Monthly Archives: January 2014

Film, Male Film Directors

Occupy Love (2012) and Assault On Wall Street (2013)

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I suppose it’s testament to the success of Occupy Wall Street that as late as 2013 there are still filmmakers using the “Occupy” brand as a form of deceptive advertising. “Occupy Love” by the Canadian documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper, was released in late 2012. It made a brief appearance in my Twitter feed, got a few reviews on Occupy related websites, and promptly disappeared. Perhaps it’s because the few people who actually saw Occupy Love went in expecting a film about the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and came away feeling duped. Sure, Occupy Wall Street makes an appearance, but it’s more of a cameo, the big star Velcro Ripper gave a few minutes of time so he could put the name on the marquee.

So does Occupy Love work on its own terms?

The central idea of Occupy Love is that the earth is in a state of crisis, that the exploitative and violent nature of not only capitalism, but of hierarchical, “vertical” civilization in general has destroyed the world economy and profoundly damaged the environment Since it threatens, in Ripper’s words, to “turn the whole world into a global ground zero,” the only thing that can save us is its negation, a “non-hierarchical” movement equally as powerful. The global and environmental crisis, he maintains, has to be “transformed into a great love story.” Eros has to confront Thanatos. Love has to banish the death instinct.

Occupy Love presents the global protest movement that began with the Arab Spring in 2010 as the “great love story” that may eventually save the world from what Bell Hooks describes as the “dominator culture.” What all of the various protests and encampments have in common, Ripper argues, what ties the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to the Indignatos in Spain is their non-hierarchical form of organization, the fact that they revolution not as a political party or set of demands but as a “process.” It’s a compelling argument. It’s probably what a lot of people in Zuccotti Park in 2011 believed themselves.

But I think Occupy Love fails, and fails badly. I actually don’t like writing this. Velcrow Ripper seems like a nice guy. He seems earnest. He seems like he put a lot of work into Occupy Love, and I agree with much of what he says. But I won’t lie to you. The film bored me out of my skull.

I guess the best explanation as to why Occupy Love is so crushingly dull is that Velcrow Ripper violated his own ideals. Occupy Love is a “vertical,” hierarchical documentary. As we watch him travel the world and ask the question “how can the global crisis become a great love story?” we realize this film isn’t about Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring. It’s all about Velcrow Ripper. What’s more, although there are some decent interviews with Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit, what’s the point of a film about radical, horizontal, anarchistic democracy when elite intellectuals get more time than the movement’s rank and file? There’s too much slow motion, too much ponderous music banging us over the head with the idea that “something important is going on here.” There’s too much voice over narration.

I was excited when I saw the first few minutes of Occupy Love. Ripper is walking across the Brooklyn Bridge on September 17th, 2011 to film Occupy’s first day, and I’ve seen precious little good footage of the rally at Bowling Green. At long last, I thought, I’d get to see the original march around the bull. I’d get to see the original occupiers burn money on the steps of The National Museum of the American Indian. But I was disappointed. Ripper jumps right to Zuccotti park, and, as far as I can tell, the footage he uses isn’t even from Day 1.

Later on, we do get some very good documentary footage of an arrest, of the young woman who had her breasts groped by the police in the iconic news photo. We see how violent it the arrest was, just how many cops jumped her. But then Ripper spoils it all by misidentifying the address. He tells us it was at 12th and University, and implies, mistakenly, that it was footage of the pepper sprayings when, in fact, it took place an hour earlier near Broadway. That kind of sloppiness about events I witnessed myself made me mistrust the coverage from Egypt and southern Europe.

If I’m reluctant to attack Occupy Love because Velcrow Ripper seems like a nice enough guy, then I’m even more reluctant to attack Assault on Wall Street because I’m afraid the director might beat me up. Ewe Boll, who’s widely considered to be the worst filmmaker alive, is known for challenging his critics to boxing matches. I suppose I’ll have to risk it. I have to warn people. Assault on Wall Street was recommended to me by a friend, who hadn’t seen it, and, since I always like to have something in common to talk about, I decided okay. I’ll check it out. Maybe it will be an entertaining B-movie about the occupation of Zuccotti Park. At the very least I hoped for an interesting revenge drama against Wall Street. After all, who wouldn’t want to see a maniac with an AR-15 walk into the offices of Goldman Sachs and go Sandy Hook Massacre on some dirtbag bankers?

Don’t waste your time. Boll actually succeeds in making mass slaughter at an investment bank look dull. I think I fell asleep before the last shot was fired.

Then there are all the little details. Everything about this film rings false. There isn’t a single good scene in the whole 98 minutes. It’s nominally set in New York. Boll even flew out to Brooklyn and Queens to get some footage on the J-Train. But nothing about the offices of the Wall Street scumbags who cheated the hero — a block headed armed security guard and combat vet named Jim Baxford — out of his life savings looks like an office in Manhattan. It all looks like some sterile office park in New Jersey, or, to be more specific, suburban Vancouver, where most of Assault on Wall Street was filmed. And Jim Baxford? It’s New York. At least give the guy an Irish or Italian name.

Baxford’s friends, played by old B-movie standbys Michael Pare (the hunk from Streets of Fire looking puffy and old), Keith David (the black guy from They Live) and Edward Furlong (the kid from Terminator 2) all seem out of place. Furlong plays another rent a cop. David and Pare play New York City Police officers. In what might be the most ridiculous scene in the whole movie, Pare gives a long speech about how much he hates Wall Street. “We spend all day busting homeless guys,” he says. “But the real criminals are on Wall Street.”

Come on Ewe. I’m even half prepared to fight you over that one. If you’re going to make a film piggybacking off Occupy Wall Street, don’t make a member of the NYPD sound like a sympathetic liberal. While it’s theoretically possible a New York City police officer might say something like “all the real criminals are on Wall Street,” it’s a lot more likely that he’d be making racist jokes or talking about “those mutts in Zuccotti Park.”

Just about the only thing I like about this film was the actress who played Jim Baxford’s wife, Erin Karplunk. I don’t know if she’s a good actress or not, but she was really cute in an “I’m a Canadian somewhere in Vancouver pretending I’m in New York” sort of way. I can see why Baxford would go on a bloody rampage against the bankers who robbed them of the money for her cancer treatments. Hell, she’s so cute in a “beautiful dying girl” sort of way that seeing her slit her wrists in bed under the covers (then break open a plastic bag full of red food dye to make it look like she bled to death) made me want to walk into Lloyd Blankfein’s office with an AR-15. It’s not like you’d need an excuse anyway. But the payoff, the shooting spree on Wall Street, is so bland, so emotionally uninvolving, and so poorly staged, it just left me pissed off. It’s not even a good Steven Seagal knockoff. Part of it had to do with the filming locations. Once again, we’re obviously in Vancouver. Part of it was the lack of a real budget. I suppose Boll couldn’t afford costumes for more than 5 riot cops. But, for God’s sake, this is New York. If a serial killer were on the loose in downtown Manhattan killing Wall Street bankers, I don’t think he could get away with target practice under the JFK Expressway (some highway in Canada trying to look like the JFK Expressway). The whole city would be an armed camp.

I also hated the actor who played the hero. He kills probably 100 people and never even breaths heavily or breaks a sweat. Come on. We’ve all scene Daniel Day Lewis. When you kill someone and you don’t have any emotions to connect to to make it look real, at least indicate. At least breath heavily to make it look like you’ve got some heightened adrenaline. This actor was so flat and affectless, I half thought he was a cyborg.

About two thirds of the way through Assault on Wall Street, the hero is walking past the Flatiron Building. He looks inside. He sees the corrupt Assistant District Attorney who had earlier revealed himself to be in the pocket of the bankers. He waits. Then he confronts him. DA Scumbag (I forget his name) has had a little too much to drink. He turns to leave, and walks right onto Broadway into the path of a speeding taxicab. For a moment, I felt a brief surge of emotional satisfaction. Who doesn’t want to see an in the pocket of Wall Street ADA get drunk and play in traffic. Boll even shot the scene on location. It’s the real Flatiron Building. Then Jim Baxford escapes. He turns, runs into an ally, and comes out on the other side, in Vancouver.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

Film, Male Film Directors

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

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In the iconic opening scene of  “Saturday Night Fever” Tony Manero, a 19-year-old Italian American from Bay Ridge played by a young John Travolta, is walking under the elevated railroad in Bensonhurst. He checks out a pair of shoes in a store window, puts a white silk shirt on layaway, and buys two slices of pizza. He also engages in some low level sexual harassment. Seeing an attractive woman in a tight dress, he doubles back, blocks her path, and propositions her. She rolls her eyes, walks around him, and continues on her way. We forget about it almost as soon as its over, dismissing it as just another example of boys being boys.

While it was marketed as part of the “Disco” culture of the mid-1970s,Saturday Night Fever is actually much closer to Bruce Springsteen’s songs about the fall of white, working class America than it is to the dance craze that started in black and Hispanic gay nightclubs and later moved to the mainstream. We are, in 1977, at a very key moment in American history, three years before the election of Ronald Reagan. Vietnam and the draft are over. The easy sex and drugs that were the “privilege” of the upper-middle-class in the 1960s have been thoroughly democratized, available to anybody with 20 or 30 dollars to spend at a local nightclub. Yet what appears on the surface to be “liberation” is actually the crackup of the last vestiges of the New Deal, the final burst of decadent hedonism before the neoliberal hammer came down in the 1980s.

Tony Manero, as it turns out, isn’t particularly interested in sex. The least favored son, the black sheep of a Catholic family in Bay Ridge Brooklyn, he lives with his younger sister, his unemployed and verbally abusive father, his elderly grandmother, and his harsh, angry but pious mother. Tony’s father, a nasty little soul killer of a man, is an unemployed construction worker. “You got a 4 dollar raise,” he says, dismissing Tony’s good news that his boss at his dead end job at a local paint store actually values him as an employee. “Four dollars buys nothing these days. It doesn’t even buy three dollars.” Tony’s mother, in turn, has little respect for her handsome charismatic younger son, openly favoring his dull, plain older brother, “Father Frank Jr.”

Father Frank Jr., however, clearly lacks a vocation. When he returns home, and announces that he plans to leave the priesthood, his parents are devastated. They blame Tony, who’s naturally curious about the genuine reason his brother is leaving the clergy. It’s too bad the Father Frank Jr. character isn’t given more development. “She’s afraid I’m going to say celibacy,” he says, giving us a hint as to why Tony is the family scapegoat, his manhood. Frank Jr., as a celibate Catholic priest, has been unsexed. No longer a real man, he’s no threat to his mother, who’s shown suffocating in her unhappy, oppressive marriage. “Maybe I’ll get a job,” she says, provoking an angry tirade from her husband, who accuses her of taking advantage of his the temporary loss of patriarchal authority that comes with being unemployed. Tony’s sexual charisma is a constant reminder of the hell that she was dragged into by getting married and having three children. She hates him because he makes her remember the squandered promise of her own youth.

A scapegoat and a black sheep at home, Tony is a valued employee at his dead end job. His boss genuinely likes him. He’s a natural at customer service, but where he really shines is on the dance floor of a local disco, 2001. A talented dancer, he’s also a sex object. If Tony later becomes a rapist, it’s not because he lacks the opportunity to get laid. Annette, a chubby, emotionally needy friend, follows him around so relentlessly that, if the gender roles were reversed, it would border on sexual harassment. “Kiss me,” a drunken, horny woman demands, coming up out of nowhere and grabbing his shoulder. “Are you as good in bed as you are on that dance floor?” a young Fran Drescher asks him practically begging him to take her home. She gets nothing for her trouble but snide verbal abuse passing itself off as witty banter.

But it’s not sex Tony wants.

Dancing for Tony Manero isn’t way to get laid. It’s a way to get respect. However superficial and downright ridiculous disco dancing is, it’s something he’s good at. The women hitting on him are only a distraction. As such, the one woman he falls in love with is the one woman he can’t have. Stephanie McDonald, played by a far from beautiful or charismatic Karen Lynn Gorney, is a 20-year-old version of his mother, a verbally abusive shrew who responds to his advances by telling him that “he’s a loser on the way to nowhere.”

But the unpleasant, unhappy, verbally abusive Stephanie, who, as we later find out, is in an exploitative relationship with an older man in Manhattan is, like Tony, a talented, if untrained dancer. Stephanie may be a bitch who makes an outward show of despising him, but as long as he’s with her, Tony can fool himself into thinking disco dancing is more than just a ritual you go through to get laid. By convincing her to become his partner in 2001’s yearly dance contest, he can imagine that disco dancing is a craft, something that will eventually bring him into the meritocracy.

Stephanie is more than just an unhappy young woman. She’s a willing little sheep in corporate America. A typist at a public relations firm in New York, and a ridiculous parody of a striver and a class climber, she spends most of her time name dropping, and mispronouncing, the famous clients who come into her office. She’s contemptuous of working-class Brooklyn, utterly loyal to and identified with the corporate neoliberal, new world order about to be imposed on New York City in the 1980s. Solidarity is a foreign concept. Tony Manero is a threat, someone who might pull her back down into Bay Ridge, into an unhappy, poverty ridden working class marriage. Stephanie realizes, deep down inside, that by dating Tony she will become Tony’s mother. That she’s already well on the way there eludes Tony completely. He’s as much of a willing sheep, ready for the neoliberal sheering as she is.

For all its marketing as the movie that embodied the disco craze of the 1970s, Saturday Night Fever is a clear eyed indictment of the sexual revolution. Dancing, for Tony, is freedom, the pantomime of sexuality the liberation from his repressed Catholic mother. But sex in the world of Saturday Night Fever becomes petty and mean spirited when it stops being a pantomime of sex and starts becoming actual sex. It’s a ten minute hump in the back of an old Chevy Impala, utterly lacking in Eros or a sense of romance. But it’s even worse. The sexual liberation of the 1960s has become the pump and dump rape culture of the 1970s.

Indeed, Tony despises the women who desire him sexually. Disco, as you may remember, started out in the gay black nightclubs of Manhattan. It was supposed to remain a pantomime, not to become a mating ritual. It wasn’t supposed to lead to marriage. In the gay world, Tony Manero wouldn’t have been working in a paint shop. He would have found a Robert Mapplethorpe to turn him into an icon, a rich sugar daddy to pay the bills and set him up in the Village. But Tony is heterosexual, and, as such, he realizes the absurdity of his predicament. His entire life is dedicated to marketing himself to women he doesn’t want, to putting himself in a position where he could fall in love, get married, have children, and, inevitably, become his father, the one thing, above all, that he fears.

I’ve always been fairly dismissive of the term “rape culture,” which, according to Wikipedia “is a concept that links rape and sexual violence to the culture of a society, and in which prevalent attitudes and practices normalize, excuse, tolerate, and even condone rape.” Yet, after watching Saturday Night Fever all the way through after many years, I can’t help but think that the “Second Wave Feminists” who invented the term back in the 1970s might have been on to something. It’s difficult to watch this film without thinking that it both critiques and in a way embodies the “rape culture.”

If rape is part of an actual “rape culture,” and not just a depraved act of a depraved individual, the rape culture has to be mainstream. It has to include normal men, and men who are downright sympathetic, not just the convenient feminist villain, the ugly man who complains about how “women don’t like nice guys.” Tony is not only sympathetic, he becomes a rapist at his finest moment. After he and Stephanie take first place in the dance contest, beating out a far better Puerto Rican couple, he realizes the contest was rigged. So he declines the award.

“You deserve this more than I do,” he says handing them the trophy and the prize money.

It’s a rather stunning moment for a 19-year-old working class boy from Bay Ridge. Yet, it’s exactly at that moment that he turns nihilistic. He’s lost the one thing he values. There’s no meritocracy in the nightlife of 1970s Bay Ridge, only cronyism and racism. When Stephanie protests that they were as good as the Puerto Rican couple, he grabs her and leads her out to the car. There’s nothing sexual about it. The attempted rape doesn’t flow out of lust but out of contempt. Tony looks more like parent dragging a toddler off to be spanked than a rejected suitor. She fights him off and runs away, but the worse is yet to come. Annette, the girl he rejected earlier, has spent most of the night drinking and taking drugs. She’s a ready victim for Tony’s destructively macho friends, who gang rape her in the back of their car while Tony, after making a half-hearted attempt to interfere, watches passively.

“You don’t give a fuck about her,” one of the rapists says.

Horrifyingly, Tony agrees with him. She’s not worth it. He like Stephanie, has become a striver and a class climber. Annette, the plain, overweight working-class girl from Brooklyn, isn’t valuable. She doesn’t have a high enough price on the market in the coming neoliberal world order to defend.

“Are you satisfied now?” he says as she sobs in pain and humiliation. “Now you’re a cunt.”

Stephanie McDonald, on the other hand, represents Manhattan (this was before Brooklyn was cool). She represents upward mobility. So he gets on the R-train and rides up to the Upper West Side to apologize. “You’re a known rapist,” she tells him, but then lets him into her apartment anyway. Stephanie, like Annette, has accepted her place in the rape culture, although, to be fair, she only knows about Tony’s halfhearted sexual assault, not the brutal gang rape that followed.

Once inside Stephanie’s apartment —- Oh for the days when a job as an administrative assistant would get you a duplex on the Upper West Side — Tony promises to “work on himself.” He vows to put the backward sexual morality of working-class Brooklyn behind him, and become an enlightened citizen of the meritocracy. He and Stephanie sit on the ledge by the window.

“Do you think you can be friends with a girl?” she asks.

Tony expresses some doubt. He also agrees to try. It’s clear they won’t just stay friends, that they will get married and become a carbon copy of Tony’s parents. The 1960s are over at last. The sexual revolution has failed. As the sun comes up, the young couple lean against each other, preparing themselves for Ronald Reagan, AIDs, and the long, miserable 30 year neoliberal hangover.

Film, Male Film Directors

If… (1968)

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Even though I had seen Lindsey Anderson’s “If…” some years ago, and it did not make much of an impression on me, it’s so highly regarded in certain parts of the American left, I decided to see if I could “get it” the second time around. I did, but I remain perplexed about its popularity in the United States. “If!” is a very British film. The difficulties I had on my first viewing were mostly about the fact that I’m not British. The 1960s were before my time, and, like most Americans, I have little or no understanding about what goes on at a ruling class British “public school” (that’s “private school” for you Americans).

Another difficulty is the decision the director made to cast actors in their mid-20s as public school “boys.” The lead, Malcolm McDowell, was born in 1943. That made him 25 when they filmed “If!.” Christine Noonan, “the girl,” was born in 1945. That made her 23. Since the premise of the film is a rebellion by the juniors against the “whips,” upper sixth form boys who are given the power to discipline the younger students in lieu of the school’s faculty members, that adds yet another level of complexity. Robert Swan, who plays “Rowndtree,” McDowell’s nemesis, was only 23 at the time of the film, but he’s got thinning hair and looks positively middle-aged. It’s easy to go through the whole film just assuming “the whips” are teachers.

But perhaps that’s intentional. A British “public school” has traditionally been more than just a place to learn how to read and write. Rather, the great public schools like Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, and Cheltenham, the real life basis for the school in “If!,” were essentially boot camps for the future military and administrative elite of the British Empire. The culture of bullying that thrived in these places was no accident. It was similar to the culture of bullying you find at army bases, or at fraternities. It’s designed to make young men hard and ruthless, to breed the kind of discipline and camaraderie that allowed England to rule most of the world. “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” was a cliche among the British ruling class. “The Battle of Gettysburg was won on the playing fields of the Boston Latin School”‘ just sounds ridiculous.

By 1968, of course, the British Empire was no more. The United Kingdom was just another western European democracy with its foreign policy subordinated to that of the United States. To understand “If!” you have to keep in mind that while the reality of the British Empire was a thing of the past, the outward form, the rituals and the ethic of the British ruling class lived on. Indeed, the public school in “If!” is almost an arena of “dual cultural power.” While the senior masters and clergyman are doddery old man who blather away as if they were still living under Queen Victoria and the “whips” maintain a fascistic style of discipline over the first year boys as if they were in the British Army, Travis, played by McDowell, and his friends and fellow rebels Johnny and Wallace line their walls with 8 x 10 photos of Mao, Che, and Lenin. I didn’t see Malcolm X or Ho Chi Minh, but they would have fit in. The heroes, in other words, are left wingers, and the villains conservatives.

That being said, the film’s attitude towards homosexuality might, perhaps, confuse some Americans. Homosexuality, in “If!” does not follow the same narrative as it does in the United States. Gay men aren’t the victims. Rather, they’re the oppressors. The first year boys are constantly ogled by the leering 20-something “whips.” The climatic scene where Rowntree flogs Travis, an excruciating few minutes where McDowell is made to drop his pants, and place his arms across railing while the sneering “whip” makes pass after pass with a heavy wooden stick against his exposed buttocks, is far more intense than any of the prison rapes in The Shawshank Redemption.

What’s more, Travis is the hero at least partly because he’s clearly heterosexual. His friend “Wallace” has an affair with a first year boy named Bobby Philips, but boys don’t interest Travis. In one of the most liberating, and visually beautiful scenes in “If!,” Travis and his friends steal a motorcycle, and drive to a local coffee shop. There the waitress, “the girl,” a sultry dark haired beauty played by Christine Noonan, asks if they like their coffee “white or black.” Travis tells her “black” (we’re clearly supposed to think he’s cool because he prefers black over white) then grabs her, pulls her across the counter, and sticks his tongue down her throat. Far from being offended, she pulls him into a dance, where he fantasizes that they’re having a nude wrestling match, accompanies him on a ride on the stolen motorcycle, and later joins the him and the rebels in their armed rebellion.

While some critics have spoken about the surrealistic armed rebellion that closes “If!” as a warning against the kind of mass school shooting that regularly takes place in the United States, I think that’s stretching it. Travis and his friends aren’t engaged in indiscriminate mass murder, but, rather, in assassination. “A single bullet,” Travis opines early in the film, can change history. But mostly its just style over substance, an excuse to get an automatic rifle in the hands of “the girl,” an opportunity to show McDowell as a posh British Che Guevera. “If!” was an early star turn for McDowell, the inspiration for Kubrick Clock Work Orange. There’s very little blood and guts. Mostly it’s just a fireworks show, the aesthetic not a critique, or glorification, of Columbine or the Sandy Hook massacre, but a display of third world radical chic, similar to what my Maoist Facebook friends do when they post photos of sexy female guerillas from Nepal.

In the end, I suppose I’d recommend that you give “If!” a look. The main problem I had with the film is purely idiosyncratic. I loath Malcolm McDowell. As such, it was very difficult for me to get involved in a film that glorifies him as a sexy new left rebel. Your mileage may vary. I suppose that his look, the thick lips, the heavy brow, the swaggering manner appeals more to the British than it does to Americans. McDowell’s hedonistic individualism is the negation of the long tradition of ruling class, imperial austerity. McDowell’s Travis is a kind of Mick Jagger or Keith Richards, a white man who’s assimilated enough black culture to make him a “bad boy.” For me it just fell flat.

I think there’s also a weakness to the film that goes beyond my dislike of Malcolm McDowell. If you’re going involve the film goer in an armed rebellion, you need to build up a credible villain. Rowntree, who symbolically rapes Travis isn’t the target. That “well placed bullet” winds up being scatter shot fire against a faceless group of visiting dignitaries. An old general, who makes a ridiculous speech about patriotism and imperial honor is more of a target for mockery than gunfire. The final shot “the girl” fires kills a theretofore rather bland headmaster, not one of the “whips.” The satisfaction of revenge, the catharsis that would come from an genuinely apocalyptic bloodbath is denied us, and we’re left feeling unsatisfied, the 1960s radical chic so badly dated it just leaves us scratching our heads.

I would, nevertheless, like to see an American remake of “If!.” While Americans often ruin great European films by remaking them, I think as far as guns go, we could probably improve upon the original. So, Quentin Tarantino, are you listening? Make a movie about Phillips Exeter or St. Albans. Put some guns in the hands of some colorful malcontents and let’s see the fictional slaughter of some of the children of the 1%.

Film, Male Film Directors

Schizopolis (1996)

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Note: This blog entry was written by Dan Levine.

You can find him here.

The use of narrative subjectivity in the cinema is too rarely commented on. When directly addressed, one ends up with dire overly literal POV shots like in the film Doom, a bizarre approximation of literal human visual subjectivity copied from a video game attempting to imitate such subjectivity to far more pragmatic ends. When the full range of possibilities it offers are realized, one ends up with the almost Jamesian brilliance of Mark Rappaport’s Local Color and The Scenic Route.

Soderbergh, in this feature length experiment in narrative subjectivity, has a couple striking sequences but much of the work falls flat. And oddly, the sequences that most seem to vindicate his experiment, clumped in the middle and involving the dental profession, seem uncomfortably reminiscent of similar but more elegantly executed explorations of the dentist in Local Color.

The film covers the same story from three perspectives, each granted roughly 1/3rd of the film’s running time. The first sequence sets up the film, which is essentially a mid-life crisis film. Banal domestic scenes are boiled down to their seeming simplistic actualities, characters frequently speak the literal intent of their dialogue rather than the actual dialogue we’ve been trained to expect, but rather than showing us some objective truth to each scene we realize these spoken intents are actually the interpretation of a middle aged man questioning if there’s any meaning in his day to day existence, a middle aged man who has likely made a lot of films, a middle aged man like, well, Steven Soderbergh.

Scattershot interludes are thrown in to give the film some flow, many of them essentially the sort of blackout gags that marked early television sketch shows. They don’t seem to relate to the primary proceedings in any way beyond their shared weary irreverence, though some of them are fairly funny and in a stream of consciousness fashion that refreshingly don’t feel the need to reach any greater coherence than a suggestion of the filmmaker’s preoccupations. It seems disingenuous to suggest that a film as guarded in intellectual disdain as this one has a feeling of easy intimacy but this one does; perhaps all Soderbergh had left of himself by the time he made Schizopolis was such a disdain and he’s speaking as directly as he can. Perhaps there was more of himself in the James Spader character in Sex, Lies and Videotape than we all realized, he is in fact hiding behind a camera and while comfortable there has the feelings of being lost, of meaninglessness, that any expressive comfort can induce.

The funniest sequence comes in the film’s only invocation of what seems to be genuine passion. Our dentist character goes to a palm reader and finds out he’ll meet the love of his life soon. When an attractive woman comes in for some work on her teeth, he’s instantly smitten and writes her an obscene letter declaring his love for her; even though her name must be in his office files he can only refer to her as “Attractive Woman #2” and in the note we increasingly realize he only express such feelings in the almost offensively mundane particulars of his existence finally comparing her lips to those of a “French model” he “desperately wants to fuck.” To call her by an actual name would actually be less than truthful in the situation; she is to him and the filmmaker (that the director plays him only drives this home more concretely) purely an abstraction, a potential not really believed in.

I’d recommend this film to people interested in abstract narrative who’ve already gone through the far superior works of Godard, Rappaport, Korty, and the early US narrative avant-garde first. It’s most rewarding when seen as an attempt by a fairly straightforward director to try to dabble in the genre and his failures when matched up to the works of the masters puts their great successes in a more distinct relief.

Film, Male Film Directors

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): Dan’s Review

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Note: This blog entry was written by Dan Levine.

You can find him here.

Martin Scorsese has always had a certain yen for the criminal element, a fascination that makes their exploits, their interesting anecdotal characters, come alive for him but at the same time this liveliness dulls the possibility for his films to be critical. He realizes intellectually that the people he portrays are amoral at best, and more often than not evil, and we see in film after film their rise into a temporary opulence and their later descent into domestic violence, madness, but more to the point, upper middle class living. What a horrific fate to befall someone who’s seen the top!

There are frequent points in his most recent rise and fall biopic, what might be considered the end of a trilogy of such films, where the urge is to compare it to his earlier film Goodfellas. And there is definitely a goodly amount of shared DNA, a similar carriage.

But Scorsese in 2013 is an older man than the Scorsese of 1990, and as each film might be his last, what the French would dub a “testament” film, he strips away more and more of the bullshit. The Wolf of Wall Street is a longer better and more honest film than Goodfellas, Scorsese as usual makes a life of crime seem like the world’s greatest block party, the people are a little off but they’re funny and charming and could be your neighbors, the music never stops and often has a beat, you could dance to it, food is plentiful as are drugs. The difference being that in this film the criminals are stock traders. The late great Dennis Grunes said once in a review that the brilliance of John Huston’s The Asphault Jungle was that Huston made what was essentially a crime film but shot it like it was essentially a business deal, the film is full of interminable boardroom meetings etc. Wolf of Wall Street could be said to invert this dynamic; though ostensibly a film about business it’s shot like a crime film, and if anyone should be the person to effect this inversion it’s Scorsese, who essentially created the style of the post-noir crime film.

I liked this film more than Goodfellas because oddly enough it embraces the excess and insanity of its lifestyle far more than the earlier film. The typical visual gag in this film is the sort where one pulls away from a yacht to show that it has a helicopter on top of it. The criticism that Scorsese makes crime too charismatic and appealing was perhaps never a criticism that accrued any capital because that’s the point of the typical Scorsese film. He likes the excess and visual possibilities it provides, he likes the liveliness of it, the dynamism. The Stratford-Oakmont office in the film, any of the three shown, are so buzzing with activity that Fellini would’ve been impressed. And the film does seem, if not morally on board with Belfort, at least far more interested in his lifestyle than any other kind; when an FBI agent approaches Belfort on his yacht Belfort taunts him with a description of what he imagines the agent’s life is like, lower middle class income, riding the subway and when it gets hot in the summer fidgeting so his balls don’t stick to his thigh, and in the only shot in the film that isn’t subject to Belfort’s subjectivity we see the agent, on the subway, most likely thinking about how his balls are stuck to his thigh. Belfort meanwhile is playing tennis in a low security prison. Belfort gets the last laugh.

Wolf of Wall Street is also better than Goodfellas (a comparison I’m not artificially dragging into the review, anyone who’s seen both realizes they’re essentially twins) because it more effectively conveys the appeal of crime to a filmmaker; crime shows the actual promise of Horatio Alger to the ethnic working classes, the reason why urban kids saw Scarface as an inspiration rather than a cautionary tale. In a speech late in the film, Belfort compares his boiler-room penny stock operation to Ellis Island; he isn’t wrong in this.

And it ends as a defeated Belfort addresses a large crowd of eager onlookers; they’d like to be him, to have had his wealth. They’re clueless, awkward, and one could imagine they probably own a couple Scorsese DVDs…

Film, Male Film Directors

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) : Stanley W. Rogouski’s Review

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There are three reasons I moved out of New York City. The first was 9/11. I was over 8 blocks away from the World Trade Center when it came down, and my apartment was all the way up in the north Bronx, but seeing the windows of my office go completely black that horrible morning, twice, gave me a mild case of PTSD. So I went back to Southeast Alaska. When I returned back to New York, I found that I could no longer afford to live there, which would be the second reason. The third reason is entirely personal and idiosyncratic: Steve Madden Shoes.

Anybody who lived in New York city in the late 1990s remembers the ads in the subway for Steve Madden Shoes. Women with over-sized heads, tiny arms and legs and bitchy looks on their faces, they were a conscious caricature of urban femininity. For all I know women may have liked Steve Madden’s shoes. They may even have liked his subway ads, but, for me, looking at those images of those angry dolls every morning on the D-Train all the way down from 205th Street in the Bronx was just too much to take. I had begun to feel like Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror.

Steve Madden, as it turns out, was a high school friend of Danny Porush, the co-founder, along with Jordan Belfort, of the “pump and dump” brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont. Steve Madden Shoes was the first company they “took public.” Martin Scorsese’s new movie The Wolf of Wall Street is their story.

Porush, fictionalized as Donnie Azoff, and played by Jonah Hill from Seth Rogan’s Superbad, is a nerd with power. A soft, puffy, effeminate, angry little Pillsbury Dough Boy with man titties and clear glass in horn rim glasses — to make him look more like a WASP—Azoff would normally be a joke, the kind of kid the jocks beat up in high school, and women “friend zone” in their 20s. At best he might grow up to be Chris Christie. But in The Wolf of Wall Street Azoff finds himself in the right place at the right time. Not particularly articulate, or even competent, Azoff, nevertheless, has the one quality essential to success in late 1990s, neoliberal America. He’s completely unethical. That gives him money, which, in the words of Al Pacino from Scarface, also gives him power, and that, in turn, gives access to the best drugs, and, more importantly, to beautiful woman. He doesn’t get bullied. He does the bullying. In one hilariously over the top scene, for example, he catches one of his brokers cleaning a fish tank on the day of the Steve Madden IPO. He fires the man on the spot and eats the fish. If you want to know what “The American Dream” looks like for the frustrated American geek, The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a bad place to start.

But The Wolf of Wall Street is not Danny Porush’s story. If if had been, Scorsese wouldn’t have fictionalized his name. It’s Jordan Belfort’s, played by the now middle-aged Leonardo DiCaprio. If Donnie Azoff is the Wolf of Wall Street’s Tommy DeVito, then Jordan Belfort is its Henry Hill. An everyman with a gift of gab, a NYC white ethnic with a degree from a non-Ivy-league university, Belfort is a trainee stock broker at the blue chip Wall Street brokerage house L.F. Rothschild. There he comes under the guidance of the senior broker “Mark Hanna” (history nerds will get the Gilded Age tie in), played by a now middle-aged Matthew McConaughey, learns the over the top machismo of Wall Street, and gets started on his drug habit. He seems destined to become just another broker at L.F. Rothschild making six figures, but then luck intervenes. He passes his Series 7 Exam on October 1987, Black Monday. L.F. Rothschild goes out of business, and he finds himself looking for a new job.

Black Monday turns out to be a happy accident. Belfort winds up in a boiler room on Long Island, Investor Center, a low end brokerage house specializing in pushing worthless “penny stocks” to working class people who don’t know any better. He not only masters the job on the first day, he becomes the dominant broker after the first sale. As the assembled employees of Investor Center gather around his desk in fascination as he smooth talks a sucker out of his money, we see the charisma that will carry him to great wealth and fame.

Soon, along with Azoff, he opens up his own boiler room, and, soon after that, he “rebrands” the company Stratton Oakmont, a newly minted “blue chip” firm, a move that gives him access to richer suckers and bigger bank accounts. An attempted “hit job” by Forbes Magazine backfires. It makes him a household name. They should have hired the NY Post instead. After that comes the Steve Madden IPO, and, by the age of 26, Jordan Belfort is worth 50 million dollars. The rest of the movie is as predictable as it is entertaining. Copious amounts of drugs are taken. Hundreds of prostitutes are fucked. Hundreds of millions of dollars of investor money are flushed down the toilet, and, eventually, Stratton Oakmont attracts the attention of the FBI.

(Historical Footnote: Before 9/11, the FBI occasionally prosecuted criminals on Wall Street. This may strike the viewer as dated, even fantastical. But it did happen. Even though the Clinton Administration, like the Obama Administration, generally declined to prosecute major financial criminals at large, blue chip firms like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, they would, at times, throw a small time hustler — and 50 million dollars is chump change on Wall Street —like Jordan Belfort to the wolves. Belfort and Porush did in fact wind up doing a token sentences in minimum security, “country club” prisons.)

Judging by the reviews of The Wolf of Wall Street I’ve read online, which include an “open letter” from Christina McDowell, one of Belfort’s employees, and a man he “ratted on” to the FBI, many people are accusing Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio of “glorifying” Jordon Belfort. That’s debatable. While the film is based on Belfort’s memoir, and does indeed read as a “God I was so drunk last night” story that frat boys tell each other on Sunday morning — and who doesn’t love a frat boy with a hangover — I’m equally sure there are as many people on Wall Street offended by their portrayal as sexist, booze soaked, coke addled jerkoffs as there are people pleased by it. Just because Scorsese gives Belfort some charisma, doesn’t present him as a killjoy like Walter or Skylar White, doesn’t mean he thinks he’s a hero. Indeed, Walter White is the hero. He goes down, in a final blaze of glory, taking out a gang of neo Nazis. Jordan Belfort, on the other hand, goes down ratting out most of his friends to the cops.

What’s more, if the American people look up to men like Jordan Belfort and Donnie Azoff, and they do, that’s not Martin Scorsese’s fault. Just because Scorsese attempts to locate the source of Belfort’s appeal, he’s not romanticizing him. Jordan Belfort succeeds because, in the tawdry world of the 1990s neoliberal United States, he was able to articulate the only thing left about the “American Dream.” Make money. Get rich. Fuck hookers and do drugs. It may not be my ideal, but it sure as hell beats “check your privilege.” If Belfort comes off like a smarmy mediocrity and Azoff like a angry little toad, that’s only because we Americans love smarmy mediocrities and angry toads. Indeed, the final scenes of The Wolf of Wall Street show Belfort as a wannabe cult leader, a “motivational speaker” who’s found his place at last, holding forth like a Baptist preacher about the Gospel of Success. If this had been another time, and Belfort had been black, he might have been Reverend Ike. Azoff, post 9/11, might have been Michael Savage or Sean Hannity. If you don’t like it, don’t blame a movie. Change the culture. Overthrow capitalism. But don’t wag your finger at Martin Scorsese for being an honest filmmaker.

I suppose I should also include a “trigger warning” with this review. The Wolf of Wall Street is one of the most misogynistic films I’ve seen in quite some time. Scorsese’s mastery of film allows him to get away with demeaning women in a way a less skilled director couldn’t, but, in spite of a few token female characters with back stories and real personalities, women in The Wolf of Wall Street are largely props. Belfort’s blond, guidette wife is a petty snob — she lets us know that even though she’s got an Italian last name she’s got relatives who are actually British — and a brainless twit who’s too incompetent even to try to Heimlich Donny Azoff when he’s choking to death. She has no job skills, no education, and, as soon as she realizes Belfort is going down, that he’s going to lose most of his money, she files for a divorce. Yes, we are rooting for her to get custody of their daughter “Skylar” but that’s only because Belfort is so drugged out of his mind, we realize he’d probably kill her if he got away. It’s not a hard decision for a family court judge. Between a castrating bitch and a drug addled maniac, the child goes to the castrating bitch. At least she’ll survive into her 20s to go into psychotherapy. In fact, The Wolf of Wall Street is so brilliantly misogynistic that I actually cheered when Belfort punched his wife in the face.

So make of it what you will. Scorsese shows us lots of tawdry, hateful people with tawdry hateful dreams. But ignore it at your peril, Americans. This is the country you live in.

Film, Male Film Directors

The Act of Killing (2012)

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If you watch Democracy Now, you probably know all about Suharto’s monstrous dictatorship in Indonesia. Amy Goodman regularly talks about the genocide in East Timor as being on a par with the Holocaust. Yet the brutal anti-Communist crackdown that took place in 1965 and 1966, a bloodbath that probably killed over a million people, has never gotten the same attention — at least in the United States — as what happened to the Kurds under Saddam or to Bosnia under Milosevic.

A brief glance at the history of Indonesia in the 1960s quickly reveals that compared to Suharto, Saddam and Milosevic were small time thugs barely worth your notice. The most widely accepted estimate, according to Wikipedia, “is that more than 500,000 people were killed.” The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the “New Order”; the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was eliminated as a political force, and the upheavals led to the downfall of president Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto’s thirty-year presidency.” In fact, there were minor league Suharto flunkies who probably killed more people with their own hands than the number of people who died in the Srebrenica massacre.

The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary, is about one of them. In 1965, Anwar Congo, a slight, almost childlike old man, was selling black market tickets to American gangster films in the city of Medan in North Sumatra. A few years later, he was in command of one of the death squads Suharto used to kill not only communists, but anybody who got in his way, including innocent Chinese nationals who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Congo, who’s now revered as a founder of the right wing paramilitary group “Pancasila Youth,” brags that he killed over 1000 people with his own hands. He demonstrates his favorite technique, wrapping chicken wire around the victim’s neck, tying the ends to wooden sticks, and twisting until they choked to death. He introduces us to his friend Herman Koto, an obese man who spends half the film in drag, a monster no Hollywood script writer would have dared make up as fiction, a man so sadistic and flat out weird that he makes Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List look like a boring technocrat.

The Act of Killing is a three hour movie, a complex documentary, half Shoah, half Marat Sade, that I can no more describe adequately in this review than I can hum a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant.” You really owe it to yourself to go see it. Suffice it to say that Anwar Congo deserves to be hauled up in front of a Nuremberg tribunal, then lined up against the wall and shot. That there’s little or no chance of this ever happening, that very foundation of Indonesian society rests upon the death squads he helped found and the mass murders he helped carry out is what gives The Act of Killing so much of its visceral power.

The way Joshua Oppenheimer organizes The Act of Killing is as baroque as it is gut wrenching. The problem isn’t to get Anwar Congo to open up. Congo thinks of himself as a rock star. He has no more trouble talking about how he killed 1000 people with his bare hands than Mick Jagger has with talking about how he wrote “Satisfaction.” The problem, rather, is getting him to understand what he’s done, to feel any kind of empathy for his victims. This Oppenheimer accomplishes by having Congo and Herman Koto reenact scenes from their days leading the death squads. He has no trouble getting them to do this either. Kongo, in fact, learned how to kill from American gangster movies, and, one suspects, that part of the way he distanced himself from the atrocities he committed was by thinking of it as “role playing.” It’s only when Oppenheimer has Congo play the role of one of his victims, and Koto as Congo himself, that Congo is able to understand the enormity of his crimes. At long last he’s able to express remorse.

It’s impossible to express just how much I hated Anwar Congo, not because he comes off like the stereotypical Nazi, but because he doesn’t. He’s a slight, childlike man. He enjoys dancing. In fact, immediately after he explains how he garroted a man to death with his patented two sticks and a length of chicken wire technique, he talks about how smoking pot, drinking and dancing helped him deal with being a mass murderer. He dances the Cha Cha. Try to imagine Adolf Eichmann dancing the Cha Cha. Congo likes nice clothes. He likes partying. The effect is so powerful, I felt a visceral, racist loathing for the Indonesian people. Congo is a vain little monkey, I thought, a primitive savage who saw a few American gangster movies, and decided to play act them literally. Take the movies away. Get the French or the British to invade Indonesia and put the whole amoral, inferior race back under some kind of benevolent colonialism until they can be taught to understand some sort of Christian, or even Islamic morality. Better yet, just nuke them all. Destroy the whole benighted country.

In other words, the film made me feel as genocidal as the people I was feeling genocidal against. If the justification Anwar Kongo and Herman Koto used to commit mass murder was “communism,” the justification I wanted to use was white supremacy. I do think this was part of Oppenheimer’s intention. How else to explain the almost constant presence of Herman Koto in drag? I was offended not by mass murder, but by the effeminate Oriental. Edward Said take notice. I had moved 20 miles to the right of Joseph Conrad. In my own mind, mass murder was only right and proper when done in high northern European Gothic. Somehow I was able to feel hate for the Pancasila Youth that I had never felt for Hitler’s brownshirts. I had forgotten that banal evil is no less evil and no less banal when done to the tune of Richard Wagner than it is while done in between watching a gangster film and dancing the Cha Cha.

After I managed to dismiss my inner racist, my inner leftist took over. As Adi Zulkadry, another, more intellectual death squad leader asked, how is the United States any better than Indonesia? We exterminated the Indians and created a whole genre of cinema, cowboy movies, to celebrate it. Lieutenant William Calley, who organized the My Lai massacre, never expressed any remorse or spent much time in jail. Hell, I even remembered the “Free Calley” marches from my childhood. Calley, like Anwar Congo, is an American hero. Americans not only stood by while George. W. Bush destroyed Iraq, they “supported the troops.” The winners write the rules, Zulkadry explained. That’s why Americans accepted Gitmo. That’s why he’s not going to apologize for what he did. He’s a winner. The communists he killed were weak when he killed them. They’re weaker now, spirits without bodies. They no more count than do the women and children Lieutenant Calley and his troops machine gunned in that ditch at My Lai.

It’s hard to argue with Zulkadry’s logic. It’s even harder to accept the rationalizations of a war criminal. My inner leftist proved as unable to deal with the issues raised by The Act of Killing than my inner white supremacist. After all, didn’t Hitler condemn British Imperialism? Didn’t the British imperialists condemn King Leopold in the Congo? Didn’t George W. Bush condemned Saddam Hussein? Moral equivalence is nothing more than rationalization, whoever does it. As The Act of Killing demonstrates, there are plenty of monsters in the world who aren’t Americans. That the United States supported Suharto’s regime over the course of three decades means the question is moot anyway. Americans and Indonesians are both part of the same neoliberal world order, founded on mass murder and genocide, stained with blood and guts.

Indeed, Suharto’s “New Order” was, perhaps, the first and most brutal of the neoliberal dictatorships supported by Washington. Chomsky once remarked that after the Communist Party was drowned in blood in Indonesia, Vietnam was little more than a side show. Suharto’s right wing death squads or gangsters —“gangster,” as Anwar Kongo explains, means “free man”— are a bit like Ayn Rand heroes. They live according to their desires and take what they want. What better enforcers for a murderous kleptocrat who became immensely rich stealing from his own people? The gangsters were given a license to steal and murder as long as they kept his regime in power.  Much like the impunity given by our government to our own bankers and “job creators,” the law just didn’t apply to Suharto’s “free men.” Our bankers and “job creators” were allowed to steal billions of dollars through high tech methods like sub-prime mortgages and government bailouts. Suharto’s “free men” stole hundreds of millions through classic, mafia style shakedowns. Give us a cut of your business or we’ll accuse you of being a communist, murder you, and take your property anyway.

I left The Act of Killing feeling drained, not only because of the documentary’s length, but because of the challenge it laid at my feet. Monsters live among us. Adolf Eichmann ended up exactly where he deserved, dangling at the end of a rope. The Italian people hung Mussolini from a meat hook. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher died comfortably in their sleep. And Anwar Kongo, for all the remorse he felt at the documentary’s end, is probably still doing the Cha Cha.

Film, Male Film Directors

Killer of Sheep (1977)

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In John Ford’s great cinematic rendering of The Grapes of Wrath, the old truck that carries the Joad family from Oklahoma to Southern California becomes more more than a truck. Overloaded, off balance, constantly breaking down or running out of gas, the Joadmobile is one of the iconic characters in film history, the embodiment of the determination of the American working class to survive the Great Depression. In what is the film’s, and perhaps even John Ford’s climatic scene, the Joad family some how, some way makes it across the desert from Nevada to Southern California, a journey as perilous as the one their forebears made 75 years before, the old truck, part motor vehicle, part covered wagon, bridging the gap that separated New Deal America from the pioneers.

In Charles Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” we have a very different kind of family, and a very different confrontation with poverty. Killer of Sheep may not be as well known as Grapes of Wrath. Filmed through the 1970s when Burnett was a film student at UCLA, its release was delayed for years because of copyright issues with the soundtrack. After its restoration in 2007, however, it was chosen by the National Society of Film Critics as one of the 100 Essential Films. In 1990, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Stan, the film’s Tom Joad, is a young black man who lives with his wife and two kids in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles of the 1960s. Poverty for Stan and his family isn’t the life threatening poverty of the Joad family. There’s no danger they’re going to starve to death, break down in the middle of the night in the desert, or get beaten to death by strikebreakers. Everybody in Charles Burnett’s Watts has enough to eat and a roof over their heads. Poverty in Killer of Sheep pretty much comes down to “lacking pocket money,” but, if the Grapes of Wrath is about purgatory, Killer of Sheep is set in hell. Burnett’s Watts may be geographically located in Los Angeles, which was, last time I checked, a major American city, but it seems like a lost village of the damned. Time doesn’t exist. Place doesn’t exist. There is no government, no police, no postal service. There are no newspapers or magazines, and the only time we see a television set is when it’s being stolen. Stan has a job in a slaughterhouse, thus the title “Killer of Sheep,” but his neighbors all seem to be shiftless layabouts or petty thieves. There is quite literally no way out.

If the Joad family make it across the desert against all the odds, Stan and his neighbors fail at the simplest of tasks. In a particularly painful scene, for example, Stan and one of his friends buy a used engine from a neighbor to transplant into a non-working motor vehicle, a possible way out. They negotiate the price. They pick up the engine and carry down two flights of stairs.  After a long, harrowing struggle, they manage to get the it out to the street and their pickup truck, which is parked on a steep incline. They’ve made it, success, but no. Stan’s friend has injured his hand. They don’t have enough strength left to push the engine all the way up into the pickup truck’s bed. They leave the hard won engine hanging right on the edge. We wince because we know what’s coming. Stan gets behind the wheel of the car, and the engine crashes down onto the street as they lurch forward. They crack the block and waste what’s probably close to a week’s salary at the slaughterhouse. A later attempt at escape, a day trip to a local race track fails just as miserably. Just like the Joad family, Stan and his friends overload their car and blow out one of the tires, but, unlike the Joad family, they lack the ingenuity and the determination to continue on their way. Instead, they just turn around and ride the rim back to Watts. We can only imagine the shape the car was in when they got back home.

Whether or not you enjoy Killer of Sheep probably depends on whether or not you see Stan’s failure to escape, or even try to escape from the hell of his Watts neighborhood as a strength or a weakness. Film critics love Killer of Sheep. They see the Burnett’s refusal to plot out an overarching, central narrative as part of an honest attempt to recreate the conditions of urban poverty in the 1960s.

Killer of Sheep is certainly an effective expression of despair. The hangdog expressions of the men, the hostility of the women, the vicious aimless quality of the children testify to what life was like in one of those ghettos. But I’m not a film critic. Like John Ford’s audience in the 1930s, I don’t watch a film to recreate conditions I know in real life. I don’t want a film about poverty to be governed by a poverty of the imagination. The fact that Charles Burnett has managed, with great skill, to recreate a small corner of hell may testify to his skill as a film maker, but it doesn’t mean I want to spend 80 minutes of my time watching it. I know what poverty is like. I know what bedbugs are like. Does that mean I want to see a film that reminds me what it’s like to sleep on a mattress infested with bedbugs? In fact, far from bringing us closer to the reality of the poor, the lack of a plot brings us into the world of bourgeois indulgence, almost certainly not Burnett’s intention, but probably a hint about why it’s been so lavishly praised by the critics.

For the Joad family, survival is the overarching narrative. They don’t have the luxury of aimless meandering. That would be for the rich, the film critics who think Killer of Sheep is a “slice of life.” For the Joad family, it’s make it to California or die. They keep that truck working because they have to. Stan, by contrast, for all his failure at buying a spare engine or getting to the race track, somehow manages to get to work everyday. How does he do it? Does he take the bus? Does he car pool? Does he ride a bike? It’s Los Angeles, after all, not New York. There’s no subway and commutes in southern California often involve vast distances. But we’re never told. It’s an interesting story. It’s the story the film calls for, but Burnett never addresses it. He denies us the pleasure of any narrative arc, even if that narrative arc is about getting to work every day, something the poor, in real life, do with great skill and ingenuity.

Indeed, the weakest scenes in Killer of Sheep involve Stan’s job at the slaughterhouse. Unlike most of the film critics who have put Burnett’s film up on a pedestal, I actually know what the inside of a slaughterhouse looks like, having worked in fish canneries in the 1990s. In spite of one striking image of sheep after they’ve been slaughtered, these scenes fall flat. They capture none of the smell, the noise, the chaos, or the violence of a slaughterhouse. For that, go to Jennifer Lawrence’s squirrel skinning scene in Winter’s Bone,where she viscerally recoils from the blood and guts. The abattoir in Killer of sheep is arty and contrived, a clumsy attempt at symbolism. Yeah, we get it. Stan and his friends, the working class as a whole, are just like sheep, aimlessly milling about, waiting to be slaughtered. But if you’re going to film a scene in a slaughterhouse, it had better be messier. Slaughterhouses aren’t bloodless.

Perhaps it’s best to look at Killer of Sheep exactly as what it is, a brilliant student film made by a gifted cinematographer.  In a purely visual sense, Killer of Sheep is a triumph. Burnett may not know how to write a story. His actors, non actors, may seem wooden and clumsy, and the sound maybe incompetently mixed, but as a still photographer he has to rank with some of the greatest. The lighting is perfect, not just in one scene, but in every scene. The framing, while simple, is also deceptively simple. Every scene, every moment, has the palpable feel of reality. I suspect that if a professor of photography at Pratt Institute diagrammed Killer of Sheep scene by scene, he’d find that every frame is perfectly composed. Killer of Sheep looks as good as any black and white film by Jim Jarmusch. Frame by frame, the black and white photography in Killer of Sheep is as beautiful as the black and white photography in John Ford’s most beautiful film, “My Darling Clementine.” Killer of Sheep looks as good as the collected works of Henri Cartier Bresson.

It’s just too bad that whatever Burnett’s motivations, Killer of Sheep never quite rises above the level of poverty porn.

Film, Male Film Directors

American Hustle (2013)

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People believe what they want to believe

Near the beginning of David O. Russell’s fictionalized treatment of the ABSCAM scandal (more on that later) a small-time con man from the Bronx named Irving Rosenfeld, played by the almost unrecognizably balding and overweight Christian Bale, has brought a woman back to one of his offices. The woman, named Sydney Prosser, is stuck at a dead end job as an administrative assistant at Cosmopolitan Magazine. He’s madly in love with her, not only because she’s played by Amy Adams, who, although born in 1974, seems to embody a vision of 1970s cool, but because he feels that she’s the one person in his life with whom he can be honest. He’s ready to tell her the truth, that he’s a con man who runs what might best be described as an analog version of the Nigerian e-mail scam. What’s more, he wants her to join him, to become his partner in crime.

“How do you get them their loans?” she says.

“These guys are lousy risks,” he replies. “I can’t get them a loan, but I get my fee, five thousand.”

Sydney understands almost what he’s asking her to do almost immediately. It’s not the Bush years, where easy credit can be had from legitimate banks, but the late 1970s, in the aftermath of the oil shocks, in the middle of a recession, where, because of stagflation, the dollar is getting less and less valuable. While clearly interested, she has a moment of hesitation.

“Everybody at the bottom crosses paths eventually in a pool of desperation and you’re waiting for them,” she says, before walking out the door.

But it’s only a moment of hesitation. Soon Irving Rosenfeld and Sydney Prosser, who has re-christened herself “Lady Edith Greensly” and has started speaking in a phony British accent, are working as a team. In addition to bilking people out of the last of their savings with the promises loans never delivered, they sell stolen, and, more importantly, forged art. “Who’s the master?” Rosenfeld asks, showing off a copy of a fake Rembrandt, “the painter or the forger? People believe what they want to believe,” he adds, and we believe it.

I never even bothered to ask whether or not Adams’s fake British accent was credible because she so perfectly embodied the ideal of aspirational WASP sexiness that every NYC male, heterosexual white ethnic male falls prey to at one time or another. It worked for me. It works for Rosenfeld, and, more importantly, it works for Richie DiMaso, a strange, ethically compromised undercover FBI agent played by Bradley Cooper who lives with his butch Italian American mother, and who maintains an elaborate white boy afro by putting his hair up into hair curlers every night.

By the way I’ve described them so far, you might not think that Irving and Sydney are particularly likable. At best, you may think, they’re a complex pair of anti heroes like Walter and Skylar White, sympathetic only because they’re honestly corrupt in a dishonestly corrupt society. They are indeed that, but there’s more. By the end of American Hustle, we genuinely like Sydney and Irving. We even root for them to get away with it all, and live happily ever after.

Enter ABSCAM.

To explain exactly what ABSCAM was is far beyond the scope of this review. So I suggest you go to Wikipedia and look it up. Even after you do, you’ll still be left scratching your head, but suffice to say, it was a sting operation by the FBI against a United States Senator, Harrison Williams, a Mayor of Camden, Angelo Errichetti, and several other members of Congress, an attempt to catch them accepting bribes offered by a phony Arab Sheik. Remember, ABSCAM took place right after the oil embargo. Looking back, neither Williams nor Errichetti, or any of the other members of Congress the FBI attempted to bribe seem like particularly bad guys, and, in fact, the sting operation bordered on entrapment, so much so that there are even conspiracy theories about how the FBI was trying to exact payback against Congress for the Church Committee Hearings.

David O. Russell’s take on ABSCAM is much less conspiratorial. For him, ABSCAM wasn’t so much payback for the Church Committee as a sign that the only difference between the FBI and the New York City underworld, between Irving Rosenfeld and Richie DiMaso is that one lives by his wits and another draws a government salary. Richie DiMaso is no Eliot Ness. Rather, he’s an ambitious hustler who wants to make a name for himself by, ideally, bagging a mobster played by Robert DeNiro, or, if that fails, a few members of Congress and a Mayor of Camden.

After arresting Sydney and Irving, locking Sydney up for three days in solitary confinement, and coercing them into becoming FBI informants, DiMaso realizes that he feels more for Sydney than disgust at a petty criminal and scam artist. Just like Irving Rosenfeld, he falls madly in love with her, but unlike Rosenfeld, and this is the important difference, he has the power of the state on his side. He can make her requite his affections because he can also lock her up in a cage if she doesn’t. There’s nothing heavy handed about the way Russell introduces it. Indeed, it’s so subtle, we barely notice it happened. While DiMaso isn’t exactly Prince Charming, he’s no comic book villain twirling his mustache while he ties the damsel in distress to the railroad tracks. Sydney’s no damsel in distress and DiMaso, for all his faults, unlike Rosenfeld, at least has all his hair, and at least goes to the gym once in awhile. But the sex DiMaso wants, and never gets, would in fact, be coerced sex, and that, in the end, is what makes Sydney and Irving, for all their faults, the heroes we root for, and DiMaso, for all the sympathy we may feel for his hopeless lust for Sydney, the villain.

The rest of it unfolds from there. Irving Rosenfeld, heartless scam artist, begins to realize he may have a soul after all. The FBI’s mark, a liberal New Jersey politician named Carmine Polito, played by Jeremy Renner as a bit of a fop with a puffy hairstyle (this film is all about hair and cleavage), may not be the second coming of Lincoln. He may be involved in some low level corruption, but only because “that’s the way things are done” in his world. What’s more, he genuinely cares about the people he governs. He likes black people. He hates racism. He considers his constituents not only his constituents but his extended family. He may be willing to bend a few rules to build Casinos in Atlantic City — gambling in New Jersey has just been legalized — but he’s doing it to get jobs for the people of his state, not to line his own pockets. So Rosenfeld decides to turn the tables on the FBI, and, when he does, the movie has so effectively conned us all we never see it coming.

Final note: Jennifer Lawrence, the current Hollywood mega star, plays Irving Rosenfeld’s wife Rosyln. She’s far too beautiful, far too Anglo Saxon, and at least ten years too young for the role. Debbi Mazur or Joan Cusack in her early 30s would have been perfect. But, whatever her faults, Lawrence earns her pay, throwing herself into the role of a 1970s New York City guidette with such abandon, we almost begin to believe her Jersey accent is authentic. Her looks also contrasts with Adams’s. Where Adams is slim, elegant, cool, Lawrence is loud, fleshy, an out of control loose canon. At times, so much energy does Lawrence put into the role of blond Snooki, you can almost forget Adams is 5’4” and Lawrence is 5’11”. Adams just seems taller. What’s more, Russell shows us all the flaws in Amy Adam’s skin. She’s sexy because she’s real. Lawrence, by contrast, comes off like a perfect, almost too perfect wax doll, a 1970s Playboy Playmate a few years later, neglected, feeling left alone, and determined to push herself into the action by any means necessary (even if it means getting her husband kidnapped by mobsters).

Final verdict on American Hustle: Maybe not a great movie or even a very good one, but a thoroughly entertaining, and genuinely anti-authoritarian one, worth seeing for Christian Bale’s toupee, if nothing else.