), who is responsible for one of the worst line-readings in cinematic history (though thankfully no one saw fit to ask her to attempt an accent), although it results in you know, an epiphany, about like keys and doors and people or something.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for the actors, because they were really given nothing to work with. Every character has a backstory that only exists in barely-there exposition, and I don’t think there’s a way to convincingly speak the alternately on-the-nose and corny dialogue. The extreme lack of action taking place in the present wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the characters were sharply drawn, but instead of conveying emotions through a precise choice of words WKW grafts some incredibly overused stylistic devices onto the scenes in order to convey those inner depths. Half of the movies is shot through obscuring glass windows and the like, making it look like photographer Lee Friedlander was lobotomized in the late 90s and forced to shoot a Molson Ice commercial. And Wong Kar-Wai apparently believes not only that every single internal emotion a person feels can be cinematically expressed through the use of slow-motion but that every single internal emotion a person feels MUST be cinematically expressed through the use of slow-motion, a tendency that reaches its apotheosis in a useless slow-motion sequence of Jones eating a sandwich while she ruminates on a business proposition put to her by Portman. It is almost a parody of his style, like a first year film school student roped in a bunch of his prettiest friends and decided to make a Wong Kar-Wai movie.

Those aren’t even the goofiest conceits in the movie. The film begins with a montage of close-up, molten piescapes that seethe with hidden emotions and also berries. While mouthwatering, these are exceedingly silly, especially when a dollop of melty ice cream is added to drip suggestively off the lip of the plate (and that’s as sexy as this incredibly chaste film gets). There are recurrent inserts of the piescapes throughout the film, which never failed to make me giggle. Repetition is also a feature of the soundtrack, as bits and pieces of source music are repeated throughout the film, tied to a specific locale and/or character pair. When the scenes between Law and Jones at the beginning of the film were scored to “The Greatest” by Cat Power, one after the other with no intervening music, my hopes were briefly raised that EVERY SINGLE scene in the film would be set to that song, (kind of like that Andy Samberg SNL parody of the OC/Imogen Heap) but it was not to be.

Look, do yourself a favor, get together with your most smart-alecky friends and go see this movie in the theater before it deservedly disappears. Ninety minutes of enjoyment can be had by simply exchanging incredulous looks as each bit of dialogue happens, and if you’re a tiny, tiny person (like me) maybe you’ll feel a little bit of satisfaction that even a creditable genius can crash and burn spectacularly.

(just a short squib, even though everything here is still not 100%. For more ephemeral stuff, visit How’s Yr Face? until stuff gets reorganized here.

The 800+ Year-Old Virgin, or, We are all idiot man-children now, even the robots.

Even though I really liked Wall-E, and though it was adorable and clever and fun, I have this irresistable urge to start cutting on it. Basically, my problem with Wall-E is that the heteronormative romance projected onto the robot protagonists is just another variation on the schlub/hottie dynamic that has been ruling romantic comedies in TV and movie formats for years. I mean, think about it:

(trying not to really SPOIL anything by spelling it out).

1.) Lonely male robot living by himself with a collection of odd pop culture ephemera.

2.) Lonely male robot has a menial job obviously beneath his skills.

3.) Meets cute with a much more put-together, driven and dynamic (not to mention more aerodynamically designed) female.

4.) Who somehow unaccountably falls for him, even though he is capable of communicating his feelings on the most basic and primal level.

5.) Then, he puts his seed in her.

6.) They’re separated by her career

7.) He has to win her back through haphazard though valiant effort.

8.) Which of course works, but only because:

9.) he gains a supporting cast of even more schlubby defectives who help him , and:

10.) the love of a hot chick inspires a loser man-child to face up to it, and do great deeds.

11.) She gives up her career for him.

This begs for a chart of some sort. Sigh. Too bad I gave up on doing that.

My review of the zombie satire Fido (2007) has been posted on The Movie Binge. Do check it out. I’ve referenced American Beauty and Tim Burton as signposts for the mediocrity of this film (which is not to unequivocably praise either of those two entities, particularly the former, which I despise).

Due to a technical hiccup, you’ll have to wait til tomorrow for The Summer Movie Comparison Chart 2007 update featuring Michael Moore’s Sicko. Do come back!

My review of Michael Moore’s new documentary Sicko has just been posted to The Movie Binge, which you should be visiting anyway, because a lot of very fine and very funny writers including the contributors to the The Summer Movie Comparison Chart 2007, which as you know is so effing funny, post reviews there. Tell your friends about the Binging.

Tomorrow: Sicko added to the chart (for reals!) and Fido review posted (double for reals!). Come back!

It is all too easy to be embarrassed by a movie like The Fountain. Writers get to hide their most outlandish scientific speculations and half-assed religious syncretisms behind the rubric of “the Novel of Ideas” but someone like Darren Aronofsky (Pi, the abysmal Requiem for a Dream) is stuck actually showing us a bald Hugh Jackman and his tiny, tiny ears in a bubble made of Karma ascending through the Xibalba Nebula. That’s some hard shit to pull off, particularly with a contemporary science fiction/fantasy film’s necessary reliance on show-off CGI artistes, but although I’m not anywhere closer to believing that death is just a cosmic new beginning, I do think that Aronofsky made a good-looking (and with apparently ground-breaking visual effects*), emotionally involving film based on the idea (or is it a misprision?) that the human race is in exile from a decidedly Earthly paradise.

Personally, 2006 provided more than ample evidence that we live in a fallen world,** and while I’m not sure that gobbling all the “ethnobotanicals” in the world is going to do much to assuage that maybe you want to check erowid.org or the works of Terence McKenna or Daniel Pinchbeck for an alternate point of view. ***

Aronofsky’s ideas are not quite so shroomed-out as those of the psychonauts above, but they come from a similar desire to impose meaning and order on the World. The Fountain traces a tripartite struggle to find the key to the redemption of the Flesh over a period of a thousand years, but the film moves along at a brisk pace and we are not as encumbered by plot or exposition as is normal in such films. This being a Hollywood movie, part of the metanarrative is that to escape our fallen nature you must embrace monogamous, heterosexual love and romance as the end all and be all to life - until you die. Then flowers shoot or roman candles shoot out of your abdomen or something. That sounds very painful but it looks really cool.

The main point of The Fountain seems to be that be you an ascending Buddha, a cancer-riddled novelist or warrior for Spain, there is a “good” way to die. Being a neurotic New Yorker, I just want to lapse into Woody Allen-esque jokes here but it might be good to engage with the ideas of the film. On the one hand, there’s the cryptic line uttered by a Mayan priest - “Death is the road to awe.” I’m not sure what that means, but when a guy decorated with more body parts than Leatherface’s cottage is shouting it at you as he’s about to decapitate you with a flaming sword, it gets you to think about it. Not sure it’s going to become anyone’s catchphrase, though.

The Fountain is not all about the persistence of metaphysical notions like the Soul or Love, and that’s what makes the movie itself, in the end, redeemable. The body and the various urges to accept or deny it are portrayed in some sharp vignettes. For instance, one of the film’s villains is another of the recent parade of cinematic, literal, gory self-flagellants, and the most heroic character, as part of the progress of her death, loses the ability to feel any physical pain (however, this reveal comes right after she’s enjoyed a sloppy bathtub shagging, and the subject is not broached whether or not she has lost the ability to feel pleasure either).

I don’t think very many people’s minds are going to be blown by The Fountain, at least the way Aronofsky intends them to be blown, but it is nice to see a science fiction epic that pushes the medium forward in new and cinematic ways.

* The “space” effects were generated using macro-photography of chemical and bacterial reactions. See Wikipedia.
**and indeed, there were a spate of similarly apocalyptic films released at the end of the year (Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men and, er, Apocalypto), each of which I hope to engage individually in the coming days, as it proved too intimidate a task to combine all into one essay
*** Oh, and like the film, for optimal effect make sure your room is decorated with subtle, tasteful patterns and mandalas (even the hospital glass had some arabesques applied) to provide a nice floorshow as you transcend consciousness or whatever.

Although I object to his utterances on women, Jews, blacks and just about everything else, I do feel a certain amount of empathy for Borat. It’s not because I have an arsenal of annoying, widely imitated catchphrases or that I can grow a mustache* with enough volume to qualify for a job as an assistant janitor, but because, I too, have embarked upon several crash-courses in self-improvement in order to conquer my ignorance, and I too, have made a mess of every single opportunity. Including college. Especially college. The fact that Borat is way funnier than any of my tales of dumbassery is testament to the fact that nothing is so hilarious as ignorance. Except when it’s morally and/or physically terrifying. But even then. Still funny.

I have omitted the sub-title of the film from my heading as it is certain to mess up my fragile style sheets, but (as you probably know) it’s “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” or something to that affect. My attempts at acquiring ‘learnings’ have never served a patriotic purpose but I’ve been guilty of pidgin in about as many languages as I have fingers on my non-wiping hand. As my unwieldy and largely unread (but still impressive) library can attest, my quest for Knowledge have ranged quixotically across branches of the Tree that I have no business crawling out on, given the limited dexterity of my brain. I should stick to the low-hanging fruit, like television or psychology.

Borat’s mission in the film is a little narrower, as the venue is not political or industrial or scientific or artistic, but social in nature. The “Cultural Learnings” of the titles are really the values of the citizens of the U.S. that enable the country to be the world leader in areas other than the export of Potassium, which is all that Kazakhstan is good for.

Of course, I mean the “Kazakhstan” of the film, which famously is a debased, medieval culture nothing like that country in reality. The main joke of the film is that the U.S. turns out to have just as disgusting values when you throw a mirror up to it. But let me return circle back to that point later, as in order to get to a discussion of values it is necessary to relate how they are transmitted, and the demonically clever way Borat parodies the learning process.

Despite the best efforts of trainers in formal seminars on such subjects as What is Funny, What is Feminism, What are Good Social Manners, and How to Talk Like a Black Person, Borat misses the point on every occasion, managing in nearly every case to spectacularly offend the person trying to educate him. “Missing the point” means that Borat has been unable to grasp the intention behind an utterance, even if he thinks he has a grasp of the form.

The best and funniest example of this is when Borat is talking with former Republican presidential case and noted nutbag (also a “real chocolate face”) Alan Keyes. Borat was describes the previous scene, which was the very fun time he had with some guys he met at a festive parade, whom he took back to his hotel for a scene that very prominently featured a rubber fist. Keyes tells Borat that his new friends were homosexuals, and Borat becomes first confused then enraged, even though there had been a prominent scene of intramural basket-cupping and implied more strenuous activity. That sequence is like The History of Sexuality combusting before our eyes. Borat’s actions are completely divorced of the codes he has available to describe them, and thus his values are totally dissonant and ridiculous.

The only time he gets the actions-codes-values equation right is when, towards the end of the film, as a penniless tramp, he “stumbles” on a Christian Revival meeting and manages to Speak in Tongues properly, reducing the babble of the film to its ultimate zero point, where empty values meet empty form meet empty intentions in the body of a diabolic imposter.

I can’t deny that it’s fun to watch the codes of ignorance and hypocrisy detonate like TNT in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but playing with loaded signifiers (e.g. the aforementioned “chocolate face” and numerous other less ludicrous locutions) in order to entertain a mass audience is a questionable choice, particularly because a huge part of the audience is the people you’re parodying in the first place. Maybe this questioning of values will fuck people’s Reality Tunnels so that they’re loose like a wizard’s sleeve, but is the fun he makes of people - real people with real lives - justified morally or ethically?

In a recent interview, Adam McKay, who directed Borat in this summer’s Talladega Nights, mentions that a favorite movie among this coterie of comics is Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. The Phantom of Liberty is not one of my favorite Bunuels, precisely because I think the premise is childish compared to other Bunuel films, and that premise is pretty much the same thing as Borat’s - values and the rituals we use to sustain them are arbitrary and oh hey here’s some short-circuited vignettes like people pooping around a table. The main difference is that Bunuel, in my opinion, was at his core a humanist, in that he loves humanity in all its flawed glory, whereas Borat, despite the “happy” ending with the prostitute (who is a figure of fun, not of any real respect) does not. There is no sense in Borat that humanity has any capacity for anything greater than what it is, or that it should even bother trying, and even the crappy Talladega Nights, which tackles the same crass culture as Borat, has that. Borat’s inability to learn and Borat’s suggestion that ignorance make it impossible to take any larger political points about the U.S. as seriously as they could be taken.

*Without a doubt, “Best Facial Hair” is going to be the most competitive category at this year’s Knifies Biennial .

Rage Against the Machine, Brooklyn Style
Recently, a friend of mine was trying to get me to argue with her about which is cooler, believing in free will or believing in determinism. Not that my opinion about what’s cool is so great, mind you - the request was directed at a number of people, most of whom are probably way more equipped to answer this question, and I can only be considered cool in so far as that I can come off as monosyllabic and aloof on most social occasions. Or is that being a creep? I forget. Anyway, not being long on style, I, as is my nature, avoided the question by flippantly observing that I only believe in over-determinism. Causes are multiple and of varying magnitudes, and end up limiting possible outcomes in ways that are unforeesable to you but totally fucking transparent to all your smart friends. No matter how much you whine about it, you’re probably just going to keep doing what you’ve been doing, whether it’s working some stupid cubicle job or writing badly proofread movie reviews or smoking crack in the elementary school bathroom.

Half Nelson is about a school teacher (Ryan Gosling) with a passion for dialectics, girls’ basketball and some of that “other stuff,” as his dealer calls it, (you and I call it crack). It’s also a film about the dissolution of idealism when the idealist can no longer reconcile his passion to change the world with the multiple and seemingly contradictory ways the world presents itself. His relationship with one of his students, Drey, (Shareeka Epps), whose world is a daily play of unstable oppositions, is the prism through which the light of idealism is hopelessly split. I guess the crack is a factor, too, though at first it seems like the only real side effect is forgetting to shave. But later in the film his cat dies! I don’t think the cat smokes crack, though. At least not on camera. Maybe feline crack smoking is implied. The cat thing is probably the part of the film I disliked the most, and if something as small as that is the largest hole I can poke, it should be obvious that I recommend this film.

There seems to be a critical consensus that when the film limits its portrayal of inner city school life to basketball matches and such it is succesful, while the interjection of overtly political material that’s not directly related to the narrative as such is a bad thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily true - I prefer to think of the interludes with the kids staring directly at the camera reciting factoids about Salvador Allende or whatever being as being a resurrection of the Brecht/Godard alienation effect, here placed strategically in a film with more mainstream, traditional virtues like strong characters, excellent acting and a decent if amorphous plot. Yeah, it’s sort of embarrassing, in the sense that I can embarrassed for anyone so earnest, but that’s a problem all of us very cool people (I lied, earlier) seem to have.

The discussions about dialectics are another issue. Gosling’s character talks about incremental change, that forces are always in conflict but that change is possible and even inevitable given enough time. Um, no. If this film has a moral message, it’s that we are all part of the machine, we are trapped in the superstructure and that the values that the “good” people of the world try to uphold have just as a tenuous relationship to the everyday experience of life as the values we impute to the “bad” people. Dialectics can be seen as the process of humankind’s alienation from and reconciliation to the material world through the creations of institutions like religion, prisons, schools, and while it’s nice to believe that historical materialism is inevitable perhaps it’s best not to do so when all you can think about is getting high. Or if some of my college roommates are any evidence, maybe it is.

While theoretically the world is spiralling ever upwards through the process of teleological change, one inescapable fact of life gives the lie to that. Say hello, mom and dad. Half Nelson shares with 2006’s mediocre junkie flick Sherrybaby a familial party sequences where some unresolved issues are revealed, but while Sherrybaby’s scene of paternal malfeasance is a melodramatic shocker that immediately drives her back into the arms of heroin (or more to the point, drives heroin back into her arms), Half Nelson’s scene is more a slow-burner, with the now-morbid 60s style liberalism of his parents turning into a hypocrisy that threatens to undermine everything they ever staged a sit-in against, if those gains hadn’t already been swallowed up by corporatism and the other unstoppable institutions that are crushing my, excuse me, our lives.

Like the character, the film “bottoms out” leaving us with a sense that things could go either way, for him, Drey, Brooklyn or the world. The future of Gosling, Epps and filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden seems not so dim, however. I look forward to their next projects and hope that some of the more radical elements of their filmmaking and politics are not recuperated by the kudos Half Nelson has received. The experimental and political parts of the film, while modest by some standards, are to be encouraged and not dismissed as half measures.

Fuck the cinema of nostalgia. Give any exile from the land of Selfawaria a camera and with some shaky hand-held shots, soft-focus, and all the right pop hits on the soundtrack they can manage to sentimentalize even the most brutal and scarring material from their formative years. But it takes a real tough and real poetic vision to relate those same stories with the grace that Dito Montiel brings to his autobiographical first feature, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

Saints is a story the impossibility of escaping your certain boundaries until situations become such that *poof* the chains fall from your body and you are free. It?s also a story about a father and a son, a story about a boy and his friends, and a story about a time and a place. You can?t choose to whom you were born, where you were born or when you were born, but it?s sometimes nice to think that everything afterwards can be up to you. Unfortunately, we?re cast out into a superstructure of values that constrict our possibility for change, and sometimes the arbitrariness and contradictions of those values hit home like a baseball bat to the head. The cognitive dissonance that comes from being a part of something but possessing the realization that it?s totally fucked up can be the force that leads to change and liberation, or the force that leads to the narcissism of the nationalist or sociopath (of which Saints has a good variety).

Spilling your guts about the misspent youth of you and your friends is usually the act of a self-aggrandizing egomaniac, but you never get the sense that Montiel is turning his past into a mythic playground of heroes and monsters. The violence, when it comes, is swift, scary and brutal, as it should be. It?s not a learning process or sentimentalized, and there’s not a withholding of judgment that sometimes happens in this kind of neighborhood story.

Saints unfolds with a dream-time rhythm, a staccato jumping back and forth, settling for a while in one time, one place, one mode before jumping to another. The film acknowledges and embraces the peculiar characteristics of memory through the interesting way it?s edited, but never dwells on these insights or makes them more important than the story. If events didn?t happen the way the film says they happened, if scenes from the past and present converge, there?s no showy moment where the filmmaker reveals the modernist pinking shears that allowed him to quilt together these different solids and patterns.

My favorite sequence in the film, which is almost indelible, even, is when the actors playing Dito and his teenage friends walk directly up to the character and speak a line about themselves (e.g. Channing Tatum, as Antonio, the hunky petty criminal who enjoys playing handball with Dito’s dad “I am a piece of shit”). It?s like you?re seeing how Dito remembers them, seeing them in his mind?s eye, as they were probably never in real life, even as the scene quickly shifts back to the ?real time? of 80s Astoria.

Memory as a subject for art is a risky business. You can easily fall into some sub-Rashomon bullshit about the self-serving nature of memory, or overlapping subjectivities or even confuse personal memory with history, but Montiel anchors his memories onto the lines of Robert Downey Jr.?s face, in that actor?s most restrained performance of the year. Dito/Downey gained his freedom by leaving his family and leaving New York, which is dramatized in a devastating scene between Shia LeBeouf (the teenage Dito) and Chazz Palminteri, playing the father who undoubtedly loves him but gives him all the wrong messages.

Only, Dito hasn?t yet quite come to terms with the freedom. Downey?s face is heavy with guilt, and his life seems poisoned by the thought that he did the wrong thing to leave, and I think that?s a mistake. It is certainly a sign of maturity and grace to realize that freedom is only worthwhile if it is coupled with a responsibility to others, but there?s a balance to be maintained that a precious few are able to sustain, and sometimes, if only for a period of time we have to separate ourselves people we love in order to make the changes necessary to be more free and more responsible to ourselves.

Please refer to my exhaustive lab report on Jackass Number Two at The Movie Binge