In the Line of Fire: FIVE BROKEN CAMERAS

As rumbles of war in the Middle East intensify for only the latest time in my lifetime, it’s important to look past empty hawkish rhetoric and witness the human-level situations that play out in that part of the world each and every day. It’s times like these that we need what cinema can provide: light amidst darkness, clarity amidst obfuscation, and understanding amidst fear. When we say that an actor was brave for doing a nude scene or for losing (or gaining) a massive amount of weight, when we say that a writer or director was brave for making a film that Hollywood considers a risky, artsy bet, we’re doing real bravery a disservice. You want to see true cinematic bravery? Five Broken Cameras represents brave moviemaking at its very best – a tough, tender, unflinching document of oppression and the human spirit, not in vague, empty-headed messaging or pat political statements, but in the stark, unavoidable power of picture and sound. This is cinema as a chronicle of history unfolding, of real people caught struggling to do the right thing.

Five Broken Cameras uses the very danger of its filming as its structure. The director and cameraman is Emad Burnat, a Palestinian farmer in a small village of energetic, resilient people. He first bought a video camera shortly after the birth of Gibreel, his youngest child, a pleased father wanting to grab memories for proud parents hold dear. It’s around this time Israeli developers began moving in, slowly but surely taking over more and more Palestinian territory. The village of farmers is finding land, livelihoods, subsumed by an ever-closer wall, by concrete buildings that appear seemingly overnight. There are peaceful protests beaten back violently by patrols from the Israeli armed forces. There are negotiations, legal challenges, and unease in the streets. Burnat is there to capture it all with his camera, even finding himself in the line of fire. One harrowing image finds a bullet shot straight into the camera and, with a scary-soft pop, the consumer-grade digital image buzzing away into terrifying computerized noise.

Burnat, with co-director Guy Davidi, follows the conflict as a backdrop for the child’s growth. We are watching home videos that add up to a portrait of a family, which in turn reflects the values of this close-knit village, which in turn reveals larger truths about the vast majority of Palestinian people. Rather than foregrounding political points, Burnat has a made a deeply humanistic, in some ways apolitical, film, arguing at its core for basic human rights, human decency, and the right to be heard. His narration, soft-spoken and melodious, takes us through everyday life, watching an adorable little boy explore the world around him. He toddles through the village with happiness, crossing through the checkpoints at the wall unaware of the menacing nature of it all, kicking at an exploded husk of a smoke bomb as if it were just another piece of nature resting in the soil.

Repeatedly, we return with Burnat to a shot of his five broken cameras, smashed, scrapped, shot, stomped, and shattered, placed in a row on his table, a physical record of the film’s making. The passing of time while watching the film can be measured not only by the age of Burnat’s children, but by the number of cameras we’ve seen destroyed, by the steady improvement in the tangible pictorial qualities of each new camera. It’s a perfect visual metaphor not only for the hazards of the film’s creation, but also for what the film represents: increased clarity through great danger. We see protests and violence from the Middle East in the media of the United States, but rarely are we afforded the chance to see it so personally, to comprehend it at a visceral ground level, to understand the overwhelming cycle of pain and perseverance from a first-person point-of-view. When Gibreel is only four years old, Israeli forces senselessly kill a beloved member of the village while he is peacefully protesting. This sweet little boy is heartbroken, his brow furrowing as he wishes harm upon the soldiers. He’s comforted, helped through his emotions, but the power of the pain, and the truth it reveals, lingers throughout this uniquely powerful film.

Fracked: PROMISED LAND

Fracking, the process by which energy companies drill into shale deposits deep underground and then shoot a mixture of water and undisclosed chemicals into the hole in order to extract natural gas, is rightly controversial. You may not have seen Gasland, the essential documentary on the subject, but you’re surely aware of that film’s most remarkable images of people lighting their tap water on fire. Fracking is safe and contamination of nearby water sources is next to impossible, at least that’s what the energy companies have a vested interest in having you believe. The good idea behind the newest anti-fracking film, Promised Land, is the way it puts those words in the mouth of its main character, a company man played by Matt Damon. His job is to ride into a small town and convince property owners to sell the rights to the shale under their feet in exchange for a big check and promises of residual checks to come.

Damon and his coworker (Frances McDormand) go door to door in an economically devastated town where the money offered sounds good. Too good to be true, says the local science teacher played by Hal Holbrook. An out-of-towner environmentalist played by John Krasinski joins the wise old science guy in a campaign to educate the townspeople about the dangers of signing away their town’s livability for an easy payout. Sure, the town would have a brief boom time, but is it worth trading their future livestock, farming, and fresh water? Director Gus Van Sant shoots the small town lovingly, with overhead shots of endless green expanses broken up only by farmhouses, silos, and herds of animals, the better to emphasize what can potentially be taken away.

The script, by Damon and Krasinski with an assist from novelist, essayist, and literary icon of sorts Dave Eggers, makes no effort to hide its didactic intentions. Well, almost no effort, I should say. There’s a wisp of a plot involving both men’s understandable, low-key, low-stakes romantic pursuit of a local teacher (Rosemary DeWitt) that doesn’t really go anywhere productive, but at least it distracts from scenes like Krasinski teaching a class about water contamination or Damon standing in front of an American flag answering tough questions in a local information meeting. It’s all pretty obvious, with character motivations and lines of dialogue blatantly standing in for the sociopolitical argument that’s inelegantly happening in a place somewhere between text and subtext.

The kicker is that the argument is so very noble. Of course we should be worried about what fracking will do to small towns. If anything, it’s a conversation that’s not being held often enough in the public sphere. The way the movie blends an economic and environmental argument is worthy, asking its audience to weigh the considerations of a struggling town’s short- and long-term best interests as the townspeople do. The problem is that there’s nothing else on which to ponder as the film plays out. It’s an editorializing documentary sitting just underneath the thin veneer of drama and I resented being asked to care about characters when they’re nothing more than living, breathing talking points. This is an artless message movie from artful people so carried away with their good message that they forgot to make a movie.

Off the Chain: DJANGO UNCHAINED

Deeply uncomfortable and scarily cathartic, Django Unchained is Quentin Tarantino’s first true Western, finding inspiration from 70’s spaghetti and blaxploitation Westerns for a racially charged fantasy of bloody vengeance. The plot, set in the antebellum Deep South, concerns a hardened slave named Django (Jamie Foxx, steely cool) who is freed by the unassumingly dangerous German expatriate Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter, in order to assist in hunting down wanted slavers. The hunter doesn’t know their faces, but figures that the slave will identify them, seeing as they are the ones who sold Django and his wife (Kerry Washington, damsel distressed) to separate plantations. In exchange for the help, Schultz promises Django not only his freedom, but an opportunity for revenge and reunion as well. This is a film with many scenes of chains and whips inflicted upon stripped, sweaty, beaten bodies. It summons up ugly history to gorily dismantle the shameful institution (if only in some small, personal way) with a force history does not allow.

As one practiced in genre synthesis, Tarantino makes clear his aesthetic influences while recapitulating and recombining until he finds and elevates core attractions of his favorite genres. Here, he makes simple Western mythology out of volatile parts and unexpected juxtapositions. There’s a hint of his mindset of insatiable cultural appropriation in shots of snowy Sergio Corbucci fields; later, we follow a chain of slaves right out of Richard Fleischer's Mandingo. Drawing upon Western tropes by digging into less well-known (or downright disreputable) subgenres, Tarantino uses his film to reveal heroism and nobility in people usually kept off screen. How often, after all, did John Wayne films even seriously acknowledge slavery, a crucial economic engine and political hot button of the very era in which many of his cowboy epics were set? (Or Clint Eastwood. Or Franco Nero. Or, or, or.) Here, the black man is the hero, freed to exact his revenge, patiently working with a foreigner to set a trap for slimy slavers and steal back his bride.

That’s undeniably thrilling. But Tarantino’s approach can be awfully troubling as well. Though necessary, perhaps, the scenes of slavery and brutality sit awkwardly in such a pulpy setting. And yet there’s such a moral force behind it all. Why shouldn’t we get a kick out of seeing a slave determined to wage a one-man revolt through those determined to dehumanize him? Along the way we meet all manner of folk who are both imbued with Tarantino’s love of colloquial verbiage and an easy despicability. There are plantation owners (Don Johnson), vicious slavers (M. C. Gainey), cruel enforcers (Walton Goggins), and colluding slaves (Samuel L. Jackson in an altogether unexpected and especially tricky opaquely complex role). These characters are dancing around the edges of the plot, which ultimately turns its attention on one particularly charismatically nasty slave owner by the name of Calvin Candie who is played in a nice bit of unexpected casting by Leonardo DiCaprio. Calvin owns a large, notorious plantation called Candieland (get it?) that he proudly uses as a base for making money off of his slaves through prostitution and death matches. DiCaprio is clearly having fun (which, come to think of it, is a problem) and makes for a scary funny foil.

What’s disappointing is that the characters (especially the supporting ones) are thinner and the genre play is simpler and more surface-level than the usual Tarantino effort. His sure ear for dialogue turns tinny time and again, with some more overtly comedic set pieces galumphing embarrassingly. A scene in which Ku Klux Klan members avant la lettre argue about the size and spacing of eyeholes in their white hoods is just plain off tonally. Where he usually wields broad material in great crowd-pleasing gasps that don’t cheat fine thematic points and nuanced characterization, here he just has the brusque sensations. However painterly and powerful is an image of a pure white cotton field suddenly spotted with red blood, this is a film in which the human body has exploding baggies of red syrup inside and in which only simple catharsis and horror comes out with the gobs of viscera splattered about. (Though if anyone voices complaint about Tarantino’s approach to violence, let it be said that at least he modulates tone exceedingly well in its portrayal. Violence to slaves is gruesome; violence to slavers is a release.) Unlike his last film, Inglourious Basterds, which told an alternate-history World War II story through perfectly written scenes working on many levels at once, this historical genre picture is fairly one-note. I was occasionally entertained and delighted by the usual pleasures of the genre and certainly unsettled by the intensity of the slavery aspects of the plot, but was disappointed in the lack of deeper engagement or coherent commitment to genre subversion.

And then, there came a time when I found myself glad I hadn’t written the film off as mere uneven entertainment and provocation. There’s a sequence near the end of the picture that’s pure Tarantino, a long sizzle of suspense in which violence and surprise lie ticking, explosion fully possible at any moment. The suspense comes not just from a dangerous situation, but from the dangerous situation that’s almost, but not quite, occurring, existing as mere possibility that is deeply imbedded within character and plot in such a way that the audience knows deep down that this scene will not end with the same number of living characters that there were at its start. This is the kind of smart, writerly standoff that Tarantino does best and has within it an excitement and layered dexterity that I found missing in the rest of the film. Django Unchained frees itself from a bumpy buildup to go out with a (strangely doubled) flourish of flashy, almost frightfully effective and satisfying violence that just about justifies the film's existence and christens Foxx's Django a true new Western hero. Still, as good as it can be and as rousing some of the finale is, I’d have liked to see a sharper, deeper film that could have put to better use the unstable dynamite of its plot elements instead of relying on easy outrage and surface cool.

2012 OFCS Awards Nominees

This morning, the Online Film Critics Society announced the nominations for our 2012 awards. It's an interesting list with some surprising choices and omissions. That's worth a look.

You can see the complete listing here, but to get you started, here are the OFCS nominees for Best Picture:

Best Picture

Argo
Holy Motors
The Master
Moonrise Kingdom
Zero Dark Thirty

Winners in all categories will be announced on Monday, January 7, 2013. 

Hear the People Sing: LES MISÉRABLES

It took long enough to get Les Misérables on the big screen, at least when you’re talking about Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s beloved long-running (nearly 30 years) stage musical based on the hefty Victor Hugo novel. I’ll leave the comparisons of stage to screen to those who have actually encountered this production before, but as one whose first exposure to the musical comes through this film, I must say that, despite some reservations I’ll definitely mention, the film works. I can see why so many have such strong feelings about the source material. This is a sturdy, often stirring Hollywood musical of the kind that won’t win over any reluctant naysayers or those unlikely to either accept or ignore director Tom Hooper’s tendency to shoot everything in wide angle close-ups, but is sure to satisfy some of us who roll our eyes whenever Carol Reed’s altogether delightfully square literary musical Oliver! turns up in lists of Oscar “mistakes.”

If nothing else, Tom Hooper (who rode his last film, the even squarer The King’s Speech, to Oscar glory) has adapted Les Misérables in a way that’s determinedly earnest. It’s the kind of movie where characters are constantly having their lives turned upside down by momentous emotion and revelations happen in the blink of an eye. One glance and you’re the most in love you’ve ever been with a girl you just met. Receive one kind gesture and a criminal is instantly a better man, or an authority figure is instantly conflicted about his duty. Hooper underplays some of this quite nicely, but that will bury motivations from time to time. (There are a few character moments that left me lost.) Had the film been under the direction of a flashier, more competent visual stylist, there might have been an embrace of some of the more swoony elements in a way that could have led to greater clarity. Still, Hooper has been handed strong material and he’s smart enough not to mess it up.

The story, set in the mid-1800s, starts with Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), a prisoner who skips out on parole and, with inspiration from a kind priest, decides to start a new life as an honorable man. Too bad, then, that after several years of successful remaking, the policeman long in pursuit, Javert (Russell Crowe), eventually catches up.  This story crosses paths with Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who is tragically unemployed and sickly, barely able to provide the money she needs to send to her very young daughter Cosette (Isabelle Allen), who has been left at a boarding house run by a couple of careless cons (Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen). Valjean promises Fantine that he’ll find the girl and make sure she’s taken care of. He does, but one step ahead of Javert, he and the girl flee. He starts over yet again. 

The plot picks up years later in Paris, where the frustrated public, among them idealistic students Marius and Éponine (Eddie Redmayne and Samantha Barks), plan a revolution. All of the other characters are in the general vicinity of the conflict as well, leading to Marius glimpsing Cosette (now grown into Amanda Seyfried) and deciding that he’s in love. Good thing she decides in the same instant that she loves him too, no matter how protective her adopted father is. And we haven’t even gotten to the revolution yet! This is a tragedy and a romance with an epic historical sweep that finds along the way menace and kindness, humor and heartbreak, romance and retribution. There’s lots of plot packed into a quick (relatively speaking, I suppose) two-and-a-half hours, leading to some moments where I was intellectually moved by the proceedings without getting my heart involved. There’s just no downtime here as we hurry from peak to peak and I felt a bit of a burden to fill in the gaps myself. And yet, this is sometimes powerful, always hardworking storytelling that soars on the back of memorable sung-through melodies and motifs.

Rarely stopping to catch a breath, the characters sing their hearts out. Hooper has one or two good ideas on how to capture the performances. First, there’s the live singing. Unlike most movie musicals, which record the vocal performances separately, leaving the actors room to maneuver through the scenes and dances without worrying about hitting all the right notes while filming, Hooper captured the singing right then and there on set. This results in many stirring moments of musical cinema in which characters are raw and emotive in ways that sound spontaneous. You can hear characters straining at times, warbling away from big notes when a swell of emotion chokes them up, weeping through swallowed notes or swelling with prideful energy. The singing is undoubtedly rough around the edges at times, but the cast does a fine job nonetheless. I was surprised how moved I was by Jackman’s clipped, half-swallowed bubbling in his most dramatic moments.

Hooper’s second good idea helps the cast’s singing as well. When the constantly swirling melodies part to let a character step forward and sing a solo soliloquy, his restless camera stops to capture the song in steady shots that keep the performance in close frames that regard the emotion that plays out with the notes. These moments could have failed a weaker cast, but here they are simple and effective. When Banks sings of unrequited love in “On My Own,” when Redmayne mourns in “Empty Chairs At Empty Tables,” and when Jackman sings his epiphany in “Valjean’s Soliloquy,” the effect is a rather lovely work of cinematic theatricality, putting us not just front row, but on the stage for a terrific feat of musical acting. The clear standout sequence of this kind is Hathaway’s astonishing performance of what has to be the musical’s most well known number, the heartbreaking “I Dreamed a Dream.” It plays out in more or less one shot, each note a twist of the knife in this character’s sad trajectory.

Though the film feels so big with production design that feels like heightened grubby realism and soaring music that helps fill the frames with operatic emotions, Hooper’s closeness occasionally makes the whole thing feel small and cramped. (You wouldn’t really want to sit on the stage to watch the show now, would you?) He’s not a particularly visual director and when he’s called upon to manage a small group number – “At the End of the Day,” say, or especially with “Master of the House” – the shots don’t add up. When it comes to matching rousing unison and harmonies with nimble visual compositions to match, he’s not up to the task. Here he breaks with his old-fashioned material and old-fashioned approach for the sake of a misguided method of keeping editing choppy and shots close and ill framed. There’s a sense that he’s trying to stay away from precisely the bigness and exaggeration that makes the best movie musicals work so well. It doesn’t work for the material here, but it’s something that one can learn to overlook if determined to ride the emotion underlying it all.

After all, there’s a great story here, or at least so I gather. Some of the rushed storytelling left me scratching my head and the pacing in the final half hour or so goes strangely slack, but the broad strokes of pain, romance, and tragic revolution resonate well. The performers sell each and every big moment, a great cast, singing memorable, endlessly hummable tunes. Less a great movie, more a movie in which you can find greatness, Les Misérables is never better than when its director can get out of his own way. 

Has Nice Beats // You Can Dance to It: GIRL WALK // ALL DAY

Girl Talk’s All Day, a whirlwind album-length mash-up, is the only sound on the soundtrack in Girl Walk // All Day, which is part silent movie, part music video, and part feature-length dance party. Any way you look at it, the film is infectiously toe-tapping. The film is a dance through New York City, a scenic tour that glides along, watching solitary dancers exuberantly, emphatically moving to the beat through crowds of real people simply going about their day. That could potentially be annoying, or like some sub-Candid Camera stunt, but instead it turns into one of the purest examples of musical joy the movies have given us in quite some time.

Director Jacob Krupnick’s camera sits back and regards the dancing as it happens, capturing full range of motion and the context of the environment. The music is pounding and hugely enjoyable, a flowing sampler of popular music from Beyoncé to E.L.O., John Lennon, Rihanna and Arcade Fire, from the Brothers Johnson and the Jackson 5 to Lady Gaga, Devo, Jay-Z, and Miley Cyrus, to name only some of the artists represented in a reported 372 danceable samples. Through lyrics beautiful, inane, and profane, the beat stays strong. As it moves along, we catch snippets of catchy hooks, bounce to some great flow, and groove to memorable melodies as they mix and match, compliment each other in new combinations. All the while, the camera moves through the city, from Chinatown to Central Park and from Wall Street to Grand Central Terminal.

There’s a loose plot of sorts that unfolds like a silent film in its broad, delightful exaggeration of expression. We’re mostly following a Girl (Anne Marsen), who bops along, dancing, wiggling and waving, sometimes eager to get passerby interested in joining her, sometimes blissfully lost in her own rhythms. In movie musicals, when one person is so full of emotion they simply must dance it out, there are often crowds of people ready to join in on the choreography. Not so here. This is dance for dance’s sake, the entirety of the city’s public spaces an impromptu stage. Luckily, the Girl is someone to watch, with a face as expressive as her dance. She’s our Chaplin, our Keaton, our Tati, a largely wordless figure to which the world must decide how to react.

There are two other dancers: the Creep (John Doyle) and the Gentleman (Daisuke Omiya). The Creep sometimes causes disruptions, but the Gentleman is a more respectful dance partner. We follow them from time to time, cutting away from the Girl. Eventually some of these characters will cross paths and exchange dances, acting out little scenarios. So there’s not much there and maybe the movie would be better off without nods towards plot, but there’s such a charming simplicity to the outsized dance-based movements that communicate so strongly through the soundtrack, that it’s hard to resist.

Along the way, sometimes the Girl is joined by new friends or receives positive nods and smiles from passerby. She’s just as often ignored. Other times she decides to take a break, like in a fun little montage in which she stops to shop. One charming moment finds her cheering up a little girl. Later, she gets caught up in a parade. Another moment finds her sad no one else will dance with her. There’s little down time here, though. She keeps moving, dancing to music that it appears only she can hear. As the movie goes on, we build to a dusk-set climax of sorts in which a larger crowd starts to join in on the dance. By the end, the effect is something that needs to be shared. At one point, in an unheard conversation recounted in subtitles, a bystander asks the girl, “Why are you dancing?” Her reply is a simple and powerful statement of purpose: “Because I’m happy.” And why shouldn’t we all try, at least every once in a while, to be so happy?

Note: As you might imagine, the music rights are what’s preventing this film from having anything approaching a more traditional release of any size. It’s screening in select venues, so if it shows up near you, I’d highly recommend checking it out. If you’re desperately curious and just can’t wait, the whole thing is streaming for free in 12 parts on girlwalkallday.com

More Than a Name: JACK REACHER

There’s a scene in the middle of Jack Reacher in which the man himself (Tom Cruise), a former military investigator now poking around in the aftermath of a seemingly random shooting, finds himself confronted by two toughs ready to clobber him over the head. Reacher falls back in a confined space and his attackers, inexperienced and overeager, swing wildly. Reacher moves precisely and quickly, giving his attackers just enough room to inadvertently beat each other up, leaving him free to continue his investigation. This is a fun scene, well choreographed and a nice blend of danger mixed with a small amount of humor. But it is also a good enough metaphor for the film itself and the way it goes about working. It’s hardly original material, but it’s well written, quick-witted (at times) and precise, ready to lean back and let the plotting fall into place with good instincts. It’s a fine thriller, crisp, quickly paced, and with a smartly plotted mystery.

It starts with a terrifying act of violence. A sniper shoots into a crowd, seemingly at random, resulting in five deaths. The man the police take into custody does not speak when interrogated. He scrawls on a piece of paper a simple directive: Get Jack Reacher. They don’t have to look very far. He’s already on his way. What’s his connection to the accused? It’s all a tad more complicated than I need to get into here. Let’s just say that Reacher agrees to help the defense attorney (Rosamund Pike) investigate the case, while navigating the evidence provided by a perceptive detective (David Oyelowo) and the District Attorney (Richard Jenkins). How this seemingly open and shut case soon involves tails and goons (Jai Courtney and Vladimir Sizov), hired toughs (Josh Helman and Michael Raymond-James), an in-over-her-head girl (Alexia Fast), and a shadowy, mostly fingerless man played by the beloved German filmmaker Werner Herzog is complexity that eventually gives way to a grim, pulpy simplicity.

What holds the film steady on its course is the constant focus of Jack Reacher. As played by Cruise, the man’s a steady rock, a determined investigator who lives off the grid and shows up to help here out of a sense of duty. He’s no-nonsense, but with some terse quips here and there that are welcome wry one-liners. This character’s already appeared in a popular and ongoing series of novels by Lee Child from which I’ve meant to read one or two for a while now. Here Christopher McQuarrie, a fine screenwriter in his second directorial outing, gives the whole production the kind of easy familiarity and relentless steady momentum that drives us inevitably forward through the tangles of mystery, inevitable precisely because of the character at the center. Reacher feels like a character who enters fully formed. We know that he will get to the bottom of the mystery precisely because he’s so determined, part Shane, part Dirty Harry, a man who’s no (or rather, rarely a) loose cannon vigilante, but a man looking for justice with comprehensive training to back up his professed skills.

Cop and lawyer procedurals have told similar stories, investigating shocking crimes that aren’t as simple as they seem thousands of times over, an hour at a time, on TVs worldwide. What’s better here is the weight given to violence, a proper sorrow and horror. The opening shootings are scary enough (especially haunting in light of the many real life random massacres we’ve seen this year), but as we return to the event as the characters try to learn more, we’re given a montage that reveals who the victims were, examining their humanity with unexpected depth. Later on in the film, when a likable side character is suddenly murdered, it’s a sharp pain of a moment, unexpectedly fast and upsetting. How often do mysteries treat the deaths involved as mere plot point? Here, they’re felt more deeply than usual, which gives a heft to the unraveling mystery it might not otherwise have.

McQuarrie has made a fine example of slick popcorn filmmaking that’s serious about its entertainment. It doesn’t shortchange its subject by cheapening it. Instead, he allows the horror of the inciting incident to inform the intensity with which the audience is able to root for Reacher to untangle the motivations and conspiracies behind it. The movie embraces genre tropes a bit too much in the climax with what was an enjoyable investigation taking a turn into a standard action movie showdown, but McQuarrie never loses his refreshingly steady eye for framing the events on screen. This is a solid, well-built example of Hollywood craftsmanship that serves up some unsettling material and then brings in a movie star hero written with the right set of smarts to settle things back down again.