Film Reviews

[Planetary Eulogy]

The Seventh Seal

For a reviewer, there is often nothing so difficult as returning to a long-time personal favorite and trying to do it justice, objectively and without indulging in the sort of rapturous fanboy antics that make reading internet commentary such a chore. With that in mind, I have decided to skip the "objectivity" part and go straight to the rapture and the fanboyism. Read on at your own peril.

The Seventh Seal is the greatest achievement in the history of cinema. There. I said it. No ifs, ands, buts, hems, haws or prevarications. Period. Final. That's fuckin' all, folks. (Which, I suppose means I'll have to get around to moving Rashomon from 1B. to 2 on my all-time list, but a little change never hurt anyone.)

Interestingly, there was a time when one could make that very statement without precipitating fits of eyebrow raising, condescending looks or, most often, the sort of blank incomprehension you might expect after name-dropping Derrida at a Bush family dinner. There are, I suppose, historical reasons for this. For starters, there was a time when people didn't feel free to proffer their views about film on the operating theory that owning Fight Club made them a real movie expert.

Beyond that, The Seventh Seal is a film of ideas. Stark ideas. Dark ideas. Ideas about life and death, meaning and emptiness, heroism, cowardice and the silence of God. We unfortunately live in a diminished age. Many of us grew up with a sheltered complacency and groped about a world where abortion and gay marriage seemed vexing enough. As a result, the profundity of the existential questions is lost. They seem naive at best, arrogant at worst.

But for an earlier generation, the big questions were not so easily dismissed. How could they be? They gazed every day over the precipice into the nuclear abyss. Most people alive in 1957 had lived through the cataclysmic nightmare that had pulled stone from stone in a matter of less than a decade an edifice of belief 200 years in the making. Many were still living, literally, in the rubble left behind. The feral, gnawing doubt at the heart of The Seventh Seal spoke loudly and clearly to that generation. And maybe, in the brave new world that has emerged in the wake of 9/11, it can speak to a new generation. I fervently hope it does, because The Seventh Seal is one of those great works of art that demands experiencing.

The Seventh Seal is high-impact cinema in the most significant sense possible, and every frame staggers under the apocalyptic weight of the search for meaning. The story is simple – a 14th Century knight (the incomparable Max von Sydow) and his nihilistically cynical squire (Gunnar Björnstrand) return to plague ravaged Sweden and make their way back home after a decade of fighting the Crusades – and the film’s structure is equally straightforward in its linearity, but extraordinary in the terrible certainty to which it inevitably moves. Director Ingmar Bergman’s mastery was at its peak The Seventh Seal, and his own stern upbringing and existential insecurities made him uniquely suited for reconstructing and reinterpreting the doomed march of medieval morality plays for a world that saw itself on the brink of a new Armageddon.

The Seventh Seal is a triumph of cinematic formalism, and the heart of its power lies in its startling (even after decades of parodies) imagery and the dark poetry of its visuals. The film’s master metaphor is introduced at the outset. Sydow’s Antonius Block wakes upon a beach where he and his squire Jöns have washed ashore. There, he finds the black-clad figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) waiting for them. He challenges Death to a game of chess, with his life on the line. What follows is one of the most famous frames in film history. Block and Death face each other across the board, silhouetted against a dark, raging sea and sky. Sydow’s face is almost completely in the shadows, his sharp features made indistinct by the gloom. Only Death seems fully real (despite his fantastic appearance), his face is well lit and draws the eye with the same inevitability with which he reaps his victims. This game is continued intermittently throughout The Seventh Seal, though we know from the beginning how it must end.

The rest of film is taken up by two journeys. Block and his squire must traverse a land wracked by plague and torn by fear. Along the way, they encounter signposts of a world in crisis and decay: flagellants marching through the streets, whipping themselves in atonement for sin, a fearful young girl tortured and burned as a witch, and the priest whose honeyed words convinced Block to take up the Cross, an opportunist who Jöns prevents from raping a seemingly mute woman (Gunnel Lindblom). They also add to their party, as they are joined by the mute and a pair of traveling players (Nils Poppe and Bibi Andersson) and their infant son.

However, it is the second, spiritual journey that forms the true center of the film. The Seventh Seal is, at its heart, about the search for meaning in a world where only Death is real. Jöns and Block represent two opposing approaches to problem of meaning. Block desperately wants the comfort of belief, but cannot bring himself to it in the face of the evidence of his senses. His squire, on the other hand, neither has belief nor seeks it. Jöns is rather a Sartrean figure, reveling in the very absurdity and meaninglessness that Block recoils from. The interplay between the two (both directly and in the omniscient eye of the camera) and between Block and the cloaked figure of Death form the primary subtext of The Seventh Seal. Will Block (and through him, the viewing audience) achieve some sort of satisfactory understanding before the inevitable triumph of Death?

The answer is as enigmatic as the the film itself. Block does indeed seize fragments of meaning and purpose. In particular, he finds something both worth living for and worth dying for in sharing the simple joys of wild strawberries (a favorite Bergman image) and a spring afternoon with Jof (Poppe), his wife Mia (Andersson) and young son. Indeed, it is through this beautiful young family that Block finally fulfills his duty and destiny as a warrior, dragging out his chess match with Death just long enough to allow them to escape the Reaper’s scythe under cover of storm and darkness.

And yet, when his own end comes, Block remains defiant, insistent that it should not have come with so many questions still left unanswered. His plaintive prayers seem all the more pathetic next to the dark acceptance of Jöns. From a distant hill, Jof, ever prone to apocalyptic visions, witnesses the final march of the doomed. He watches as Block and his companions gyrate wildly in an ecstatic procession behind Death, describing the scene to his wife. “And the strict master Death bids them dance.” He then smiles ruefully, turns and leads his family into the rising sun, toward life in the living, but ever cognizant of the fate that lies both behind and ahead.

10/10

 

[Planetary Eulogy]

Youth of the Beast

Seijun Suzuki is one of the more polarizing and ambiguous figures in Japanese cinema. Genius? Madman? Something in between? Perhaps it doesn't matter, the differences between these positions are in any case, quite sleight. An amazingly prolific director - he directed over forty films in the 1960s alone - his very productivity helped lend credibility to those who dismissed him as B-movie man, preeminent among these to be sure, but a B-movie man nonetheless. In recent years, however, his work has been increasingly appreciated, particularly in the West.

In large measure, this uptick in esteem is can be traced to the film industry finally catching up to Suzuki. His classic mid-60s films (Youth of the Beast, Gate of Flesh, Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill) featured a powerful combination of brutal, explicit and often sadistic violence, morbid humor, a keen sense of the ridiculous and a visual and narrative style that is fractured and often hallucinatory, all held together (or, rather, defiantly not held together) by a totalizing nihilism that denies any higher or greater meaning to actions beyond the demonstratable consequences of action itself. This made for cinema that, at the time, was incomprehensible to many viewers, and Suzuki was famously fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 for making films that "make no sense and make no money." Decades later, however, the potency of his best films is keenly appreciated by many cinephiles raised on Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers (both almost completely derivative of Suzuki's work).

Suzuki himself identified Youth of the Beast as marking the beginning of his most creatively fertile period, and all the distinctive elements of his filmmaking are in evidence, and meshing perfectly. The basic story - a mysterious tough muscles into the center of a war between rival gangs, then begins pursuing ends of his own as he plays each off the other - is strongly reminiscent of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but where Yojimbo is a period piece set in a down and out town of the Edo period, Youth of the Beast is a (post)modern gangster film set in contemporary (1960s) Tokyo. Mifune's iconic role as the amoral ronin Sanjuro Kuwabatake is here filled by Jo Shishido as disgraced ex-detective Joji 'Jo' Mizuno.

The film opens with police investigating the apparent double suicide of a detective and his mistress (we later learn that it was actually a double murder). The initial sequence plays at being a traditional police procedural, with middle aged men in rumpled suits and worn hats speaking clinically of the dead. The camera pans to a table and an incongruous splash of color, a single cut red flower in a vase. It is an image of fleeting life that is repeated as the film's closing frame.

Suddenly, the film jumps to full color with a blast of hard bop from the soundtrack, cutting to a crowded street in Tokyo and the maniacal laughter of a woman. The camera soon finds 'Jo' Shisado, who explodes into violent action, attacking three men, pummeling one of them to the ground and kicking him repeatedly before fastidiously wiping the blood from his shoe onto the fallen man's shirt. He then turns with an air of total indifference and strolls into a hostess bar.

His outburst provides an entree into the Tokyo underworld; the men he thrashed were low-level yakuza soldiers, and the ease with which he dispatched them attracts the attention of the local underboss. Soon, he meets the big boss, Hideo Nomoto, and becomes a hitman for Nomoto's gang. It rapidly becomes apparent that Jo is playing a deeper game. He forces his way into the office of Nomoto's chief rival, earning a place on his payroll as well, this time by providing intelligence on Nomoto's activities. He plays the rivals off one another, eventually achieving the cataclysmic annihilation of both gangs.

But why? We learn through flashbacks and his own admission that Jo is a former cop,framed by the yakuza and sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. More significantly, it is revealed that the detective whose murder was investigated in the opening scene was his former partner. He knows that someone in Nomoto's gang is responsible for that murder, and he is bent on discovering the killer and dispatching him..but he's not at all particular about who else he kills in the process. The purity of his vengeance is eventually undermined, however, when he befriends one of Nomoto's henchmen, and, particularly, after he learns who the real hand behind the killing was. In the end, his success brings no satisfaction, only more death.

The great strength of Youth of the Beast is its combination of superb visual flair and unremitting nihilism. Suzuki's shots are almost invariably dynamic in their composition, a riot of color and movement against a gritty background of corruption and decay. They create at once a hallucinatory detachment and a gut level immersion in the violence. Even the relatively static shots are intensely poetic and loaded with symbolism. Several scenes take place in the office of Nomoto's hostess bar. The entire back wall of the office is a one-way mirror, looking out into the nightclub. The floor of the office is set below the floor of the club. It is a perfect visual depiction of an "underworld" existing side by side with everyday life, but invisible to most people.

One aspect of the film will likely be extremely disturbing to many contemporary Western viewers. Suzuki's films were often possessed of a violent and virulent misogyny, and this is no exception. The female characters are invariably unsympathetic; prostitutes, addicts and murdering adulteresses. One scene features a pimp humiliating an addicted woman while she begs for a fix. In another, Nomoto beats a call girl with his belt and then rapes her. The movie reaches its climax when Jo leaves the woman who orchestrated the murder of his partner to the tender mercies of a straight razor wielding psychopath. It is a fitting end to one of the most relentlessly violent films of its era.

9/10

 

[Zack]

Umm, wow, great writing! I seriously wanna go fucking see the first one now!

 

[Planetary Eulogy]

As Tears Go By

One of my favorite film viewing pastimes is going back to the early films of some of my favorite directors and getting a feel for where they’ve come from to get to where they are. In the last year or so, Wong Kar-Wai has firmly ensconced himself as my favorite contemporary filmmaker, and tonight, I treated myself to his 1988 debut feature As Tears Go By.

What makes this film fascinating is the startling degree to which Wong’s instinct for visual poetry and his ability to translate the almost physical pain of longing onto the screen are both already finely honed, though the languid pacing and narrative inventiveness of his later works (like undisputed masterpiece In the Mood for Love) are notably absent.

As Tears Go By wears the clothing of a straightforward Hong Kong street opera of the type made famous during the 1980s by John Woo, though Wong also tips the cap to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. It features swaggering bravado and staccato violence one expects of such fare, and is both Wong’s most accessible film and his only commercial success to date.

As Tears Go By centers on Wah (Andy Lau), an up-and-coming Triad gangster trying to balance his own ambitions against his loyalty to his feckless “little brother” Fly (Jacky Cheung), whose impulsivity represents a constant danger, not only to himself, but to Wah as well (though he also provides an otherwise tense film with much needed humor). Wah’s life is further complicated by a growing love for his cousin Ngor (frequent Wong collaborator Maggie Cheung in her first major dramatic role), a beautiful girl whose existence he was totally unaware of before she came to stay with him while seeking medical treatment in Hong Kong.

Beneath the familiar aspects of genre film, however, lurk the seeds of Wong Kar-Wai’s later mastery. As Tears Go By could have been just another bullet ballet, but it is instead a searing, romantic work of art, despite occasional clichés. Always something of an actor’s director (and famous for leaning heavily on the improvisational talents of his stars, despite his own background as a screenwriter), he coaxes from his cast performances that are uniformly excellent. Jacky Cheung, in particular, stands out, and he imbues Fly with a reckless machismo that only serves to highlight the self-doubt that gnaws at his soul. The Hong Kong Film Awards Best Actor trophy which Cheung won for this role was well-deserved.

But it is Wong Kar-Wai who really dominates As Tears Go By, as the visual and emotional style that characterized his later works is already in evidence. His signature thematic concerns of longing and memory, and the master iconography he associates with these concepts (slow burning cigarettes and torrential downpours, respectively) figure prominently in As Tears Go By, and while his mastery of the basic visual style he introduces in this film would increase with later films, he was already a powerful cinematic poet.

The only elements of his mature style that are missing are the characteristically recursive and self-referential narrative structures of his later work and the constant weight of emotional isolation that so perfectly captures the disassociative rootlessness of modern existence (though the latter is not completely lacking, and is especially apparent in the opening scenes of the movie). This has the effect of slightly lessening the impact of some of the imagery, but it cannot keep As Tears Go By from being an immensely powerful debut film.

8/10

 

[Europa Ascendent]

Starship Troopers

The lengths which many are willing to go to provide some sort of intellectual justification of the existence of Starship Troopers never cease to amaze me. "Oh, it's satire," they say. "It is a subversive send up of fascism, the most brilliant since Dr. Stragelove."

Well folks, I'm here to let the cat out of the bag. No it isn't. Starship Troopers is not subversive. Starship Troopers is not satire. Starship Troopers is just stupid. For all its smirking, in-on-its-own-joke faux camp and oh-so-ironic stabs at social commentary, it is nothing more than a schlocky sci-fi shoot 'em up aimed at adolescents (clearly demonstrating that the filmmakers knew all along that their 'subversive' film was a steaming turd) and directed with all the ham-handed prurience which we've all come to know and hate from Paul Verhoeven (whose chief claim to fame is Showgirls, the movie which ensured that no one would ever be curious enough to see an NC-17 film again).

That's not to say that 'satire' and 'subversion' aren't attempted, just that they fail miserably (and how could they not with Verhoeven at the helm, not to mention a cast of 'stars' headed by the likes of Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards?). Any satirical effect is lost in the stunning lack of context. So there might be a fascist society some time, for some reason at some point in the future, and it might not be pleasant? How interesting. Now get back to machinegunning four-story beetles.

The moral of this story? In the future, Marines will take co-ed showers.

0/10

 

[Dazed and Brutal]

Man your reviews are the shit.

 

[Europa Ascendent]

Hard Boiled

John Woo has been called the world's foremost action film director, and, while his efforts since crossing the pond to Hollywood have often been hampered by indifferent acting and American studios' lower tolerance for unrelenting violence, Woo's work in his native Hong Kong more than justifies that assessment. His adept manipulation of pacing and emotion, and his total mastery of the visual language of violence set him apart from and above all others working within the genre.

Hard Boiled was Woo's Hong Kong swansong, his last film before jumping the Pacific to Hollywood. But, Woo being Woo, he left town in a blaze of glory (and gunfire).

The story of Hard Boiled is thoroughly unremarkable: it follows the efforts of hard charging, reckless detective 'Tequila' (Chow Yun-Fat) and equally off-the-reservation police infiltrator Tony (Tony Leung) to uncover and bring down a Triad gun running ring. In pursuit of their seperate (but shared) agendas, they inevitably cross paths (and wires) before settling into an uneasy partnership that culminates in a massive shootout and the destruction of those arrayed against them.

While the plot itself will win no awards for originality, Woo breathes life into tired action formulas by playing subtly with the expected cliches. The Tequila-Tony pairing is no 'odd couple' duo; both men share a penchant for unrestrained violence, a disdain for basic police ethics, and tortured spirits that express themselves through art (Tony makes paper cranes to memorialize his victims and Tequila is a jazz musician on the side). Other sly inversions are inserted into the script as well, Tequila's boss, Superintendent Pang (Philip Chan) is teasingly dangled as a possible corrupt conspirator in one scene, only to be revealed as a hard-ass with a heart of gold later. In another scene, the 'psychopathic' henchman Mad Dog (Philip Kwok) refuses to endanger innocent lives and is eventually undone by his own vestigal sense of honor.

But the real strength of Hard Boiled is John Woo in his guise as cinematic Poet of Carnage. The film has three major set piece gun battles, all of which could easily be considered among the greatest action sequences ever filmed. In particular, the 40 minute finale, set in a hospital and its underground morgue, is a masterpiece of visual style, tension, and elegaic mayhem. It is a fitting close to Woo's Hong Kong career. Here's hoping that we get an encore some day.

9/10

 

[Thoth-Amon]

SEVENTH SEAL

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

Saving Private Ryan

Great film is an illuminating thing: it shines its light into the dark recesses of humanity, revealing the greed, hatred, and hypocrisy that fester there. Bad film is often just as revealing: its existence and reception serve as a mirror reflecting the hearts of its intended audience. Saving Private Ryan is a classic example of the latter, in the flickering light of its propagandistic glow, the American people stand revealed for what they really are: stupid, self-absorbed, morally unsophisticated rubes ready to be fleeced by the first charlatan who comes along and tells them what they want to hear.

"Saving Private Ryan" is typical Steven Spielberg fare: a big budget spectacle, bereft of style, filled to the brim with childishly heavy-handed moralizing and peopled with facile "characters" who exist only as cardboard cutouts for the ensuing morality play. Even the film's underlying subtext is an old Spielberg standby - America GOOOOOD, Nazis BAAAAD.

The plot of Saving Private Ryan revolves around a simple moral question: is saving one life worth potentially sacrificing the lives of many? This fourth grade ethical dilemma is played out for nearly three hours over the background of the brocage of Normandy in the hours and days immediately after the D-Day landings, and is handled with Spielberg's usual wandering attention, ham-fisted lack of subtlety and babbling pop psychology. Spielberg being Spielberg, there's never any doubt how the question will ultimately be answered (hint: with saccharine sentimentality in front of a tombstone - because, obviously, the same scene wasn't manipulative enough when it was used to close Schindler's List).

The film opens with thirty minutes of unremitting carnage as US soldiers assault Omaha Beach. This opening scene has been hailed for its savage realism, but it is in truth one of the more cynically manipulative sequences in recent memory, full of irritating, disorienting jump cuts, pornographically Gibsonesque attention to gory detail, camera tricks and special effects artifices, all accompanied by a deafening soundtrack designed to overwhelm our capacity to think about what is being portrayed on the screen and to push us to simply immerse ourselves in its reductive US vs. Them POV. When I saw this film in the theaters, the audience cheered when the first German soldier was killed, then cheered again when American troops murdered surrendering Germans in cold blood: this, I'm sure, was Spielberg's intent.

Having bulldozed and buried any hint of the moral ambiguity of war, Spielberg gets around to the heart of the movie. It has been discovered by the War Department that one Private Ryan (Matt Damon) is now the sole surviving son of a family who has sent five sons to war. Unfortunately, Ryan was a part of the paratrooper drop that preceeded the Normandy landings and is missing behind enemy lines. In a moment of supreme hokum (complete with a quotation of a letter by Abraham Lincoln that wouldn't feel out of place in a Ken Burns documentary), Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall (Harve Presnell) decides that an effort will just have to be made to save Private Ryan.

At this point, Saving Private Ryan becomes just another motley-crew-of-experts flick. A team of caricatures is assembled: the tough-as-nails seargent; the feisty Italian; the pious Southern sniper with Talent on Loan from God (if the historical setting had been Vietnam, I'm sure this character would have been replaced by Cuba Gooding Jr. as The Magic Negro); the REMF pussy - all led by Tom Hanks in the role of Tom Hanks, Captain Everyman. Call them the Sanitized Seven. Battles ensue. Some of the caricatures die (does anyone really remember which ones?). The Germans never miss an opportunity to remind us how EVIL they are. One wehrmacht man - having been saved from certain death at the hands our intrepid heroes by the earnest pleas of the REMF - returns only to slowly and sadistically stab an American to death. Oh those tricksy Krauts! In the end, Ryan is saved and Tom Hanks is dying. But it was all worth it. Cue the graveside maundering. USA! USA! USA!

The problem with Saving Private Ryan is the problem with everything Spielberg touches. More broadly, it is the problem of the American commercial cinema. Lacking the courage of any real conviction, it cannot offer any challenge to its audience. Instead, it panders to that audience with easy answers, impressive effects, a soundtrack that booms and tinkles in all the right places and a nice mom's apple pie pat on the back for every red blooded American. What's missing is even the faintest glimmer of awareness that the world doesn't break down neatly into heroes and villains, cowards and the courageous, us and them. In the place of subtlety, it gives us spectacle, in the place of art, it delivers technically proficient propaganda.

4/10

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

Fallen Angels

Wong Kar-Wai is the modern cinema's premier poet of loss and longing. His characteristically enigmatic films capture the erratic rhythms and ephemeral nature of memory and torment: fleeting, fragmented, wandering only to return obsessively to its central foci.

While Wong's debut, As Tears Go By, was a relatively straightforward commercial riff on Scorsese's Mean Streets and the 'heroic bloodshed' style of Hong Kong street opera pioneered by action maestro John Woo, he would establish with Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express a signature style characterized by visual bravura mixed with interwoven and intensely introspective tales of emotionally isolated young people adrift in the shadow kingdom of urban postmodernity. Eschewing more traditional narrative formats for an ellipitical self-referrentiality that mirrors memory itself, Wong's films are rarely instantly accessible, but reward the patient viewer with intoxicating moods and contemplative brilliance.

Fallen Angels was originally conceived as something of a 'nightside' sequal/companion piece to Chungking Express. Structurally and thematically it mirrors the latter with two seperate plotlines, each centering on a pair of twentysomethings (a hitman and his female 'agent' in one and a strange, mute confidence man and the girl he takes a shine to in the other) in search of love but unable or unwilling to find it in each other. Assorted camera tricks, fish eye lenses, slow motion sequences and the strategic use of a gloriously bittersweet pop soundtrack all help to capture a mood of frantic desperation and the distortions of memory and longing.

Wong also invokes the first of his 'art' films, Days of Being Wild, returning to its concern with the loss and meaning of identity in an impersonal world. Leon Lai's hitman and Takeshi Kaneshiro's petty criminal both try - and fail - to remake their lives on ths straight and narrow. One of them manages a peace of sorts with his failure - the other goes out out in a bittersweet blaze of glory. Through them, explores the way in which longing (mis)identifies others: his characters view each other through the distorted lens memory and desire - what they see is not reality, but a projection of their own dreams: when the truth is made manifest, it is always the cruelest blow.

10/10

 

[My Man Mahmoud]

Casino Royale

In recent years, James Bond has become the clunkiest of film franchises. Dragged down by the accumulated weight of gadgets a lack of real wit, it has devolved into little more than the most prominent operation of Her Majesty's Product Placement Service. Likewise, Ian Fleming's signature antihero has fallen far from Sean Connery's iconic turns as the dangerously masculine superspy to the smugly effete portrayals affected by rom com light weight Pierce Brosnan.

Casino Royale sets out to do for Bond what Batman Begins did for the Dark Knight - returning the darkness and ambiguity that made the early films (and the James Bond character) so intriguing, and it succeeds admirably with a back-to-basics approach.

Those 'basics' start with a return to the source material. For the first time in years, the opening credits make use of the magical phrase "Based on the novel by Ian Fleming." Indeed, the source is the original Bond novel - a fitting choice for a film that seeks to reimagine the entire franchise.

The plot centers on a high stakes card game (Texas hold 'em in a nod to the current poker craze) where blood-weeping banker-to-international terrorists Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) is trying to win back millions in clients' money he lost in an investment scheme before his clients can find out and kill him. Newly minted Double-O agent Bond (Daniel Craig), the best poker player in Her Majesty's Secret Service, is sent to the Casino Royale with the backing of the British treasury to make sure Le Chiffre busts out. Bond's mission is complicated by the presence of treasury agent Vesper Lynde (Eva Green) - beautiful, intelligent and seemingly immune to his considerable charms - who is in charge of the purse strings and none too confident in Bond's abilities.

The writing and direction are vastly improved when compared to recent entries. Gone are the excessive gadgetry and most of the smarmy self-referrentiality (and most of the inside jokes here slyly subvert series clichés, rather than reinforcing them) that dragged down recent Bond flicks. The back-to-basics approach includes a return to classic Bond formula of beautifully shot exotic locales, impressive stunt work (the free running chase scene that opens the film is the best action sequence you’ll see this year), and stylish direction with special attention to gesture and detail (even showing the scabs and bruises on Bond’s hands when he returns to the table after brutally beating two would-be assassins to death in a stairwell brawl). The dialogue, too, has a dark and morbid turn not seen since the early Connery films. A pre-credit sequence detailing James Bond’s rise to Double-O status is particularly black – Bond’s quips have a sadistic edge, blurring the line between heroism and villainy. That isn’t to say that Casino Royale is a perfect film. Eye aside, Le Chiffre is a rather bloodless villain who never seems terribly threatening, and Vesper Lynde undergoes a major shift in outlook with little in the film to explain her behavior. Additionally, at a fairly hefty 141 minutes, there’s definitely some narrative fat that could have been edited out.

The biggest improvement is in the development of Bond’s character. He emerges in Casino Royale as a much more primal figure than we are used to seeing. When Daniel Craig was cast for the role, the response was overwhelmingly negative. Too short, too blonde, the naysayers said. The worries were misplaced, however, as Craig turns in a superb performance. His Bond is very much in the mould of Fleming's literary creation – brutal, amoral, predatory and impulsively violent, a sociopath redeemed (or perhaps not) only by the righteousness of his cause. Craig brings an overpowering physicality (bulging muscles more than compensating for the lack of height) that is offset by his emotional vulnerability: he's a decidedly thuggish rake, but not an invincible one. For the first time, the series has given us a new Bond that doesn't need to stand in Sean Connery's shadow, and Casino Royale is easily the best entry in the series since the 60s.

8/10

 

[Scourge of God]

Aguirre, the Wrath of God​

Werner Herzog has been called a madman, a dreamer and a maverick of cinema. An eccentric and driven filmmaker, his drive and eccentricity often crossed the border into obsession. Not surprisingly, his films have often been seen as explorations of the depths of obsession, and his masterpiece of masterpieces, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, is no exception.

Aguirre is a fairly accessible film, considering its pedigre, and one that eschews the temporally disjointed structures and arcane avant-garde-isms more typical of earlier German art cinema (including Herzog's own previous work). Instead, Herzog relies on simple narrative filmmaking to tell a story that is on one level a chronicle of a Quixotic yet doomed quest, on a second level, a meditation on the descent into madness and death, and on yet another level, a scathing rebuke of the cultural zeitgeist of Herzog's age.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God begins with one of the most visually stunning shots in cinematic history (and ends with another), as conquistadors under the command of Gonzalo Pizzaro (brother of the conqueror of the Inca), guided by Indian slaves, pick their way through the fog down an impossibly steep mountain terrace toward the jungle below. Soon, a small force leaves this main body to scout down a river in the search of the fabled city of El Dorado.

The rest of the film follows the course of this scouting party as it floats to its inevitable doom, done in by starvation, disease, the decidedly unfriendly attentions of the natives, and, most of all, by the madness and boundless ambition of the expedition's second-in-command, Don Lope de Aguirre (the incomparable Klaus Kinski).

In telling this story, Herzog makes use of a minimalistic cinematic style in which both dialogue and action are sparsely distributed. Instead, the plot unfolds primarily through a series of visual metaphors - the descent into the jungle, the river, a fully rigged sailing vessel somehow stranded in the forest canopy - which, combined with the brilliant soundtrack by ambient music pioneers Popol Vuh, help to create the trancelike dreamscapes for which Herzog is justifiably famous.

One of the highlights of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is the simply stunning cinematography of Thomas Mauch. The fluid, languid movements of Mauch's camera mirrors to the agonizingly slow progress of the expedition (shown to particularly brilliant effect in the film's opening shots), and serves to lend an epic sensibility to a film that clocks in at a spare 94 minutes. The supersaturated colors of the jungle backgrounds become at once beautiful and suffocating - a choking, endless emerald sea, swallowing all human presence and endeavor, rendering them futile and meaningless.

Special attention should also be paid to the Klaus Kinski's performance in the title role, which is not only magnificent, but must be counted among the greatest performances in film history. For a lesser actor, the sparseness of dialogue and plotting in Herzog's largely improvised script could have presented an insurmountable obstacle, but in the hands of a master like Kinski, that very lack of dialogue and action becomes an opportunity to fill the empty space with the edges of a character created from the fragments of gesture. Kinski renders the madness of Aguirre all the more frightening by cloaking it in mystery and only allowing us to view glimpses of the beast within. Instead, we are left to intuit his insanity from subtle cues of movement and expression: his curiously bent walk; the inhuman detachment he shows in the face of the suffering and fear of his men; the way he simply materializes in front of the camera, drifting in like fog (a feat he contrived through a contorted sort of pirouette); the calculating silence into which he frequently falls. That his madness is only hinted at makes the unnervingly whispered moments of rage even more terrifying.

On the surface, Aguirre is an exploration of the romance of the Impossible Dream, yet another sign of his obsession with obsessions, perhaps the central concern of Herzog's art. On a deeper level, it is perhaps best understood as a blistering critique of the 1960s counterculture. The Enlightenment conceit of the 'noble savage' which the hippie movement adopted as its central tenet is ruthlessly dissected, and the hollowness made manifest by the Summer of Love, Altamont and the Manson Family is given concrete expression in the form of the Indians. These, far from being the peaceful sages of hippie lore, appear in Aguirre as faceless demons of fear, invisible except for their handiwork, which is no less than death itself.

Herzog's Jungle, his emblem of Nature, reinforces this critique: Herzog's Jungle is not the counterculture's garden of delights, it is Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Here, the hippies' peaceful paradise is consumed by Kipling's 'nature, red in tooth and claw.' Though the Jungle teems with life and beauty, it is in the end a cradle of madness, and the triumph of the Jungle is a meditation on the triumph of Death.

But it is in the character of Aguirre himself that Herzog's critique of the counterculture achieves its most complete form, for Don Lope de Aguirre can be fruitfully read as the film's hippie stand-in (he conveniently even sports long hair). It is Aguirre, conquistador, and ex officio, agent of civilization, who descends into the Jungle (and into madness), stripping away the last vestigial remnants of his own civilized veneer in his pursuit of the Impossible Dream of El Dorado. What emerges is, in a sense, the Natural Man. But the Natural Man is not a man at peace and harmony with other men and nature, but a man reduced to a state of madness and endless, unquenchable desire. In Aguirre, the great lie of the Enlightenment and counterculture is made manifest: divorced from any civilized impulse, he is only a savage, vicious, ruthless and subject only to his own impulses and wishes. Instead of Rousseau's Noble Savage, the Natural Man stands revealed as nothing more (or less) than Hobbes' Leviathan.

10/10​