A bloodied Travis is congratulated by his mother in "This Wrestling Life."

(Stephen Gillis, 2010)

September 7, 2010

by Joel Crary

The wrestlers in “This Wrestling Life” pull no punches about their ambitions. At the end of their road are today’s two biggest promotions: World Wrestling Entertainment and Total Nonstop Action. To describe their training en route as work in the trenches would be too hard on trenches. “The second I found out I was in a hardcore match, I just couldn’t wait,” newcomer Travis admits with a smile on his face. After the match, he’ll be covered in blood from a self-inflicted wound, his horrified mother looking on, his father encouraging him to keep living the dream.

That’s the type of bizarre kinsmanship that the men and women of indie promotion Extreme Canadian Championship Wrestling share. Their dream is a communal one. It’s what gets them to the gymnasiums and community centres, what inspires them to wrack their bodies in front of small groups of spectators, and what motivates them through 5 a.m. boot camp drills, where the buff sergeants refuse to take excuses. They congregate at the Slam Academy, a loading dock in Port Coquitlam, B.C., with skids and forklifts where a JumboTron should be. “Some of them won’t make it through a few matches. Most of them won’t make it through a few years,” lead trainer and ECCW champion Scotty Mac observes. In an environment like this, why would they bother?

Mac is quite a guy. His isn’t an easy gig. A bartender by day, he’s been wrestling the independent circuit for about a decade and training new ECCW recruits. Most professionals start early and don’t wrestle much farther north of 40. Now about 30, Mac’s sights remain set on WWE stardom, but at 5′9″ and just over 200 pounds, he doesn’t fit the muscleman profile of the federation’s top contenders. What keeps him going? “It may not be the WWE, but it’s mine. I need it. I need them,” he confesses. For a guy in Mac’s position, wrestling is an identity, bouts very real successes and failures, opponents family.

The central personalities are unique enough to make “This Wrestling Life” compelling viewing. The film follows Mac; 18-year-old Travis, who signs on with the Slam Academy and is introduced to the demanding schedule of training and shows; Bill, a 40-year-old telemarketer with a midlife crisis and a desire to be a referee (even a ref’s technique requires finesse and the ability to take a bump); and Natalie, a grown tomboy whose procrastination and flightiness get her assigned to selling 50-50 tickets to rows of local fans in folding chairs. First-time director Stephen Gillis has a nice sense of flow, balances their experiences well and, importantly, treats each experience with the respect of a good storyteller.

Bill is an especially rare competitor. Openly gay, he recognizes the contradictions between the homoerotic elements of professional wrestling and the homophobic rhetoric that can pollute its storylines and catcalls. When a group of wrestlers start playfighting and hand Bill a pretty harsh beating, Gillis is smart to reveal it as the brutal schoolyard gang-up it is. It would have been all too convenient to portray Bill as nothing more than an oddball, but treating him sympathetically lends the film a greater amount of depth and pulls its themes out of the realm of the pea-brained geek show.

“This Wrestling Life” follows its subjects through to graduation from the Slam Academy, sealed with a series of knife-edge chops to the chest. I wish it had been able to contrast the indie circuit lifestyle a little more effectively with the grandeur of the WWE and TNA big leagues (licensing complications probably prevented that from happening). While Gillis plants his roots a little too firmly into reality show conventions, his inside look at a lower rung of the professional wrestling ladder surprises with its intelligence and sincerity. These people are genuine, even if most will find what they do utterly mad.

“This Wrestling Life” is currently playing on Super Channel digital stations in Canada until September 9th and on Super Channel On Demand until September 13th. It will also be a part of Salon des Refusés Atlantique on September 18th in Halifax, N.S. For more information, visit www.thiswrestlinglife.com.

Jack takes aim in "The American."

(Anton Corbijn, 2010)

September 5, 2010

by Joel Crary

In scene after scene of “The American,” George Clooney sits or stands, his chiseled chin catching any available light it can, his eyes staring ponderously off to a spot out of frame. Sometimes he’s in the corner of the shot, or sandwiched against the very bottom. Sometimes he’s captured in closeup, where the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes – all but screaming “I look better with age” out loud – shift ever so slightly. We’re always precisely aware of the space around him, and Clooney tries his best to look obsessed with his surroundings without showing any emotion. Nothing happens, and then it happens all over again in another part of town.

It creates a palpable sense of paranoia. At any moment, out of the darkness could come… Well, who, exactly? It’s impossible to be sure. Paranoia comes with the terrain of a character like Clooney’s “Jack,” who without explaining much about himself fosters the impression that his lifestyle as a weapons assembler, or hitman, or whatever goes back a long way. “The American” opens with three violent murders, and the shock of the violence, unfolding in a desolate part of Sweden, teases that the rest of the film will be another gritty exercise in the modern Bond/Bourne vein of action drama.

Then things slow. Jack befriends a priest (Paolo Bonacelli), walks with him in a scene echoing Fellini’s “8½”, and balks at confessing untold sins. “You’re an American,” the priest tells him. “You think you can escape history.” Not much about Jack’s history surfaces; his very identity is evasion. The Bond and Bourne films dwell on what makes a heroic killer tick. Rowan Joffe’s script, adapted from Martin Booth’s “A Very Private Gentleman,” feels nearly bereft of exposition, offering up the character of Jack as a man in progress without providing any detail about where he comes from or where he’s going. While the scarcity of dialogue leaves room for Jack to reveal himself through action, he hardly takes any.

The minimal dialogue comes across as though the characters share Pregnant Metaphor as a language. It works, since Jack is a type whose business demands he mask the truth. “I’m bad with machines,” he explains to the priest. Later, he makes the same observation about a cell phone to Pavel (Johan Leysen), his shady contract negotiator. Later still, we see Jack quite aptly using drills and files to modify ammunition. What lesson does that teach? That Jack is a liar, or that he must bend truths selectively, depending on who he chooses to confide in. “Don’t make any friends,” Pavel scolds before offering him retreat from the debacle in Sweden. We picture a man of Jack’s age and experience making that mistake one too many times, costing lives, blowing missions, but still so good at what he does that it’s no surprise he’s made it this far alive.

Jack takes off for Italy and settles apprehensively in Castel del Monte, the type of scenic mountain town ideal for scooter pursuits along cobblestone streets. It’s a wise choice of location, since the stacked dwellings lend the impression that even the landscape is crushing Jack’s last nerve. His final mission is to assemble a lightweight, powerful firearm for a sniper named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). She’s after an unmentioned target, and there’s a hypnotic pastoral sequence where the two test out Jack’s handiwork by a secluded riverbed, exchanging finer-point dialogue about weaponry that’s meant to sound clinical in spite of how attractive these actors are.

The film’s fatal flaw is the casting of Clooney in yet another international man of mystery role, returning too much of the expected result. “The American” might have sailed as a picture had it starred a less obvious actor, someone whose exhaustion and hurt are etched deeper into the lines on his face. Try as I might, I can’t feel sorry for the handsome Jack while he mutely pines for the comfort of a gorgeous prostitute (Violante Placido), nor can I wistfully consider his inability to get close to a woman when he’s doing business with someone of Reuten’s beauty. I like Clooney, especially in his comedic roles, but here the conventional casting choice undercuts the movie’s aims for the unconventional.

Director Anton Corbijn may have tried to film a subtle meditation on the hired-killer life, taking on the project because it wasn’t the type of violent, bass-pumping assassin plot to which we’ve been conditioned after decades of cheap thrills, but his end result feels subdued nearly to the point of immobility. The final shot, recalling an earlier comment about an “endangered species,” is hamfisted. “The American” boasts an effective atmosphere and some inventive tension, but by its conclusion the weight of it dissipates, leaving only thinly conceived characters with no force in their ambitions and no history in their makeup.

Danny Trejo speaks softly and carries a big f**king knife in "Machete."

(Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis, 2010)

September 3, 2010

by Joel Crary

“Machete” debuted as one of the joke trailers preceding the 2007 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino “Grindhouse” double feature, one of the last decade’s bravest pop cinema experiments. Purposefully pocked with the grain found on forgotten exploitation fare and slapped with an X rating, the trailer meant to communicate two things: first, that Rodriguez and many other film fans hold a great affection for those old pieces of crap, and second, that gruff character actor Danny Trejo finally deserves some centre-stage recognition for the hours he’s put in as the resident crazy henchman in countless action features.

I’m not sure where the filming of the full-length “Machete” began after the assembling of that trailer, but the spirit remains the same. An opening sequence kicks things off with grain intact, as Mexican federale Machete busts into the hideout of drug lord Torrez to rescue a kidnap victim and behead a few stunt guys along the way. Torrez is portrayed by Steven Seagal, armed with a katana and ponytail, spitting out threats in Spanish between big honking bites of the scenery. Machete’s wife is dispatched in short order and the lawman is left to burn. Three years later, the grain abates and we’re left to witness Machete scratch and claw his way upward in America. Last stop: sweet revenge.

“Machete” is one of the more ingeniously cast films of the year. A smile comes on when the credits cheekily “introduce” Don Johnson as Von Stillman, a vigilante officer who patrols the Texas/Mexico border, mercilessly opening fire on “illegals” trying to make it across. Riding shotgun with him is Robert De Niro, a Texan senator running for re-election. The first real hint that “Machete”’s aims are to satirize reactionary positions rather than preach them is a shot of Senator McLaughlin’s gleeful mugging for a video camera as he guns down a Mexican youth from the back of a jeep. He’s not simply a stereotypical Texan politician; he’s the Worst Politician of All Time.

Jessica Alba plays Sartana, an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who spends her daytime hours surveying Luz, a taco stand jockey who keeps Mexican labourers in cheap protein. She’s played by Michelle Rodriguez, and the two have the kind of histrionic, cliche-filled conversations about law and human nature that movies like this always portray with adorable sincerity. They’re both types, Alba the officer straddling the hazy line between “the law and what’s right,” Rodriguez the revolutionary with her eye fixed on the inevitable uprising. Both have eyes for Machete, of course, who always has time to get the bad guy and the women, regardless of how much suffering he’s put through by either.

Other broad types abound: McLaughlin’s aide Booth (Jeff Fahey) hires Machete to assassinate the senator and delivers every ultimatum as though he’s dumping trucks full of rocks into a canyon. Cheech Marin pops up as Machete’s hermano, clad in a priest’s garb and offering up priceless one-liners. (“God has mercy. I don’t.”) Lindsay Lohan, no stranger to real-life party girl woes, puts in a sad but effective turn as Booth’s no-good daughter. Even Booth’s bodyguards get in some amusing meta-aware dialogue that makes light of the film’s numerous plot holes. (Why WOULD they simply let a tough-looking SOB like Machete walk by with hefty gardening tools unless the lack of a copacetic script allowed them to do so?)

I heaved a pretty big sigh when “Crash” won the Oscar for best picture a few years back. That film’s unbearable piousness regarding racial hatred in America deflates any honourable intent it purports to exhibit. It unintentionally, and unsuccessfully, blends comedic overreactions with the holier-than-thou observation that, underneath everyone’s political correctness, we’re all a bunch of seething bigots who can’t stand each other – a sad truth that must be recognized in order to combat racism. “Machete” is anything but pious. It treats everyone as a stereotype, knows it, has fun with it, and ultimately does it to show the dangerous lunacy behind any extreme, immovable opinion.

Since the “Machete” trailer pretty well captured Rodriguez’s sentiment for exploitation, I wasn’t sure the concept would work as a feature, or had anything left to metamorphose into. Co-directed by Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis, whose editorial hand was apparent in the gritty found-canister choppiness of “Planet Terror,” the movie ends up being a better example of what Stallone’s recent “Expendables” project was trying to be and embraces its ludicrous us vs. them mentality without glossing over it with a stock plot. Rodriguez puts names and faces associated with action and excess into one melting pot, allows them to boil to eruption, and asks us to lick the spoon. Then Machete grabs the spoon, fashions it into a weapon, and uses that weapon to lop off the noggin of tyranny.

A crowd watches a presentation of "The NeverEnding Story" in East Vancouver's McSpadden Park.

August 31, 2010

by Joel Crary

“The NeverEnding Story” may have been the first film I saw in a cinema. Who remembers? The memory stamp includes moving through an aisle of seats at the old Centre twin theatre on George Street in Peterborough. Was it the first time I’d seen it, or had the Centre been re-running it for parents desperate to keep their kids occupied? The Centre closed its doors the year after the film’s release, so it’s entirely probable that I sat in a chair on a night during the film’s first run, taking in the images and stereo sound, ingesting tiny mittfuls of popcorn, elated at seeing a luck dragon soar across the giant screen, and shrinking in my seat at the terrifying sight of a bloodthirsty monster.

Growing up in the ‘80s meant growing up with home video. I have seen Wolfgang Peterson’s movie countless times, enough that moments of it linger in the brain like burn-in on a plasma television screen. When long ago I asked my mother about the scariest film she’d ever seen, she described moments from the 1962 Bette Davis and Joan Crawford vehicle “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” She probably hadn’t seen the picture in years. Yet even decades after seeing it, one viewing of “Baby Jane” had affected my mother to the point where she recalled it as the pinnacle of film-induced fear. It became clear to me early on that movies had the ability to take up residency inside us, somewhere deep down where their images and themes would resonate perpetually.

It was the terror of “The NeverEnding Story” that fascinated at age five. The Sea of Possibilities sequence, culminating in young warrior Atreyu’s confrontation with the relentless wolf sentinel Gmork, settled in on my sensibilities with an eerie, methodical concentration. As the Nothing swallows the world beyond the camera frame, making its presence known by the toppling of boulders and violent stirring-up of dust storms, the film pursues ever forward, gradually peeling back the oncoming fright of seeing the animatronic beast snarling and clacking his chops from a deep dark hole in the rock. This was dread, pure and unhesitating.

The Gmork scene stills astounds with its ingenuity, meticulous effects design, and poetry: The beast’s descriptions of the world’s loss of imagination hit like a passage out of the Book of Revelations, stirring a fear that travels back to the dawn of creative inspiration, illustrating scenarios in which the mind will shut down and leave puppets and husks where civilizations once stood: “People have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So the Nothing grows stronger. It’s the emptiness that’s left. It is like a despair destroying this world, and I have been trying to help it. People who have no hopes are easy to control, and whoever has the control has the power.”

The scenes of great despair are paramount to establishing that even the world of human fantasy may be wrought with injuries to the psyche, as such inflictions will inevitably dwell within the same sphere. Only after I had watched the film recently did I come to understand the true weight of the moment in the Swamps of Sadness, when Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) loses his faithful steed Artax to grief. Bastian (Barrett Oliver), the story’s reader and co-author, has recently lost his mother and receives a somewhat stern chastisement from his father for fantasizing about horses yet being too afraid to “get on a real one.” Artax’s sinking is symptomatic of Bastian’s growing realization that all things must perish, and so to build attachments to any living being necessitates an inevitable feeling of loss; the empty space of swamp where Atreyu stares in confused sadness is where Bastian’s mother figuratively once stood.

To a child, the heartbreaking and frightening loss of Artax is a sharp reprimand that great pain is possible even in the boundless landscapes of fantasy created by the movies. But the horror experienced in watching “The NeverEnding Story” arrives from witnessing its assemblage of beautiful and tranquil sets, lush matte paintings, and elaborately costumed creatures being rent apart by an unstoppable force. In order for the movie to succeed thematically, it must come from a place of understanding in the souls of its creators; their task was to establish a world to end all worlds, and also to make it appear as though all additional worlds remained possible, if only the film’s message were taken to heart by the children drawn in by its bright elements of fantasy.

While I count the fear instilled by scenes in “The NeverEnding Story” as significant to my development as a moviegoer, it’s still true that if the doom and gloom of the film were not so effectively countered by its sense of wonder, there would have been no opportunity for me to relax and enjoy it. Those who champion “The NeverEnding Story” solely for its darker themes deny the more sincere examples of its beauty: the Ivory Tower, capped by its budding flower summit; the rolling fields, streams, and deserts under Artax’s galloping hooves; the shimmering blue incandescence of the Southern Oracle; Falkor’s scales glinting in the moonlight as Atreyu awakens with his wounds dressed. The film’s combination of spirited adventure and despair lends it a captivating rhythm of advance and retreat. I felt free to get close to what scared me because I was secure in the knowledge that I’d be able to find my way back again.

Co-written by jazz musician Klaus Doldinger and Italian synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder, the movie’s score is awash in perfectly executed cues that work to both heighten tension and bring forward the bounding exuberance of the quest. The composers never give into the temptation to sweep their material too dramatically in the film’s darkest emotional moments; Atreyu’s mourning of Artax is bathed in synths kept small, aching, lonely. The music in its entirety strikes a special bittersweet, melancholy chord, even while capturing triumphs. The title theme, sung by Limahl and Beth Anderson and played over dizzying shots of clouds that foreshadow the onslaught of the Nothing, effectively sets the stage for something comprised of equal parts possibility and decay.

A ride on Falkor promised unmitigated freedom. A distance of 10,000 miles could be covered in a blink, and any spot of peril could be counteracted physically and emotionally by his loyal perseverance and jovial nature. He was an entirely unique creation, built larger than life in order to cradle the young warrior in his arms and support his tiny frame on his shaggy neck without the cold sterility of computer effects. As Falkor and Atreyu hurtle through the space left behind by the obliterated world of Fantasia, this too-real giant has run out of perches on which to land and rest; calmly taking his friend as far as he can go, the thought that their destination may ultimately not exist is met with tired acceptance and smoldering determination.

The very idea of a never-ending story has postmodernity written all over it; one pictures a breathing apparatus being pumped by the Western world’s late-20th-century literary critics, keeping a story on life support as they advance theories about the nature of structure and the identity of the author until the sentences bleed. One moment in Peterson’s film particularly invites the approach, and it occurs when Atreyu confronts his “true self” in the magic mirror gate. Moments after having to exude his self worth under the cutting eyes of the pair of golden sphinxes, Atreyu discovers that he shares that self with Bastian, who dissolves into Atreyu’s reflection and looks up from the book in puzzlement before throwing it across the room.

My five-year-old self watches that scene and begins to understand that Bastian is somehow connected to the world on the page. Excitement builds because he may have the chance to be drawn out of the mundane and into the world of Fantasia, and the payoff is a scene at the end of the film where Bastian spends his first wish on riding Falkor, the only logical choice as far as any kid watching is concerned. The undergrad in me thinks on “The NeverEnding Story” in terms of a postmodern trap, identifying more with the apprehension in Bastian as he heaves that hefty tome across the room, his moment of realization so powerful that he must banish the book immediately or turn forever into Captain Nemo trapped fatally in the submarine.

While the film entertains the philosophical reader-as-author concerns quite literally within the film, it achieves true meta-awareness during the reveal of the Childlike Empress’ (Tami Stronach) godlike intuition. Whereas Atreyu reacts angrily to his misfortunes out of feeling deceived, and Bastian gradually accepts his responsibility for the pages in his hands, the Empress subtly extends the character-as-audience philosophical point to incorporate the viewer, creating a viewer-as-reader-as-author hierarchy: “Just as he is sharing all your adventures, others are sharing his. They were with him when he hid from the boys in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book with the Auryn symbol on the cover, in which he’s reading his own story right now.”

“The NeverEnding Story,” then, is never-ending by virtue of its outward reach, from Atreyu to Bastian to us, and beyond to the infinite imaginations of all who engage with its principles. The creation and fostering of Fantasia becomes a quest assigned to all who view the film and accept its decree of responsibility; it’s an appeal to the children who take it at face value and the resigned adults who have let a giant “nothing” eat away at their tendency to fantasize. In order for stories, and all art, to continue, they must exhibit a willingness to include, to build relationships and connections across periods of time, to exist fluidly, and to change on a creative whim, making way for untold endings and countless new beginnings.

A crowd gathered in McSpadden Park last night to watch “The NeverEnding Story” as part of the Commercial Drive Business Association’s final installment of its Summer Cinema in the Parks series. “It was the first film I saw in a theatre,” I overheard a woman in her late 20s observing to a friend. Families sat close as kids stared in wonder at the images on the massive inflatable screen. Toward the back, teenagers and young adults parked on blankets, enjoying the film at the level of irony. One cracked a laugh at the death of Artax, provoking a string of nervous chuckles. “You’re a sick man,” someone called, the comment swimming through a cloud of exhaled pot smoke.

But all hushed during the Gmork speech, their inner kids brought to an uneasy halt by its horrifying imagery and chilling truth. A cheer erupted when Atreyu plunged his makeshift dagger into the monster’s heart, drawing blood. A hero filling Nothing with fight. A blade pushed into boundaries. As the downpour hit Bastian, poised to scream a name across worlds in order to save imagination, the sky over McSpadden began trickling down rain. Where does a story begin and end? Hundreds put up hoods and umbrellas on the way home, the credits rolling on the emptying park, able to offer only the meek suggestion of finality.

A former lover of renowned soprano Edmea Tetua projects her image onto a movie screen in "And the Ship Sails On."

(Federico Fellini, 1983)

August 28, 2010

by Joel Crary

“And the Ship Sails On” opens with a striking monochromatic sequence with little more than a running camera for a soundtrack. When renowned soprano Edmea Tetua’s ashes are escorted on board by the classic Fellini procession, colour is gradually withdrawn from behind the veil, encouraging the craft to embark. Life begins in the presence of death just as the present is yanked from the film techniques of the past, and the indicative whir of the camera insists upon its own corporeality as the boat pitches along on its artificial ocean. Overseeing the obliteration of the fourth wall is genial and self-effacing journalist Orlando (Freddie Jones), who in a humourous moment of meta-staging is distracted from his introductions by a waiter’s request that he move to another part of the room.

There’s a simplicity to “And the Ship Sails On” that is undoubtedly appealing; the feverish colours and self-indulgent arthouse tendencies of the Fellini pictures that immediately followed “8½” are dulled and stripped back respectively. In their place is a quieter, more reflective air, well complemented by Jones’s natural likability. He begs our indulgence of this particular crowd of socialite snobs, a group of opera singers, composers, conductors, musicians, and dignitaries he has chronicled for posterity, all of whom are voyaging to bid a final goodbye to their deceased colleague.

The numerous introductions are all too brief, and this is where Fellini typically fails in his latter-career characterizations, believing in vain that the types he presents are recognizable enough to be denied any kind of development. One actor’s role as a closeted homosexual is left to play out over two paltry scenes that relegate his character to the most basic of representations. But because the artisans are aboard the ship in order to meet a common purpose (to pay tribute, or perhaps to be seen by God Himself at the moment of the departed Edmea’s ascension), it is easier to forgive the lack of individualism and seemingly unconnected spurts of odd behaviour.

It is the dawn of World War I; cameras are cranked by hand, gramophones project recorded performances, and photos are taken with the genuinely naïve observation that it helps one remember an event. There’s a focus on the novelty of these items, and particularly their endless potential for drawing an artist to the bosom of history: A man claiming to be a former lover of Edmea’s projects silent footage of her onto a screen in his bedroom as a bust of the singer looks on blankly, the lights bouncing off the expressionless eyes. What is at last presented is the mourning of mortality itself, for seeing Edmea’s form on celluloid creates the impression of everlasting life.

On the way to the island of Erimo to spread the ashes, the drive for one-upmanship is fierce, even as the demand for performance comes from working-class patrons in a boiler room. When the boat takes on Serbian castaways just after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the resulting divide between class and nationality is stapled shut in the revelry of competitive dance. The common human bond of mortality becomes the crux of this particular opera, enforced by the cruise ship setting’s insistence that these characters have nowhere to run from death. At its most sullen, Fellini and crew lend “And the Ship Sails On” the look and feel of a Visconti production; inevitably, however, small elements of surreal humour, including a lovesick rhinoceros and a catatonic hen, will momentarily shift things back to the stock and trade of Fellini’s carnival excess.

Attention is routinely drawn to the artificiality of the production, and while there seem to be indications throughout that a wider range of perceptions is integral to surviving the new century, they’re routinely cut down by the cynicism and violence of the industrial age. The blind Austro-Hungarian princess (Pina Bausch), who routinely beats her portly brother at chess by “feeling” the pieces, also experiences synaesthetic reactions to music and speech and is thereby held in esteem for having a “sensitive” soul. The men and women gather in the kitchen to indulge in parlour tricks, creating spectacle to entertain themselves and keep creativity flowing. Yet as the elites belt out a fantastical operatic protest at the Serbs’ deportation, they are answered in kind with the roar of cannon blasts, all while our faithful narrator shrugs and grabs a life preserver.

“And the Ship Sails On” builds until it feels as though it’s going to come apart at the seams, and then it does; criticisms about the shimmering blanket used to double for water and obvious models standing in for ships billowing smoke turn to a bizarre relief when the film acknowledges itself. This is the pageantry of an elder Fellini throwing mocking jabs in the boxing ring of blockbuster filmmaking. To make matters more intriguing, shots of water filling up deck levels and of lifeboats making melancholy descents to the off-camera seas below appear uncannily close to shots negotiated a decade and a half later in “Titanic.” How many ways could there be to shoot a sinking ship, one could wonder, but the hydraulics tilting the enormous floor under Fellini’s cast do everything but toss it completely vertical.

With the progression of the 20th century came the gradual realization that audiovisual recording technology was not the great truth-teller it seemed. Ultimately, Fellini and co-writer Tonino Guerra’s patchwork of concerns over mortality is woven through observations about the meaning and ramifications of that technology, its effect on the artists of a new century that will come to be defined by it, and the tendency it has since had to prescribe narratives of life, death, and war onto historical record. “It’s almost impossible to recall the sequence of events,” Orlando explains. “Are we certain it was the boy who threw the bomb?” Yet there it is on the screen, replayed for mounting effect in slow motion as a swirling score paves the way for violence. It is only when Fellini pulls his camera back that the film’s metaphors are finally understood: a ship that isn’t really a ship, a volcano instead of a mountain, the reality that the end of a voyage awaits us all.

Six friends spend the twilight of their adolescence over fries and coffee in "Diner."

(Barry Levinson, 1982)

August 25, 2010

by Joel Crary

There’s a scene in “Diner” that strikes me every time with its odd vibrancy: Boogie (Mickey Rourke) and Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) meet a young woman on horseback alongside a country road. The men exhibit the kind of energy that only two young guys with nothing on their plates could possibly muster after spending the entire night out, talking nonsense with each other in a greasy spoon. The woman tells them her name is Jane Chisholm, “as in the Chisholm trail,” and then gallops away. Boogie and Fenwick are left alone in the middle of nowhere without the movement of the car to distract them, and Bacon utters the film’s most important bit of dialogue: “You ever get the feeling there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”

Asking that question is paramount to making the shift from adolescence to adulthood. Like the aging boys of Fellini’s “I Vitelloni,” none of the characters in “Diner” have done so. Not even Shrevie (Daniel Stern), who’s married, or Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), who soon will be. Ditto Billy (Tim Daly), who receives some life-altering news in the midst of attending grad school. The film takes place during the week before the 1960s began, and like the ’50s, the men’s youth is dwindling. They’re all in their early 20s, still making bets about what girl will do what with which guy, and still hanging out at Fells Point Diner, the only place open at 4 a.m. while the adult world is sleeping off their responsibilities.

A young man needs a place to hang out, a section of public space he can claim as his own. In my early 20s I longed for a coffee shop that would serve me a usual. In Ottawa, the Elgin Street Diner fits that bill for a lot of people living in the Centretown neighbourhood, serving as both a net catching the drunks after last call as well as a quiet spot to grab a late Monday lunch. I was grateful for the Diner, but came to realize it wasn’t the building itself that mattered. It was the exchange of talk with the faces across the table, complimented by periodic glances out of a picture window at the busy street. The hesitation of time in its move forward.

There are hardly any scenes set in “Diner”’s diner. Those that are exhibit the expected kind of amusing detritus a group belonging to the era might share: debates over Sinatra and Mathis; the etiquette involved in asking for another guy’s sandwich or a ride home. But the diner generally seems an omnipresent concept, always coming up in conversation as a place of retreat, a space in which to organize happenings of the day, or an opportunity to look cool in front of each other. Shit-eating grins unite over fries and gravy, and when morning arrives it’s time to call it a night. Underneath it all–the pranks pulled, the bets made, the time spent in county lockup–there’s something going on that the guys don’t know about.

There’s a lot of improvisation going on, and it reinforces the coming-of-age material. Guttenberg exudes the kind of short-fused simpleton everybody meets in high school, regardless of the decade. Bacon’s weaselly intelligence befits his ability to nail an apt Thoreau quotation during a quiz show. It remains astounding to see a young Rourke take such sly control as a bad-boy heartthrob. Daly is the Moraldo of the group, tethered to a real future and forced to be adaptable in a way his friends don’t yet have to be. Paul Reiser, underused, puts up shining comic relief. And Stern is at the centre of “Diner”’s best scene, in which Shrevie explodes on his wife (Ellen Barkin, beautiful and sharp in her first film role) for putting his records out of order. It’s precisely the kind of ridiculous argument a young man who’s terrified by commitment and unable to voice his expectations would start. Inviting empathy and contempt at once is tricky, but Stern gets there on passion alone.

That Jane Chisholm moment feels nicely out of place. Writer-director Barry Levinson made the mistake of capping it with a ridiculous moment in which Rourke revisits the pasture on his own horse. “Diner” was Levinson’s first film, and he exhibited an overanxious concern for tying loose ends. There are certain late scenes (another involves characters rocking out in a strip club) that should have been left on the cutting room floor. But though “Diner” ambles at times, it does so in an honest effort to reflect its characters’ fading lifestyles. Youth is all music, movies and attitude. The rest is tomorrow.

Spring break is broken up by a school of swimsuit-stripping fish in "Piranha 3D."

(Alexandre Aja, 2010)

August 23, 2010

by Joel Crary

“Piranha 3D” kicks off with a shots of an old man in a rowboat, fetching beers out of a lake and fishing until his face is revealed and, surprise, it’s Richard Dreyfuss. The Internet Movie Database credits Dreyfuss in the role of Matt Hooper, either the same Matt Hooper Dreyfuss played 35 years ago in “Jaws” or a close facsimile. He’s at ground zero when an underwater fissure opens underneath the lake and thousands of prehistoric piranha are unleashed on a resort town. Just when he thought it was safe.

I was browsing around in a Future Shop last week, and they had displays set up for people to try out the new 3D home televisions. The technology is apparently here to stay for a while, much to the movie industry’s relief, since we’re led to believe that a 3D film justifies an inflated ticket price. It doesn’t. I would have taken in “Piranha”s excesses in a lesser collection of dimensions without complaint. Frankly, the bells and whistles of 3D can’t direct me past thinking of that old SCTV skit where Count Floyd moves back and forth in front of the camera limply to try and simulate the effect.

Anyhow. I haven’t seen the original “Piranha” films, in which vacationing young people are devoured en masse. My familiarity with the franchise begins and ends with the running joke that James Cameron was the helmer on one of the sequels. What’s to know? People-eating fish eat people in order to capitalize on the success of “Jaws.” Now the kids who grew up on those movies are remaking them. In this case, it’s the co-writing team of Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, who last scripted a modern sorority house horror flick, and French director Alexandre Aja, whose “High Tension” and “The Hills Have Eyes” remake have proven that he’s not the type to mess around when it comes to this stuff.

To Aja’s credit, he pulls “Piranha 3D” almost clear from the edge of hackery, which may be all one can ask for. The underwater shots are desolate and creepy, especially a sequence in which deep sea divers explore an expansive underground cavern, and parts of the film flirt cheekily with the art/kitsch dichotomy. In a moment of high eroticism, Delibes’ “Flower Duet” plays as two women swim nude under the floor of a glass-bottom boat. It’s hypnotizing until things are cut short by a salivating Jerry O’Connell demanding ass closeups.

Talking about “Piranha 3D” in the context of cinematic art seems a fruitless pursuit, but it’s important to establish that the film isn’t necessarily lazy. All of the effects work – apart from the fish, which look tiredly cartoonish – is top notch. Once the mayhem starts, expertly forged prosthetics, gushing injuries and fake blood abound, and it all looks appropriately disgusting. Prop and makeup work like this has it all over the pathetic look of the CGI knife wounds and shorn torsos on display in “The Expendables.” All it takes is a little tender loving care.

There’s nothing really special going on in “Piranha 3D,” but what does go on isn’t horrible or angrily exploitative. O’Connell provides the film’s funnier moments, if only when his coke-snorting horny maniac is juxtaposed with the fat kid in “Stand By Me” or the spraycan superhero in “My Secret Identity.” Christopher Lloyd shows up to act demented for a couple of scenes and otherwise get people longing for another “Back to the Future” installment. There are also plenty of beautiful people to look at, and plenty of carnage to reward their unbridled hedonistic impulses. 3D should be put out to pasture, though. Now that a severed penis has popped out at audiences, where can the technology possibly go from here?

Two kidnappers take a break from soundproofing an apartment in "The Disappearance of Alice Creed."

(J Blakeson, 2009)

August 20, 2010

by Joel Crary

“The Disappearance of Alice Creed” features an unsettling first act in which a young woman is kidnapped and held hostage in a meticulously fortified location, made all the more unsettling because we are shown the lengths the kidnappers have taken to make sure their screaming victim can’t escape. Two men work in silence, mounting soundproof material in a stripped-down apartment, assembling a bed from the floor up, taking only the occasional break to swallow food. The details of their setup go down to the crooked wheel of a shopping cart being pushed through the aisles of a hardware store. Something entirely unpleasant this way comes.

Handcuffs, ropes, and a ball gag lie efficiently in a row before they’re placed in a sack. The inside of a van is covered in disposable sheeting, and the men change clothes as though growing enough skins will render them completely undetectable. The end result is revoltingly impressive. Staying with the kidnappers forces an understanding of their frighteningly precise mindsets. When their target, Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton), is finally chained to the bed, as disturbing as her capture is, there’s also a sickening sense that the difficult part is over.

Hardly any words are spoken for a good 20 minutes. The who, what, when, where, and why of the situation is absent, and because the focus is kept on the kidnappers, “Alice Creed” feels coldly fascinating. Consider an early scene in which the two men, Danny (Martin Compston) and Vic (Eddie Marsan), sit over plates of food. There’s no discussion of a plan, since the plan has probably been discussed at enormous length. A sliver of doubt starts to creep into young Danny’s features, echoing loudly in his loss of appetite. Doubt about what? The larger, harder Vic takes a dominant position and profanely tells Danny to pull it together. All of that procedure has given way to a violent reality.

The trick to pulling off a film like “The Disappearance of Alice Creed” lies in impressing with revelations. It’s a heist film disguised as a ransom film, and the heist film depends upon double crosses, hidden motives, and backfiring sociopathic tendencies surfacing at just the right moment. Writer-director J Blakeson taps into all three to varying degrees of effectiveness. A relief comes on once reason, however twisted, enters the picture. At some point, the young woman will have an opportunity to escape. The circumstances surrounding that opportunity depend on a fresh approach to avoid the pitfall of routine exercise.

For the most part, “Alice Creed” is fresh. Some of its revelations threaten to launch the narrative into the realm of comedy, so suddenly are we asked to adjust our perception of the events. (A character exclaiming “we’ll fuck each other senseless” would have had Evel Knievel throwing his hands up at the jump required.) The film could have worked better if Blakeson had surrendered his material to lunacy. Instead, he clings to the safety of standards set by the Coen brothers, all while keeping the developments knit to the modest locales. Most of the the action takes place in that junky apartment, the bedroom door always forebodingly present during conversations about possible outcomes. Blakeson scripted the sequel to “The Descent,” and “Alice Creed” further exhibits a taste for drama unfolding in tight spaces.

Films that are staged simply tend to show a greater deal of trust in the dialogue. A demand is placed on the actors to open up the plot. Smaller environments call for bigger emotional profiles. As Vic, Eddie Marsan straddles a complex line between psychotic and fallible. His frustration completely shatters the claustrophobic set. Compston provides a substantially writhing counterpoint. Arterton, miles away from her role in “Prince of Persia,” is brave as Alice, crafty, able to play along with the script’s odd shift from the horror of sexual abuse to the tangled web of conniving that follows. All three actors are called on to wear several masks convincingly, and do so without crumbling.

I’ve taken pains not to comment on the specific revelations, as discovering them is crucial to understanding how “Alice Creed” develops. Blakeson initially paces them well and then gets a little too excited toward the film’s conclusion, throwing them away without concern for plausibility. But he has a solid flair for memorable images and a convincing enough knack for neo-noir execution. It’s a strong early work for Blakeson and indicative of a promising future.

A local developer is investing $12 million to save the near-century-old York Theatre.

August 18th, 2010

by Joel Crary

The Raja Cinema was one of the first buildings on Commercial Drive I laid eyes on during my search for an apartment here in town. It sits, peeling and empty, at the end of my block. Abandoned theatres bring to mind all kinds of assumptions. The dilapidated Raja comes across as a joint that screened porno and exploitation flicks toward the end of its run before repeated raids finally forced it into giving up the ghost. It is part of an area many call one of the most thriving neighbourhoods in Vancouver. How could such a building aid in representing the vivacious arts community so many people associate with the Drive?

A couple of blocks away rests another building I hadn’t come across during that initial visit: an old church, transformed into the headquarters of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. Folks around here call it “the Cultch.” An attached theatre provides a venue for musicians, stage actors and dancers, with a history that boasts such performers as Jane Siberry and the Steve Miller Band. The Cultch is currently involved with an initiative to restore the Raja, more commonly known as the York Theatre, to its former glory as East Vancouver’s performing arts Mecca.

The York opened in 1913 as the Alcazar Theatre and has undergone several permutations over the course of passing decades, including a stint as a punk and metal venue in the ’80s. (For a more detailed history of the building, check out this synopsis at the Vancouver Arts and Culture Forum website.) The theatre has been pretty well dormant for the past few years. Attendance at the Raja flagged and forced the owners to sell off the property. The building was headed for demolition to make way for townhouses until the city council decided to give local developer Bruno Wall a crack at restoring it. Terrific news for the 30-year-old Save the York Theatre Society, who have had more than their share of difficulties trying to convince Canadian Heritage of the building’s cultural worth.

The word “gentrification” is on the lips of everyone walking the streets of Vancouver. While improvements have been made to certain areas as average net incomes grow, property values can be made weirdly arbitrary courtesy of the investments of the wealthy into areas of urban decay. (In his “City of Glass,” Douglas Coupland called real estate “Vancouver’s biggest sport.”) I’ve never had a head for that kind of thing, but I understand why people identify the “yuppiefication” of an area as something entirely soul-killing, akin to all those Starbucks that started sprouting up in Seattle back in the early ’90s, or the Giuliani/Disney rezoning of Times Square. Still, there seems to be a need in this area for a place like the York to do well. It’s a quite visible indicator of the state of the Drive’s arts community, which is richly seasoned with a lot of independent businesses but showcases a disturbing scarcity of performance venues.

Not much appears to have happened on site since the development announcement was made early last year (other than the reassurance of an Economic Action Plan sign that glosses over years of federal inaction and apparent indifference to the space). But it will be nice to see the York restored. I’m a little selfish in thinking that it would be an ideal spot for a refurbished repertory movie house, since there’s an enormous body of neighbourhood moviegoers to serve and little competition outside of the single-screen Van East and Rio theatres further south on Commercial, which outside of the occasional midnight showing typically run blockbusters. Either way, however, it’s a perfect opportunity to extend the life of the Drive.

Further reading: CBC article on the development deal

Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Terry Crews, and Jason Statham are "The Expendables."

(Sylvester Stallone, 2010)

August 15, 2010

by Joel Crary

When Mickey Rourke won a Golden Globe for his role as Randy “The Ram” Robinson in “The Wrestler,” he gave a speech that honoured veteran action and crime thriller star Eric Roberts in a moment of burly graciousness. Rather than coming off as a movie star, Rourke came off as a guy who has spent a career in the chaff taking an opportunity to acknowledge an underappreciated trench mate’s dedication. Both Rourke and Roberts have been in a lot of genre pictures to keep working, but gosh darn it, it warms the heart to know that they embrace their bread and butter.

“The Expendables” is further proof. It’s been made a thousand times, and that’s why it’s special. It’s a film of action figureheads, actors who have become synonymous with blow-’em-up franchises and scores of mostly direct-to-video productions done on the cheap for a particular fanbase. Back when I used to work at a video store, there was a certain kind of customer who would sidle up to the counter with a stack of the latest releases starring Dolph Lundgren, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, movies that never came close to playing in theatres but were funded knowing that a built-in audience would support them.

Freudian analyses withstanding, there’s something innate in men who have grown up on action flicks that demands something bigger, better, more explosive, more collaborative – to see toughs square off to find out who the tougher man is. The critic devil on my shoulder squealed with manly glee over how great “The Expendables” sounded on paper, and looked in the trailer. And the appeal of the end result is still in seeing this buffet of muscle – including Sylvester Stallone, Lundgren, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, Roberts, Rourke, and Steve Austin, plus cameo appearances from Bruce Willis And Arnold Schwarzenegger – served on an enormous (s)platter of violence and mayhem.

But the angel on my other shoulder has to take a breath and admit that “The Expendables,” co-written and directed by Stallone, is sorely lacking on all three levels of script, performance and direction. It strives to be as authoritative as its legends, to be the mother of all action blockbusters, but it buckles under the weight of its assumption that actor pedigree alone will prevent it from being just another mindless collection of explosions, gunfire and car crashes, all while flaunting an ignorance of what makes a bad action film bad to begin with. Six months from now, when that customer lines up at the counter with his stack of direct-to-video failsafes, “The Expendables” will be fitting snuggly alongside those other titles. I’d hoped for more.

The plot never aspires to be more than an average mercenary tale involving American Joes who infiltrate an interchangeable foreign land to restore order for a profit. The sluggish first act sets up the guys’ relationships, characterized by little more than tired witticisms dropped at each other’s expense. Stallone mostly keeps the focus on himself and the Statham character: a wise move, since Statham is the most agile actor of the bunch, though he’s saddled with a nowhere story about an ex-girlfriend who he can’t get close to because of his line of work. The guys talk and talk until, mercifully, the action starts and Statham firebombs a dock of soldiers from the nose of an airplane.

Things get progressively violent and loud. A lot of CGI-added blood spurts from knife wounds to the throat. Filmmakers now have the technology to cleave a torso completely in one fluent shot, but the ease of it brings disappointment and the longing for a time when special effects artists had to try harder. The chief drawback to cramming a picture full of action stars is that there’s so little room for (ha, ha) character development. When it came to flicks like “Cobra” and “Commando,” “badass” used to be the only character trait needed, but in the age of directors like Martin Campbell and Christopher Nolan, both of whom have it all over Stallone in the staging department, a little complexity has come into fashion. Most of the guys in “The Expendables” deliver their lines half-coherently, relieved that they were able to film the movie at all, even if it came 15 years too late.

There is a scene involving Rourke, however, that should be required viewing for burgeoning actors as a lesson in turning mediocre writing into a thing of beauty. As his character forlornly paints floral designs on a guitar, he delivers a monologue about a mission in Bosnia, where the deaths of his friends turned him away from a woman in danger. Watch how Rourke’s emotive decisions elevate the otherwise so-so material, the small breaks in his voice as he starts the story, and how his mounting affect gradually brings every detail to life, completely changing the tone of the narrative. It’s a brief moment of transcendence among a whole lot of blunt beefcake, and a reminder of what an actor like Rourke is capable of when the guns and knives have been holstered.