Erik's thoughts on "Snowpiercer"

A sci-fi yarn celebrating glamor and grime with a low-budget aesthetic, Bong Joon-ho's future-set Snowpiercer often feels like a cross between The Wizard of Oz (a journey down a single path to meet The Creator) and The Hunger Games (the upper-class inspired by the flamboyant fashion of yesteryear), between a social satire and an action movie steeped in revolutionary causes. The film, based on a French graphic novel, is pretty simple — with Earth now a frozen-over wasteland, a constantly in-motion train stores the planet's remaining survivors (divided by class), continuously circling around the planet until a hopefully eventual environmental change deems it safe to step outdoors again — and its storytelling rather straightforward: placed conveniently at the back, a group of the lower-class least-of-the-least come up with a plan to fight back against the authoritative enforcers at the head of the train (although the train is not a literal pyramid of ascending power, it might as well be) and so they march forth, compartment by compartment, to confront the man who created all this.

Yes, the themes are heavy, and often times, a little too on the nose  — the lower class get relegated to the back of the train, bringing to mind incidents that prompted the African-American Civil Rights movement — and the narrative progression, almost by design, repetitive. But the lighter moments make do, i.e. the characters relishing the chance to inhale cigarette smoke for the first time in years. Also humorous is that each train compartment serves as another take on a fucked up version of the ideal desired life, be it the attentive and all-too-ready-to-be-brainwashed children reciting the mantra of their leader or the older twentysomethings engaging in rave, club-like behavior and going all out on excess. Make no mistake, drugs are a nuisance here, but Bong Joon-ho finds a way, late in the film, to incorporate them as a useful play on the tropes of MacGyver.

The film's joys then come out of similar excitement a video game player feels when he advances to the next level to face the subsequent "boss"; each new train compartment reveal feels like it should open with a "Level 2! Level 3!..." introductory announcement, indicating that by moving forward, they have advanced to the next round. And the further you get in "the game," the harder it gets, as ammo (thought to be a thing of the past on this train) is later introduced as being in possession of the evil henchmen. Snowpiercer's narrative isn't the only thing that feels modeled after a stage-by-stage video game, however. Its visual aesthetic occasionally mirrors one as well: as the train goes through an extended tunnel, literally keeping our protagonists in the dark, the film's masked villains don night vision goggles, allowing Bong Joon-ho the opportunity to indulge in some participatory POV shots.

The film's cast is adequate enough, mixing some faces quite familiar to American moviegoers (Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton) with some much appreciated Bong Joon-ho regulars. Swinton, doing her best impression of a Jerry Lewis impression,craves her chance to play the diabolical character equivalent of Mr. Potatohead (fake nose, fake teeth....), while Evans tries his best to deliver a monologue about how delicious babies taste somewhat hauntingly. And the big cameo late in the film is a nice surprise, if only the character served a greater purpose than to deliver mucho exposition and to prove he's the worst of the worst as evidenced by the size of his telephone.

While Snowpiercer doesn't come close to matching the quality of recent Bong Joon-ho efforts like the quirkily sad Mother or the environmentally-conscious monster movie The Host, it still serves up some delights. The CGI exteriors, whether shoddy or up-to-par, have a certain otherworldly charm to them, and that goes double for the film's brief violent outbursts. I could have done without the perhaps too easily wrapped-up conclusion (and the sacrifice Evans' character has to make and the way it relates to his arm/dark history on the train), but the film ends with an poetic visual that has two intriguing options: 1.) our surviving characters have quite a future ahead of them or  2.) they are the afternoon's main course on Mother Nature's food chain.


Recommended

Inside My Mind on the Minds of Jack Smith and Michael Snow

  
Last Saturday evening, I headed over to the Anthology Film Archives to take in some Essential Cinema screenings presented in 16mm. On tap were Jack Smith's Scotch Tape and Flaming Creatures, as well as Michael Snow's Wavelength and < — >. Having not seen the movies before, I brought along my handy notebook to take some notes in between the films as to document my experience. Note-taking is a common practice for me these days (I thank certain professors I've had for that), as I try to jot down as many ideas, theories and emotions as possible while watching a film.  Some films demand intense note-taking more than others.  No observation is too vague and no observation is too obvious, although in retrospect, having done more research, they can seem somewhat innocent and humorous. Still, there's a first time for everything.

Scotch Tape (Jack Smith)

- music.
- daytime.
- working in a landfill/construction site

- is that tape on the film in the right hand corner?

- guys dancing.

Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith)

- classic list style credits (but on a piece of paper which our characters consistently walk in front of). Hollywood opening trope demolished!

- Objectification of body parts? Representation of sexual organs but (I don't want to say desexualizes) as an apparatus necessary for playtime.

- everyone puts on lipstick as audio of what appears to be a lipstick commercial is played. They are enamored with putting their lipstick on, slumping over one another in relaxed fascination and glee.

- A lot of flaccid penis and the touching/jiggling of it. Penis straight on at camera.

- Dude in the audience laughed at this. We then encounter the rape of the woman and the touching/jiggling of the left breast and the laughter stopped. People lay down on the floor, finger each other, eat each other out against their will.

- The screams are prevalent.

- The sound (as well as the score) is very prominent throughout.

- The world explodes and the rape stops. People either die or zone out as debris falls from the sky.

- The camera shakes in a panic.

- Blond bombshell introduced (later lies down and touches himself, trying to get hard).

- Flamenco dancing.

- A party reminiscent of a Hollywood of yesteryear breaks out (overhead shot of flamenco dancer bustling through the congested crowd like a bumper car).

- The victims, abused from before, stare from afar, frozen in time.
- A fly swoops in and makes its presence known.

 

Wavelength (Michael Snow)

- One room.

- camera moves in closely. Like Blowup and Blade Runner, the film takes an image and gets in close.

- We stare intently for so long, our eyes scanning for information and clues (but as to what?) and our brain plays with what to do with them.

- We get closer and closer as the camera uses filters to change the colors, lays image on top of image, etc.

- We look for so long that our eyes start to play tricks on us.   - We think we know what we see and then think again.

- What perceives what we witness? Our eyes or our brain?

- The film takes a theory and practices it.

- A piercing, drone-like sound throughout.
- Women chilling to Strawberry Fields by the Beatles (is the sound in this film diegetic?).
- What's going on at that hardware store across the street?
- Day to night and back.

- Guy lays on floor. Is he dead? Woman (Amy Taubin!) later reports him to be. We hear police sirens in the distance. Perhaps he is.

- This film is playful. Whatyaknow? A narrative developed in front of our eyes and we didn't even know it.

- A part of the film feels like an eye exam, like when you look through different lenses and the optometrists keep playing with the prescription to see how well you can view the image. - It's fuzzy, then clear, then REALLY clear.

- One of the photos on the wall (spoiler alert!) turns out to be one of waves in the ocean. A postcard of peaceful serenity on a wall in a room of urban business.

< — > (Michael Snow) 
- Bradley Eros told me that the film is sometimes called "Back and Forth" by some but that the title is a symbol and so they are wrong to call it "Back and Forth."

- Shot at Fairleigh Dickinson University in NJ in July 1968 with a Bolex camera.

- Like a visual tennis match, left to right, back and forth, accompanied by the sound of what very well could be a tennis ball bit hit.

- Heard at each turn.

- The camera oscillates back and forth inside a classroom (surveillance state metaphor?).

- I hear they do something like this in Paranormal Activity 3. Should check that out.

- The provides not only a left and right image but a left to right image; the spatial imagery matters most of all.

- We see people walk in and out of the classroom.

- They sit at the desks (professor at chalkboard;  "< — >" is displayed on chalkboard.

- A party takes place in the classroom.

- The camera keeps moving.

- How much of this is performance?

- "Characters" appear and disappear from the frame in an instant (their souls inhabit the classroom).

- The swooshing back and forth induces paranoia at times.

- It's like a television set scanning information from left to right, attempting to transmit an image.

- The camera becomes a representation of a viewer's darting eyes.

- Later the camera movement switches to up and down, up and down.

- A cop peers in through the window.

- The camera's movement speeds up.
- Accelerated speed makes it all a blur.
- The images do not change but the speed and intensity creates a new image out of this chaotic order.

- A collage of previous moments we've seen (left to right and up to down) is played, one image on top of the other.

Erik's thoughts on "Ukraine Bride: 13 Years Later"

Like Michael Apted's long-lasting Up series but briefer and set to a more specific narrative, Nili Tal’s Ukraine Brides: 13 Years Later — playing today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of The New York Jewish Film Festival — continues the filmmaker’s sociological investigation into the lives of four women thrust into a difficult marriage. Opening with a title card that reports, “As of the year 2000, women from the former USSR have been building internet dating-sites, inviting Western men to marry them," the film provides updates on three such women whom Tal has been documenting for over a decade. 

Vera, a widow living in Tel Aviv, is given the most screen-time. Married to a stranger who she grew to love, she nonetheless feels like an outsider in her adopted country.  And, as the film soon reveals, Vera is more alone than she at first thinks — after nine years of marriage, her husband, struggling with diabetes and kidney problems related to his past heroine abuse, passes away and leaves her with child and a faulty will.  She now spends her days dealing with lawyers and struggling to provide for her son.

Natasha is featured next, a young woman who fled from her husband soon after marriage and moved in with the director of this documentary. There she met a new man, married, and now spends most of her time in a decrypted old home missing her husband (he is a truck driver consistently traveling to support his family).

Most fascinating is Tanya’s story, a Ukrainian woman who, as a teenager, served as a translator for girls looking to marry foreign men. It becomes no secret that Tanya desires a husband herself, and soon after marries an Israeli man twenty-five years her elder. 

The relationship eventually ends and Tanya returns home to the Ukraine where she meets a new husband in Kiev (with whom she creates a child).  When director Tal — who appears on-screen and often narrates the film — asks her in 2008 if she loves her husband, Tanya hesitates. She adores her daughter but cannot confirm a love for her partner.

Confirming this sense of doubt, Tanya is up and at 'em again soon after that 2008 discussion. She takes her daughter and moves to the United Kingdom to live with her mother and get an education. Tal shows us an interview with Tanya from 2000 where she appeared dead-set on finding a man. This contrasts with current day footage where Tanya now believes a man would have held her back from achieving her dreams.

One of the documentary's strengths is that each storyline goes off into uniquely personal directions with vastly different (and occasionally opposing) outcomes. Vera loved her husband very much, but now realizes the unfortunate situation he has indirectly placed her in. Natasha is attached to the opposite sex and, happily married with child now, is content with being wife to a hard-working, often on-the-road husband. Tanya wishes to be independent of the opposite sex after years of believing that the opposite sex would define her and provide reason for her existence (being a mother provides solace now). All three women took similar paths to new destinations and Tal, who produces, narrates, and stars in the film, never judges their outcomes. Another sequel may soon be on the way. 

Recommended

Erik's thoughts on "The Wolf of Wall Street"

With elements ranging from Goodfellas to Glengarry on crack (and cocaine and quaaludes), Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is a film about a select group of shallow fratboy idiots on a quest for more. By now you've heard the water-cooler controversies (it justifies the characters' behavior, it doesn't show the effect their actions had on their helpless victims) and are probably wondering when we can just start talking about whether or not the movie is worthwhile. In my opinion, it holds much value, but there are some reservations to keep in mind.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort as a frat house psycho salesman crossed with a maniac game show host (just give this boy a microphone and see him morph into a preacher of the deranged). His character mirrors the film: it is all a piece of a complete energy — as Scorsese gives us a consistently moving camera, quick edits, eye-catching slow-mo camera flip-outs, pop music, flashbacks and excess, DiCaprio gets to narrate the film and occasionally break the fourth wall, speaking directly to the camera. Does this add some necessary chutzpah? It loses its impact after a while and sometimes the narration is very briefly provided by other characters, which tends to serve little effect, breaking its primarily singular tone in the long run.

Many moviegoers (or perhaps a very vocal minority) seem to have a problem with the film's characterization of Jordan Belfort. He is not a very deep individual. He doesn't change much throughout the film (if you're expecting a big come comeuppance at the end, look elsewhere), never seems to realize he's a despicable person (give or take a crucial scene where his first wife discovers he's been seeing another woman) and seems like the kind of guy whose family gets a TV show on Bravo due to how rich they are; the opening sequence involving Belfort giving us the lowdown on his home, his car and his insanely attractive wife is shot like an introduction to a highly addictive reality show. I thought I heard Robin Leach make a voice cameo later in the film (during the introduction of the Naomi boat, which Scorsese films like a commercial), and after doing a little research, my suspicions were confirmed. This really is Lifestyles of the Crude and Famous.

Moviegoers may hate Belfort because he's not like Jake La Motta or Henry Hill — they may have been dumb, but they knew it and strived to do better, even if their vices ultimately provided their downfall  — but rather a 2000s villain to be gleefully detested. He's Tucker Max (of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell fame) and Hunter Moore (founder of the Is Anyone Up? website), two men who profited in different ways by what we now know as "revenge porn." Yes, Belfort is THAT kind of evil. While we get to know Belfort's father (Rob Reiner's performance tears the house down), it's a deceptively poignant narrative choice to show us much less of his mother.


In one flashback involving an office orgy, we are quickly told by Jordan that one guy in the office wound up marrying "the office slut" and offed himself soon after. It's somewhat of a throwaway line, but Scorsese gives us a glimpse of the crime scene — the man slit his wrists and bled to death in the bathtub — that counters Jordan's nonchalant attitude. Later, Jordan doesn't seem to care that he could have killed innocent passengers on the road during a drugged-out wreckless driving incident. A flashback shows just how unreliable his narration is.

That may be the key to this whole shebang. The film is based on a book by Belfort which chronicled his Wall Street experiences. It goes without saying that anyone who takes this guy at his word is about three apples short of a lemon tree. Belfort often begins to explain to us the inner-workings of his illegal activities before saying something along the lines of "meh, you're not really interested anyway." It's frustrating, for sure, but its purpose stems from Belfort's compulsive need as deceptive storyteller to pull the wool over the eyes of even those he holds closet (us, the viewers). There's a sight gag late in the film where a plane blows up on its way to rescuing Belfort and his friends after a disastrous boat wreck. If you question the likelihood of this incident, you're supposed to. Also, if you are female, homosexual or black, there will be moments where you may feel very disrespected, and you have a right to be. While the film is more condemnation than glorification, you have to look closely at times to see it. If you don't think Scorsese identifies with the victims, then why would he cast himself as one of them (it's a pretty hard to find, or rather hear, cameo, but his voice is present during one important phone call)? The characters have an extremely isolated view of the world, but I'm not sure the film does.

Whether or not The Wolf of Wall Street glorifies Belfort and Donnie Azoff, his right hand man (played neither brilliantly nor horribly by Jonah Hill) is left for the viewer to decide.  Certainly this lifestyle feels rather empty and the film, as a mirror of the lifestyle, occasionally runs the risk of feeling a little empty too. It's not so much a rags-to-riches story (while the film opens with Belfort rising up the ranks before Black Monday hits, his rise back up the ladder is perhaps showcased a little too quickly), as it is a riches-to-riches story which, while unfortunately a true scenario in the lives of many Wall Street crooks these days, can be a little unsatisfying dramatically.

Much will be said about the ultimate quaalude trip-out sequence which starts at a country club and recklessly finds its way back to the Belfort household. It's accomplished, hysterical stuff. Personally speaking, I could have done without some of the connections Scorsese visually employs —  as he notices a nearby television set playing Popeye, taking his spinach and becoming invincible as a result, Jordan finds some coke from a nearby drawer, takes it, grows empowered and saves his friend from choking to death; even in his drugged up state, the only way Belfort can out-do the heroic Popeye is by doing more drugs.

The scenes that work best are often the more subtle inclusions, the standout being a verbal conning between Belfort and a FBI agent on a yacht. Scorsese allows for a basic two-shot to tell the story here, and the actors thrive in this low-key game of one-upmanship (a later two-shot sequence set on a park bench between Belfort and his wife's aunt works as well, until, that is, the off-screen narration runs a little too broad). Some of the verbal sparrings between Belfort and his duchess wife also provide a lot of entertainment and the film takes an appreciated breather as a result; the film is three hours long, but it rarely stops moving forward.

The Wolf of Wall Street won't be for everyone. Some have described it as a collection of "Scorsese's greatest hits," and while that's true, the pieces don't work as cohesively as they do elsewhere. The sex, the drugs, the hard-to-love but fascinating lead characters, their rise, their fall, the giving in to the FBI and ratting out your dearest friends...Scorsese has been here many times before. The film, with a screenplay by Terence Winter, feels patched together at times, even as Scorsese tries constantly to keep it moving. 

One reason why all these vitriolic responses are emerging may be because once the film is done and the high wears off, some viewers may feel they've just been conned. Jordan is currently living on Manhattan Beach, newly engaged and enjoying all the renewed media interest in him. What would've happened had he taken that stockboy position at The Wiz?

Watching the film, I was reminded of Pauline Kael's review of Goodfellas. "Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas has a lift," she began, "It's like Raging Bull, except that it's not domineering. It's like Raging Bull made in a jolly, festive frame of mind. It's about being a guy and guys getting high on being a guy." Make no mistake, The Wolf of Wall Street is domineering (and that brings down the lift) while also being "about a guy and guys getting high on being guys." Occasionally, that cancels out the fun. Still, it's a film certainly worth your time, and I hear you won't even have to shave your head to get in.



Recommended

BSMC – Now Playing: Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Big Shot Movie Club (Now Playing)

I recently started work on a monthly column for Big Shot Movie Club, a website that discusses a group of films "every month relevant to a specific theme." This month's theme was nudity, more specifically of the female topless variety. I discussed Amy Heckerling's Fast Time At Ridgemont High. Here's a link: http://bigshotmovieclub.com/2013/08/30/now-playing-fast-times-at-ridgemont-high/

'Superfly': A Racial Divide In A Fun City

I recently wrote another piece for Indiewire's Shadow And Act, a blog on Indiewire which focuses on "cinema of the African Diaspora." The article discusses Superfly, Gordon Parks Jr.'s 1970s classic that screened last Friday night at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of J. Hoberman's "Fun City: New York in the Movies 1967-1975" series. Here's a link: http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/superfly-a-racial-divide-in-a-fun-city

The 17th Annual Fantasia International Film Festival

I recently wrote a piece for Slant Magazine's The House Next Door, covering the 17th annual Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal. It has been added to my Clips section, but here's a link for interested readers: 

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2013/12/fantasia-international-film-festival-2013-antisocial-willow-creek-bad-milo-curse-of-chucky-and-more