Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is that rare beast: a blockbuster popcorn movie that has won favour with critics and festival programmers. Of course, it’s a South Korean blockbuster, so it’s neither as turgid nor as banal as the average Hollywood formula film.
Which is noteworthy, considering the familiar storyline: after an instance of wanton environmental abuse, a mutated monster terrorizes an Asian city, causing mass panic and triggering an overzealous military response. In Bong’s version, the monster also takes hostages, allowing the director to weave a skewed tale of familial loyalty among the CG-fueled rampage scenes.
The resulting genre mix is typical of Korean cinema, and mostly works in the film’s favour. Some of the comedy is too broad, especially in the performance of the usually excellent Song Kang-ho, who plays a bufoonish father. But the family as a whole works as a locus of quirky characters, a group of regular-citizen underdogs who contrast with the even more blundering figures of governmental and military authority.
Though the monster, created by FX heavyweights WETA Workshop (Lord of the Rings) and The Orphanage (Sin City), is one ugly critter, there’s no mistaking who the film’s real villain is: America, whose army combats the reptilian threat with a sinister gas cheekily called “Agent Yellow.” If that weren’t a blatant enough shot at the country that’s occupied Korea since 1945, there’s the prologue, in which a U.S. army doctor orders dozens of bottles of formaldehyde poured into a drain feeding into the Han River, causing the mutation of the monster.
That scene is based on a real event that occurred in 2002, which resulted in stirrings of anti-American sentiment across South Korea. Although The Host is a fun movie, it’s not short on those same negative feelings. Every host needs a parasite, and Bong, using clever visual parallels, fake news footage and a sharp sense of humour, names his in no uncertain terms.
It’s that undercurrent of anger that makes the film and its phenomenal success – it broke box office records upon its domestic release, and now stands as the most successful Korean film of all time – fascinating beyond its skillful spin on a well-worn genre. Hollywood is to U.S. pop culture as the Pentagon is to its military projects. It’s where the hostile takeover of the world’s movie screens is organized, where the weapons are built and where the demands are made. Recently, American studios have been putting pressure on the Korean government to roll back its quota laws, which ensure a place for Korean films in Korean cinemas. The Host’s story is allegorical, but the film itself is a more blunt sort of defense: a blockbuster in the Hollywood mode, deployed against the culture that inspired it, and embraced with fervor by the Korean public, who are justifiably proud of their film industry. It’s a film that questions U.S. dominance both in its content and its execution, and it’s all the more threatening for it – especially since even the most bellicose Hollywood producer has to know, in his heart, that the inevitable remake won’t be anywhere near as good.
For a while, it looked like David Lynch’s Inland Empire would not be playing at a theatre near you. Debuting in September 2006 at the Venice and New York Film Festivals, showing regularly in Manhattan and Los Angeles and then slowly making its way across the United States for a series of one-off engagements, the elusive, somewhat sinister film seemed as though it would never get across the border, until Toronto’s newly revamped Royal Cinema stepped up and scheduled a run in May.
I was lucky enough to catch a late show of the film in February (2007) at the IFC Center in Manhattan’s West Village. It confirmed that there’s a reason why Inland Empire is not in wide release. Lynch may have best explained the main problem speaking to a National Film Theatre audience in London: “Inland Empire is three hours long and… people have trouble understanding it. It’s the kiss of death; for a distributor looking at this, it’s a horror to them.” To bypass the problem, Lynch decided to distribute the film in North America himself.
Narratively, Inland Empire pushes much further than any of Lynch’s previous work – think the last half-hour of Mulholland Drive (2001) at five times the complexity and largely without the anchor of that film’s more traditional narrative. The film’s one-sheet offers only the tagline “A Woman In Trouble”; with that in mind, I took the movie to be about the troubled inner life of either an aspiring Hollywood actress (played by Laura Dern, who previously worked with Lynch on Wild At Heart) or an unnamed young woman who sits on a bed watching TV.
Inland Empire’s story also encompasses a sitcom about walking, talking rabbits (complete with canned laugh track); it features actors Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton and William H. Macy in supporting roles; and it boasts a bunch of familiar Lynch motifs, including factories, female nudes, and American pop songs used to strange and unsettling effect. Polish people and folktales also somehow figure into this strange brew.
Lynch shot Inland Empire in standard-def DV on the Sony DSR-PD150, and yet for some reason still transferred to 35mm film for 1.85:1 theatrical exhibition. The financial freedom afforded by DV allowed him to experiment on a number of levels: self-financing, shooting over a period of several years, writing as he shot, filling a number of key crew roles himself, and at times risking some particularly unique and intimate camerawork. Ultimately, this results in a film that – relatively speaking, anyway – lacks Lynch’s usual tension between conventional and experimental storytelling (a tension that perhaps accounts for the mainstream success of Lynch’s more famous work).
My last experience with this sort of long form abstract filmmaking was Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3. By comparison, Inland Empire is more story-focused; in the end, it’s a mystery, with enough clues dropped throughout that I’ll probably begin to make narrative sense of the movie after nine or ten viewings. (The IFC Center had a sign posted at the box office: “See Inland Empire nine times and the tenth trip is on us!”) Yet it’s also essentially David Lynch operating without restraint. For fans of Lynch or offbeat filmmaking in general… well, it’s really something to see. If you don’t make the Toronto screening, keep an eye out for the rumoured DVD release in Summer 2007.
For most audiences, however, Inland Empire will be an extremely difficult three hours, if they even stay with it to the end. It’s destined to become Lynch’s least-seen feature, and as such will perhaps be remembered alongside the filmmaker’s recent forays into off-beat enterprizes such as pay-per-view web content, promoting Transcendental Meditation across North America, selling his own label of gourmet coffee and Oscar-campaigning for Laura Dern with a live cow on Sunset Blvd (Google it).
After the recent Toronto screening of Calgarian Gary Burns’ debut feature film The Suburbanators (1995), he admitted in a Q&A session that he cringes over hearing the way he talks in the dialogue of his characters. Yet The Suburbanators, produced in and around Calgary in 1994, speaks clearly in the developing voice of a filmmaker who continues to make interesting statements about the space around him, most recently with the excellent Radiant City.
Where that most recent film uses a documentary-style narrative to analyze expert interviews plus grown-ups’ and childrens’ responses to the suburbs, The Suburbanators examines this everyman’s land from its defining dimension: the time between destinations on the roads of suburbia, inside the slacker void of post-adolescence stoner come down. When our two principal tour guides through this wasteland, Al (Joel McNichol) and Bob (Stephen Spender), stop off to get haircuts, you know you’re comfortably settled into a narrative that places little importance on the multiple characters overlapping via plot points, and instead simply follows a day in the life of a handful of suburbanites. And often it’s a fascinating purgatory, not least because it’s often awkward to the point of comedy – statements such as “My car is my penis” have to count for unique cultural commentary.
The film also marks Burns’ first collaboration with DOP Patrick McLaughlin (Radiant City, Six Figures) and offers plenty of compelling images, many of them from within the environment of a car. Driving in circles is a good way to get you nowhere, and that’s more or less what becomes of these drunks and manic obsessives, and of the poor, preening women who wander into their vortex of flat-lining male maturity. The latter make the film an interesting complement to the equally mundane character worlds showcased in Bruce Sweeney’s Dirty (1998), where misogyny is presented as everyday male behaviour, or the everywhere to go but nothing (or no one) to do moral tales of Blaine Thurier (Low Self-Esteem Girl; Male Fantasy).
By the end of The Suburbanators, Burns doesn’t suggest his characters will break the cycle of repetition, at least for a while. Instead, they’re doomed to spend day after day as completely harmless gangsters of suburban adolescence, going for a ride, and passing out on lawns. After all, what else is there to do?A certain tendency in the dramatic branch of contemporary English Canadian cinema of late is for filmmakers to place earnest characters in blatantly contrived situations, forcing them to speak barely-metaphorical dialogue intended to lead them closer to psychological reconciliation (see Emile), often of an ambiguous, misty Muskokan past (see Show Me; The Dark Hours). Though a bright future, achieved with the right mindset of openness and renewal, often closes out such a film (see Douglas Coupland’s first screenplay, Everything’s Gone Green), it too often feels as detached from the rest of the picture as a moment actually free of cliché.
However hard they might try to connect with the viewer through
contemporary music – in Who Loves The Sun’s
case, Matt Bisonette’s second feature, it’s the
Silver Jews – these films ultimately suffer from a narrative
strategy based on interior psychology and, it would seem, monologues,
a technique that works well in books, but in film tends to
translate into blank stares and forlorn memories framed by
craggily metaphorical rocky shorelines.
One could also do with a little less Molly Parker, who, as
one of Canada’s finest female actors of the past 10-15
years, surely deserves a reprieve from screen time spent retreating
into a psychologically botched past as a drinker (see Marion
Bridge), or, as in Who Loves The Sun, a lover
and cheater. The performances by Parker and fellow leads Lukas
Hass and Adam Scott, who collectively make up the film’s
central love triangle, are fine in and of themselves. But sparks
never really fly between the seemingly eternally immature authors
(yes, both leads play failed writers) Will (Haas) and Daniel
(Scott), and Parker’s older Maggie.
The other main characters are the father and mother who essentially orchestrate the family reunion at the core of the story – the revelation of a biological connection between Will and Daniel. Played with scary theatricality by Canadian theatre vet R.H. Thomson and movie star Wendy Crewson (who seems out of place, like Parker overused and underutilized), they’re even less believable as a couple than the younger group is as a triangle.
Structurally, the film stitches together many beatific natural settings, but ultimately offers no social or cultural commentary on their significance, other than as backdrops for awkward, soap opera-esque family gatherings and their subsequent outbursts, private moments eavesdropped upon, or running away from problems by jumping off a handy nearby cliff.
That said, it’d be nice if more Canadian films were worth writing about for their own merits rather than their similarities to an unfortunately developing genre of moody mediocrity.
Who knew a documentary about a font could be so engaging? Everyone from artists and designers to average web users will find something fascinating in director Gary Hustwit’s first film. From the early history of Helvetica to its eventual dominance, the documentary confidently expands its narrow lead into a much bigger picture. After seeing the film I spent the rest of the evening playing a game of “spot the font.” There was Helvetica in all its round, approachable blandness directing me to the subway, telling me about how to save on my phone bill, or where to put my garbage. Helvetica is all around us, and like a secret conspiracy uncovered, awareness of it changes the way you see the world.
The strength of Helvetica lies in the passion of the type designers who praise or abhor the ubiquitous font. The men and women Hustwit interviews are very entertaining in a geeky, eccentric sort of way. Some love the clean even strokes of Helvetica because it is the perfect representation of post-WWII modern design; as one designer notes, it was a refreshing drink of water after the arid desert of 1950s cornball, multi-font visuals. Other (just as impassioned) designers scorn the use of Helvetica by big corporations and governments because its neutrality makes even dangerous messages palatable to the mass population. One woman states simply that when she started designing, Helvetica was the font of the government and therefore the font of the Vietnam war.
It’s hard not to get a bit of a shiver after hearing these arguments and seeing The Gap, for instance, selling us “love” (written in Helvetica of course) with our jeans. Helvetica is the safe, familiar voice advertisers, government agencies and individuals use when they want everyone to listen. Hustwit uses montages of busy city streets, clothing, IRS tax forms and everything in between to drive home the use of Helvetica in how we interpret the words we read.
In general, Hustwit keeps the pace brisk, but some interviews go on a bit too long, and the history lesson on how Helvetica developed slows into a lecture. Excellent use of abstract rock music plays well with the images, and the cinematography owes a debt to the clean, high definition compositions of Luke Geissbuhler. The wider implications of Helvetica, and all fonts, is left for the viewer to contemplate after the credits end and we go back into the cluttered modern landscape. Helvetica remains, after fifty years, the most popular, accepted and utilized medium of written communication. If the medium is the message, what does Helvetica say about us?
In Memoriam Alexander Litvinenko
(JOS DE PUTTER AND MASHA NOVIKOVA)
The story of Alexander Litvinenko is a remarkable one. As an exiled former member of Russia’s secret police, Litvinenko fearlessly believed that it was his responsibility to tell the truth about the heinous crimes and atrocities he witnessed and was a part of during his tenure. This determination ultimately led to his tragic and mysterious death.
In Memoriam Alexander Litvinenko is one of those films that keep making you wonder if what you’re watching is actually real. Directors Jos de Putter and Masha Novikova use a brilliant structure, moving between interviews with Litvinenko’s father, the exiled Chechnyan Prime Minister Akhmed Zakayev and Litvinenko himself – both two years prior to his death and later, on his death bed, about to succumb to radiation poisoning. The simple story of this member of the secret police and the controversy over what he tried to reveal would be enough to make a great film, but compounded with the suspicious circumstances surrounding Litvinekno's death, we bear witness to a full-on political incident that is simply jaw dropping.
De Putter and Novikova tell the story with such conviction that you can’t help but become enraged by what you’re watching. The film is tight and efficient, wasting no time in getting to the meat of story and the mystery. All of the interviews are thoughtful and provoking. Litvinenko’s father even comes to tears as he tries to understand how his son became a target. This is a film that makes you feel as though there’s no justice in the world – but believe me, you’ll still be glad you watched it.
Last Call at The Gladstone Hotel
(DERRECK ROEMER, NEIL GRAHAM)
The stately corner facade of the Gladstone Hotel is a Toronto landmark. For better or for worse, Toronto's oldest continuously operational hotel has reflected the times and people who have slept within its walls. Once it housed businessmen and upper class tourists; then, like its Parkdale surroundings, it declined and became a flop house for those living below the poverty line. Now it has been transformed once again, into a unique art centre and boutique hotel.
Amazingly, filmmakers Neil Graham and Derrek Roemer were there over the last six years to capture this recent transformation and document how the residents of the Gladstone, as well as the hotel itself, changed. Graham and Roemer were regular patrons of the Gladstone Hotel Bar in the late ’90s. At that time, it was a popular choice for locals who sought live music, cheap beer and wait staff “who weren't thinking about their acting careers". A shared appreciation of the hotel was the starting point for the duo to cultivate relationships with hotel staff and residents. The casual camerawork reflects the sometimes unplanned conversations that were captured once they earned their subjects’ trust. Over the years, the old owners had to sell, deals were made, renovations began (and stopped) and staff complained that the building was literally falling down on top of them. Through it all the camera recorded the heartbreak, anger and excitement of everyone involved.
The question of gentrification, and the displacement of lower income neighbourhoods, remains at the heart of the film. The Gladstone serves as a microcosm for what is happening in urban centres around the world. Who is to blame when people can no longer afford their rent? Is it better to save a building or preserve a home? The film wisely offers no easy answers.
On top of that, the film appeals as a terrific piece of drama. It draws you into individual lives and the struggle to survive. In particular, one former bag lady named Marianne is the heart of the film, and her story is very eloquently presented as she is forced to adapt with the changes around her. The long periods of time when little happens are condensed and the pace remains constant. However, this is not the most polished film, with both audio and picture quality sometimes on the rough side of verité.
In the end, a new day dawns for the Gladstone Hotel. It is bittersweet but the issues are too complex for anything but a mixed resolution. The future of the Gladstone, Parkdale and all of Toronto are left to the forces of economic evolution and human compassion. Who knows what changes the Gladstone will see in the next hundred years?
Losers And Winners
(ULRIKE FRANKE AND MICHAEL LOEKEN)
A stirring tale of globalization’s local effect on a state-of-the-art-coking plant in Germany, Losers and Winners portrays the efforts of the Chinese workmen dismantling the facility and the German foremen who formerly ran the plant. While the Chinese hope to successfully use bricks, mortar and technical know-how to bridge a 30-year technology gap, the German workers wonder at the pace of Chinese industry and its disregard for safety and environmental considerations at the expense of progress.
The hulking industrial equipment being systematically dismantled serves as a stark backdrop to the film’s clear focus on the sympathetic personalities of workmen on both sides of the East-West divide. Indeed, Losers and Winners is a study of contrasts: the German workers have gone soft next to the Chinese interlopers and their overzealous work ethic. Spurred by their pride in being a cog in their country’s rising global status machine, the Chinese workmen deride the Europeans for their overly burdensome procedures and speak openly about their need to compete. Privately, the Germans grumble about their loss and their disbelief in the Chinese capacity to reassemble the plant, and they are direct in pointing out the dangers of unheeding safety issues. Their warnings are justified when workplace injuries predictably occur.
Shot simply and effectively, Franke and Loeken’s tale tugs at the heartstrings, and one almost feels sorry for the coking plant itself, lying in twisted heaps of metal where once mighty furnaces stood. While the Chinese are on a mission to raise their personal and collective living standards and international stature, their pursuit of these goals without proper consideration for the social and environmental effects is daunting for the German workers – and, indeed, for a Western audience, which now takes for granted the hard-earned lessons of development. While Losers and Winners tells one of thousands of tales describing globalization’s rise, its delivery is powerful and compelling, and despite one’s political or geographical bias, extremely entertaining.
Lovable
(ALAN ZWEIG)
My first reaction to seeing Alan Zweig’s new film listed in the program guide was, holy shit, someone’s actually made the film on love – a film to explore and prod at the reasons why people walk to the ends of the earth in search of someone to spend their life with. I was instantly intrigued, thinking that maybe Zweig had really stumbled upon something to say about a sociological phenomenon that hasn’t really been investigated to its fullest, considering how much dating, relationships, romance, love – whatever – are part of our cultural experience.
Lovable is comprised of pieces of interviews with single women who share their stories of love lost and the search for love found. The subjects are all strong, interesting characters who talk about experiences that are so common and easy to relate to, you feel as though the interviewees could be one of your own friends. These interviews are broken up by Zweig detailing his own experience, taking on the role of the male protagonist on a journey. His anecdotes and personal stories and very telling and honest and give the film tremendous credibility.
My only wish is that Zweig included more male voices in the film to offer more perspective on the mostly straight female characters. I can understand why Zweig wanted all of the subjects to be women – this is after all, his quest – but hearing more on love from the male brain would have offered another dimension and given the viewer a glimpse into something a bit more rare. Regardless, Zweig lets his subjects speak and doesn’t try to come up with any grandiose answers – just a little insight into one of the more peculiar mysteries in life. Watching Lovable as a ‘single’ I found it both comforting and disconcerting, which I think, given the subject matter, makes perfect sense.
Manufacturing Dissent
(DEBBIE MELNYK, RICK CAINE)
Michael Moore is undoubtedly a polarizing figure, even for us here in Canada. Canadian directors Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk begin their documentary claiming to be fans of Moore, who want an interview with the larger than life figure. There are some questions, you see, about his methods, and some accusations of outright lies.
Although she doth protest, Melnyk's voiceover gives away from almost the first moment that the innocent act is simply a narrative structure for what will be a series of damning arguments against Moore and his films. Caine and Melnyk follow Moore around the United States on his "Slacker Uprising" tour. In public, Moore proves to be a good showman, loud and obnoxious, as he gets people fired up about voting and hating President Bush. Interviews with Moore's old friends, business associates and critics greatly expand the discussion. For me, these were the most entertaining and illuminating parts of the film; Moore's unique mix of media mogul, tyrannical boss and everyday slob personalities gives plenty of good ammo for funny quips and recollections. Paranoid megalomaniac or tireless crusader? Perhaps Moore is both. The film also makes good use of Moore's inability to confront criticism. The celebrity documentarian makes lame excuse after lame excuse as to why he cannot do an interview with Melnyk, and then finally has his cronies kick the director out of a talk he is giving about free speech. The irony is perfect.
The evidence presented of Moore's half-truths and lies is undeniably compelling. Footage cut out of context, hidden interviews, and plain old made up events are uncovered in Moore's entire body of work. For documentary fans, the idea of selective editing is what we expect. Liberties are always taken to make real life more convenient to the story, and more interesting to the viewer. There is a difference, however, between liberties and lies.
Unfortunately, the arguments against Moore are watered down considerably by the long rambling segments and gossipy tone of the voice over. There is not enough cohesion in the editing, and the sound design – complete with ominous chords to signal Moore's appearance – is simple and obvious. Ultimately, I would have greater respect for Manufacturing Dissent if the filmmakers had chosen to be direct in their accusations. When they have a chance to confront Moore face to face, they nod blankly and hide behind their polite Canadian personas. They use a method of accusation, clip that appears to support accusation, and final word to structure their entire argument. In the end, they use the same methods as Moore to win audience approval and limit our ability to question their conclusions. While Manufacturing Dissent is undoubtedly well intentioned, the film is weakened by manipulative direction that undermines the strong (if relatively scant) concrete examples of Moore's deceptions.
Milk in the Land – Ballad of an American Drink
(ARAIANA GERSTEIN, MONTEITH MCCOLLUM)
The choir loves a good song, and even the converted appreciate a good preaching once in a while. And so it was that this self-styled hater of the dairy industry sat down with Milk in the Land, ready to receive wisdom that would further my case against this most staple of beverages. Gerstein and McCollum present their history of the rise of milk as the American drink of choice in a series of vignettes presented by activists, farmers, and scholars, punctuated with imagery and newspaper headline collages.
Unfortunately, what could very well have been a watershed awareness film misses the mark; the presenters stutter and have difficulty making convincing arguments, and the news clippings and animation sequences are irresponsibly devoid of context. To lay siege to such a well-established institution, Milk in the Land would have done well to present and then debunk arguments from milk proponents. Instead, the lack of thorough analysis results in a message bordering on fear mongering.
Milk in the Land’s does have strengths: the original and engaging use of visuals, and the captivating and educational fact-based sequences describing society’s weaning away from breastfeeding and booze to baby formula and milk. These historical portions of the film are well researched and well presented, but they do not carry the rest of the song, which is lacking the attention to detail that is sorely needed. Milk in the Land tackles an important subject where debate has been stifled far too long, making the film’s shortcomings all the more disappointing.
Talk To Me
(MARK CRAIG)
Talk to Me has a very simple premise: for the last 20 years, director Mark Craig saved every message left on his answering machine. To tell his story, Craig crafted a relatively linear storyline of the major, noteworthy or otherwise silly events from his past 20 years and brought it to life with a collage of photographs and music that put a face and feeling to the people and moments that defined his life. Watching the film, you’ll be astounded how much you can learn about a person and a person’s life just from the casual bits of dialogue we drop every day after the beep.
Clocking in at just 23 minutes, the film is very thorough. It’s fantastically conceived and exquisitely shot, as Craig uses the camera to follow a trail of photographs, tracing his 20 years as if it were a road map leading up to the present. The messages, meanwhile, tell the real story. The result is an intimate and revealing portrait of an average man, with an average family, who’s lived a happy, decent life. Craig really lets the viewer in by sharing his experiences and basically suggesting, without plainly stating it, that you can’t control what life throws at you. As someone who’s probably around the age Craig was when he started saving messages, I found it comforting to see this personal story of how someone else, quite simply, lived.