Neil Flowers

Last Train Home

mandy — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Zeitgeist Films, Canada Council for the Arts

The establishing longshot of this documentary tilts down to show a few policemen in an open, paved space. Slowly the camera pans left, and the entire frame fills with thousands of people standing in a drizzle. Many hold bright, pastel-coloured umbrellas. It’s a beautiful image. The following shot, from ground level, shows that huge crowd rushing in pandemonium past the camera into a train station. These two shots are emblematic of the film: beauty and chaos inextricably interwoven.

Earth’s largest human migration occurs in China at their New Year. One hundred and thirty million people who work in cities scuffle for prized train tickets to return to villages where they were raised. Last Train Home fuses a macro view of this migration as a social and cultural phenomenon with a micro view of one family that makes this annual trek. In so doing, it underscores the high price in domestic turmoil many Chinese families pay for the country’s so-called economic miracle. It also vividly contrasts the lovely countryside with the polluted, teeming, ugliness of urban China.

Changhua Zang and Sugin Chen, husband and wife, work as sewing-machine operators in a factory in Guangzhou. They have two kids—Qin, a girl in her teens, and a boy, Yang, about ten—who live with their grandmother in Huilong Village where the parents were born. The film was shot over a couple of years, so we watch the kids grow up a bit. The parents labour at their dreary work to give their children a chance at prosperity. “You shouldn’t be like us,” they say. To this end, they constantly remind Qin and Yang to stay in school and get good grades. The parents also reveal decidedly mixed feelings about being wage slaves 2,000 kilometres away from their kids. They insist their destiny (etched in their faces) will be worth it if the kids acquire a higher education.

However, Qin, angry and bitter with her parents for their protracted absence, quits school and moves to a city, thus frustrating Changhua and Sugin’s hopes. She goes to work in a strobe-lit dance bar where the music is industrial technopop and employees’ training includes chanting capitalist slogans: “Customers are always right!” and “The boss is always right!” (Mao is turning over in his grave.) Yang, the son, stays in school and remains the light of his parents’ lives. If he quits, their sixteen-year devotion will have been for naught.

A great thing about Last Train Home is how it makes family a common human denominator: the daughter angry with her mother; the likable, hard-working, worried, exhausted, guilty, self-sacrificing parents; the wise grandmother; the young boy who is academically inclined and is his parents’ last, best hope. We know these people. They are us. When Changua finally breaks from his impossibly stoic reserve and slaps his daughter for disrespecting him by using fuck in his presence, we deeply empathize with them both.

A word about the production of this film. Lixin Fan, the director, is Chinese-Canadian. The film was produced mostly by government funds from Canada. It’s a tribute to the country and its art organizations that they have the acuity to fund a film that may seem at first to have nothing to do with Canada. But troubled families, Chinese, Canadian, or anywhere else are legion. And China itself is omnipresent. One need only look at the planet’s retail shelves to see that. This superb documentary allows us inside a Chinese phenomenon to see how similar and connected we all are now.

Finally: Be sure to stick around to hear the plaintive, chilling, gorgeous, acapella aria sung over the end credits.

Written by: Neil Flowers, April 15th 2011

Small Source of Comfort

mandy — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Bruce Cockburn

True North Records

Full disclosure: Bruce Cockburn (COE-burn) is Canadian; I’m Canadian. There aren’t that many of us. We’re the world’s second largest country, with a population smaller than California. So we back our homeys when they’re world-class: Angela Hewitt, Frederick Banting, Sandra Oh, Denys Arcand, Jim Carrey, Diana Krall, Leonard Cohen, Karen Kain, Tom Thomson, David Suzuki, Cirque du Soleil.

Which returns us to Bruce. The world-class part, that is. He’s a musician’s musician with an extraordinary scope as a lyricist, guitar player, and singer. He can do jazzy gutbucket ("Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long"), a beautiful country hymn ("One Day I Walk"), a great road song ("Silver Wheels"), an anti-war descant equal to Dylan ("If I Had A Rocket Launcher"), a funny blues ("The Blues Got The World By The Balls"), a credible cover of a classic blues ("Soul of a Man"), a rocker ("Lovers In A Dangerous Time") and several other genres. He is one of the planet’s best finger-pickers, which is why he has swapped licks with guitaristas such as Ali Farka Touré. The years have been good to his voice. His lower register has deepened but he hasn’t lost much at the top.

Small Source of Comfort is the singer’s thirty-first album (!) since he began in Ottawa forty-some years ago. A generous album of twelve songs and a coda it is, too. “Called Me Back” is a wry, LOL tune that imagines why someone wouldn’t return your call, for example, “Maybe his mother ran afoul of the law” or “He coulda slid into a society scene.” The instrumental “Bohemian 3-Step” is way uptempo and alternates between complex descending chords and the quick, complicated finger-picking at which he is so adept. He shows off his musicianship in four other instrumentals on this CD that run from jazz-rock fusion, “The Comets of Kandahar,” (with superb violin help from Jenny Scheinman); to the Debussyesque “Parnassus and Fog”; to the spare, what-you-might-call-new-age “Ancestors.”

His lyrics are as original as his guitar work. “Each One Lost” is part threnody with undertones of a Scottish ballad. Bruce spent a week in Afghanistan and was present when a plane brought in the bodies of two Canadian soldiers. The song is also a celebration of the freedom for which the men fought and died; its theme, as the title indicates, is reminiscent of John Donne’s famous passage from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, which contains the phrase “for whom the bell tolls.” It’s destined to be classic Cockburn.

“Call Me Rose” is an instant classic as well. The song begins, “My name was Richard Nixon only now I am a girl/You wouldn't know it but I used to be the king of the world.” Yes, the singer imagines Richard Nixon reincarnated as a young woman—with two kids living in the projects, working out his penance, learning what it means to be poor and powerless, but also learning how to endure. These two songs are alone worth the price of admission, and you get eleven more to boot, all of them very fine.

So there you have it. One Canadian shilling for a fellow Canuck? Or one Canadian telling the truth about his brother’s tunes? Bruce is a member of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s two highest civilian awards for merit. That’s a clue. So Canuck, Aussie, Kiwi, Yank, or Brit, you should buy this CD if you love the best. I swear by the beaver and the maple leaf you’ll be glad you blew the fifteen bucks.

Written by: Neil Flowers, March 26th 2011

Mutum

mandy — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Sandra Kogut

Global Film Initiative

Mutum is a coming of age, low-budget feature about a subsistence farming family living in the sertão, the hardscrabble outback of Minas Gerais, Brazil. The family is so dirt poor and isolated that nearly every meal is rice and a little meat, the roof leaks buckets in a rainstorm, and a person can die from lack of treatment for a minor scrape that becomes infected.

The protagonist, Thiago (Thiago da Silva Mariz), nine years old, is guileless, curly-haired, doe-eyed, a moralist, a storyteller, a profound questioner, and a favourite of his long-suffering mother (Izadora Fernandes). His innocence is broken by death, violence, and sexual betrayal, mostly played low-key or off-screen, except for a small amount of overt physical violence.

The household’s father, Bero (João Miguel), can joke with his kids, but has a hair-trigger temper, is subject to rages, and abuses his family—especially Thiago because his son is broodingly sensitive. His personable uncle (Rômulo Braga) treats Thiago well, but exploits the relationship to manipulate the boy. His older brother, Felipe (Felipe Leal Barroso), with whom he is close, suffers a disturbing fate.

Sandra Kogut, Mutum's director, takes chances that pay off. The temporal and thematic connections between scenes are not always immediately obvious. This method requires a viewer to actively engage with the scenes to connect their meanings—a good thing. Kogut’s actors are mostly non-professionals. All of them—kids and adults alike—do amazingly well in range and expression. One feels their authentic presence, undoubtedly because they are native to the locality. This casting creates the feel of eavesdropping on real lives, as well as foregrounding by comparison the artifice of so much Hollywood acting.

Contrary to the hyperkinetic editing fashionable in many studio films, Kogut establishes an unhurried rhythm using long takes that employ close-ups and extreme close-ups, often of people’s faces, which contrast sharply with telephoto landscape shots. This method and its results mirror the slow pace of the countryside and also allow the characters to bond emotionally in a convincing way, which big feature films often fail to do because those movies almost always restlessly move on to the next edit.

Example: Thiago and his mother must make a decision that will alter their lives forever. He comes to her, climbs in her lap, rests his head on her shoulder. Dialogue is minimal. Everything they feel lives in their faces and their hug. One keeps expecting an edit, but the camera is not impatient; it holds for about a minute—an eternity for most shots in movies nowadays—so they and we can feel the love between them. It’s a beautiful, simple, complex minute.

Finally, in this incomplete list of Kogut’s achievements with this film, Mutum eschews a music track. This tactic lets an audience experience on its own the emotions arising from those long, intimate takes rather than being coerced into those emotions by hammer-and-anvil leitmotifs. Sounds from the environment—the barking of dogs, a cow lowing, birds calling, insects chirruping—contribute to a scene’s tone, while simultaneously helping to create the sense of place.

I do have a major beef with Mutum. In the last few minutes of the film, with nary a scintilla of backstory, seeding, or foreshadowing to set this up, there occurs an extremely important revelation about Thiago. This sudden revelation is all the more jarring because it seems incompatible with what we have seen of him; thus the suspension of disbelief necessary to drama—indeed upon which emotional involvement in drama absolutely depends—is shattered. This flaw is not a dealbreaker, as there are so many pleasures and treasures in Mutum, but it sure is a clunky misstep in an otherwise excellent picture.

Written by: Neil Flowers, March 10th 2011

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss

mandy — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by Felix Moeller

Zeitgeist Films

Harlan reworked brilliantly the Jew Suss film. This will be the anti-Semitic film. - From the diary of Joseph Goebbels, December 15, 1939.

You’re a talented, ambitious film director, lauded in your homeland and feted elsewhere for your movies. You can choose your projects. Producers throw money at you and don’t interfere with your work. You have final cut. You’re well paid. You lead a privileged life. You are married to a beautiful actress, who is your leading lady.

Suddenly: a political sea change. Ruthless men seize power. The Minister of Propaganda calls you in. He wants you to direct a film and use your wife and many another of your country’s famous actors in the cast so that the film will draw a large audience. He promises you a plentiful budget.

You read the script. It’s scurrilous propaganda that denigrates and villifies the government’s so-called enemies. Almost certainly, this film will inflame your countrymen against these perceived foes; many may die as a result. You can’t flee; you’re too famous, and they’d never willingly let you out. Don’t make the film and you might never work again; in fact, you might be killed and your family with you.

With some tweaks, this was the dilemma that faced Veit Harlan, a renowned German director of the 1930s. The Minister of Propaganda was Joseph Goebbels. The script he gave to Harlan in 1938 was anti-Semitic shit entitled Jew Suss (Suss the Jew). Harlan made the picture. It was a hit.

He would come to rue his decision, perhaps not so much for the film itself but for the repercussions that followed the Nazi defeat. He was twice tried, twice acquitted for contributing to the holocaust by directing Jew Suss. That wasn’t the end of it. The court of public opinion denounced him. After the war, he couldn’t find work; when he did, he had to direct under pseudonyms for a number of years.

This documentary about Harlan employs the customary mix of period photographs and movie footage, and talking heads, to examine Harlan’s case. Part of what makes the film unique is that the talking heads are mostly not pundits and historians proffering distanced or academic opinions. Harlan had five children by two wives. His kids, now elderly, and his grandchildren, mostly young women in their twenties, were filmed at length. Their responses manifest divided feelings about his actions and about being related to him by blood.

Harlan claimed he was forced to make Jew Suss and denied that he understood the possible deadly consequences. His apologists claim that he made the film well because he was a true artist and could not make a movie any other way. Some family members believe this. Some reject these avowals and say he knew what he was doing, he was responsible for the deaths of many Jews, and his crime was inflected by never confessing he had erred grievously in accepting Goebbels’s and Hitler’s commission. This division in the family—and some who speak are conflicted within themselves about Harlan’s guilt—lets us see how problematic, complex, and emotional the question of his culpability is.

So which way Harlan? Dupe under duress with no real clue about what he was doing? Skilled filmmaker who morphed into a stinking Nazi propagandist with buckets of blood on his hands? Somewhere in between? Have a look at this engrossing piece of work, a significant contribution to the cinema of fascism and the holocaust, and decide for yourself.

Written by: Neil Flowers, February 19th 2011

White Material

mandy — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Directed by Claire Denis

Why Not Productions

The title of this grave work derives from Black African slang for Whites and for the objects Whites own, e.g., a gold cigarette lighter (an important symbolic prop in the film). Maria Vial (Isabelle Huppert) is the main white material here, a middle-aged woman trapped by the colonial past and present civil war in an unnamed African country.

Maria married into the Vial coffee plantation founded by her ex-father-in-law, Henri (Michel Subor). Her former husband, André Vial (Christophe Lambert), divorced Maria to marry a young Black woman, Lucie (Adèle Ado). Maria stayed on with her son—a slacker who transforms into a shotgun-toting skinhead—and she is now the farm’s major domo. She remains in Africa because she loves the country, knows the plantation work, and can’t go home. The family is outlawed in France, for reasons never made clear.

The crisis that propels the plot and radically changes Maria’s life and everyone’s life around her is that civil insurrection. The Vial farm lies in the path of an advancing rebel vanguard that will expropriate White-owned property and kill the Europeans. The Vials must flee, but Maria won’t. She needs a week to finish the coffee-berry harvest. Complicating her predicament, Maria’s employees, afraid the rebels will kill them for working with Whites, abandon the farm. Undaunted, she hires a ragtag crew desperate enough to work for her. So the race is on. Will the crop be in before the rebels arrive? Will the Vials escape?

Although the context of the narrative—Black/White conflict in Africa with its attendant sufferings, violence, and privileges—could become cliched, White Material never seems so because it avoids ideological simplifications and etches its characters and circumstances mostly in complex shades of grey. Maria is grim but likable; determined and brave, but heedless. She hides the rebels’ leader (Isaach De Bankolé) because he’s wounded and needs help, though the rebels would kill her if they could. We do empathize with Maria; yet for all her pluck and decency you can’t forget that she’s a favoured landowner. In this equation, we likewise empathize with the Blacks.

The film’s complexities extend to the internecine struggle between the country’s opposing indigenous soldiers. The rebel cadre turns out to be composed of children. It’s hard to believe that a bunch of disorganized, ragamuffin orphans could create so much fear. Yet they’re armed to the teeth and ready to kill, which one girl does in a powerful, frightening moment. For their part, the government troops seem to be saviours, a force for order, but their ruthlessness becomes more repellent than the children’s.

The film’s editing sometimes creates confusion because it’s not always immediately obvious from scene-to-scene where the narrative line is being picked up. This aesthetic device works because it reflects the gathering disturbance of Maria’s mental balance. The intercutting of past and present can make it difficult to grasp the temporal context and sequencing, thus also abetting the sense of dislocation (hint: a pink dress is the Ariadne’s thread). The washed-out, sun-baked cinematography matches the countryside.

Though all the actors in White Material acquit themselves well, including the non-professionals, the film depends on Huppert’s lead performance. She has starred in more than fifty movies, in English and French (she’s fluently bilingual). Now, like Meryl Streep, she is of a certain age, and like Meryl she never lacks for new projects. Lucky for us. In this film, she has a lot to do: It’s instructive to watch her work; she’s absolutely convincing as a woman with too much courage for her own good, a staunch soul who can’t be cowed but who is nonetheless lost.

Written by: Neil Flowers, January 21st 2011

Dear Pyongyang

mandy — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Directed by Yonghi Yang

Typecast Releasing

Yonghi Yang and her parents are Zainichi, meaning a Korean who lives in Japan. During the division of Korea in 1948 and the war that followed, the Zainichi took sides just as those who dwelled on the peninsula did. Yang’s parents had never been to North Korea, but were so enamoured of communism and the country that in 1971 Yang's father sent his three teenage sons to live in Pyongyang, the capital, as part of the Zainichi “Return Project.” This emigration occurred between the 1950s and 1970s when “Returnees” hoped for a better life in the “fatherland.” This better life never materialized, yet Returnees were forbidden to go back to Japan.

What Yang’s father's decision regarding his sons meant and still means to the family, and how her father now feels about his decision, form the core of this remarkable documentary (much of it shot in first-person POV, a rare occurrence in cinema). Yang interviews her septuagenarian father several times in homey circumstances. He jokes, laughs, sings, banters with his daughter, and gracefully accepts being made fun of. Yang teases out superbly this non-ideological side of her father. His decision about his sons was appalling—frightening in its implications of how political ideals distort the mind. Yet he’s likable and so loves his wife, daughter, sons, and grandkids that it’s almost possible to forgive the tragic mistake he made that his sons live out to this day.

An important thread of the story is Yang’s fortune compared to her brothers’. She was the youngest child, and only daughter, and so remained in Japan where she listened to the Beatles, took up videography, and decided that she had the right to choose her own career. By contrast, the brothers and their families lived in the pinched, highly controlled, and stagnant environment of Pyongyang. Footage that Yang shot as a schoolgirl when she visited her brothers several times over the years is deftly incorporated into the present-day journey to Pyongyang of her and her parents, and plays a crucial role in this contrast.

I won’t reveal the outcome of the narrative, but suffice it to say that Yang’s father's love for his daughter doesn’t fail when she needs an important answer from him. Criticisms? Well, toward the end, Yang’s camera shoved in her father’s helpless face shades into a passive-aggressive assault.

The film is DIY to the max, so its technical aspects can be roughhewn. Yang apparently shot the present-day footage on a consumer-quality digicam. The limitations of this kind of equipment and shooting do crop up. Sometimes the image is overexposed or underexposed. Occasionally the camera work is deliriously shaky. Sometimes the dialogue is not synched properly, and sometimes it’s obscured, for example, by wrapping paper being scrunched because the mic isn’t well placed.

Yet Dear Pyongyang—a sad and ironic title—tells so compelling a family tale with so many political ramifications that its production flaws don’t matter a whit. This “little” film has a big mind and heart. Though it often seems as if it were made for six dollars—all right, make it ten—it’s worth a dozen megabuck Hollywood blockbusters.

Written by: Neil Flowers, November 26th 2010

Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Elyssa East

Free Press

"Anybody that’s ever lived on earth knows that the earth is the geography of our being." - Charles Olson

Dogtown is a rocky 3,000-acre swath occupying the interior centre of Cape Ann Peninsula in the northeast corner of Massachusetts. Gloucester, renowned as a fishing village, is located on Cape Ann (the fishermen of The Perfect Storm worked out of Gloucester). British colonists cut down trees and built homes on the peninsula in an area known as the Commons Settlement. Logging subsequently became important to the colony’s survival. Additional clearing by herds of voracious cattle denuded the cape, but by the late eighteenth century the population had abandoned the Commons and moved to the coastal reaches. Trees and bushes returned. The interior of Cape Ann has been a wilderness ever since—not wilderness comparable to northern Canada or the Grand Tetons, but wild enough for a place only twenty-five miles from Boston. This tract, including the Commons, came to be called Dogtown; in part due to packs of dogs that ran free there, in part because it attracted squatters on the downside of the socioeconomic scale.

Elyssa East, author of this intelligent book, discovered Dogtown in the 1990s when she was studying art history. A last-ditch attempt to complete an assignment led her to Marsden Hartley, the important—if little known—American Modernist painter. Hartley, who was gay, lonely, and suicidal, stumbled onto Dogtown, painted his best landscapes there, and consequently experienced a spiritual renaissance. East, too, was feeling a loss of the “hopeful sense of discovery and wonder.” She went to Dogtown to see if she could find her own renewal. Dogtown is the result of her ten-year search.

What she discovered was a region with an extraordinary, schizophrenic spirit of place. Just as Hartley had painted there, the renowned postmodern poet Charles Olson had employed Dogtown creatively in his signature work, The Maximus Poems. Other artists, and many a regular citizen, found there a life-affirming inspiration. Others thought it a wasteland, a haunted, foreboding place to be avoided. Some found madness and tragedy.

In 1984, Anne Natti, a teacher, had been brutally murdered in Dogtown. She was walking her dog when attacked from behind, her skull fractured by a forty-pound rock. The assailant stripped her, but did not rape her. He hid her still-alive body in a copse, stuffing her face into the muddy ground. She died slowly and horribly. The murderer was a Gloucester boy with a previous conviction for exposing himself. Cape Anners took him to be strange, but never a potential killer.

Dogtown has many good portraits of locals, people whom East interviewed. It is interestingly structured, alternating chapters from the remote past with an account of Anne Natti’s murder, the investigation, and the trial, all of it interwoven with East’s explorations of Dogtown’s geography and her inner quest. This varied content makes for a rich book, although the murder at its centre, even flatly and forensically narrated, makes for harrowing reading.

East has her facts mostly in order, and she is enlightening on certain aspects of colonial history, deploying her woman’s awareness for a different look at the Revolutionary War—so storied in American myth, yet which left behind many sorrowful, unsung widows forced to fend for themselves. In a work so replete in fact, errors are nearly inevitable: East calls Robert Duncan a novelist, but he was a poet, and although William Carlos Williams, arguably the greatest twentieth-century American poet, was invited to teach at Black Mountain College, he never did. The book could also use more maps; the lone one in the book is not nearly adequate for the text. A photo section would have been a worthy addition, too. These are small-time caveats. In all, East has produced a fine book—her debut—and of noteworthy consequence.

Written by: Neil Flowers, March 25th 2010

From Paris With Love

admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 09:18:00 +0000

Directed by Pierre Morel

Lionsgate

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent — Isaac Asimov

Luc Besson is credited with the “story” for this violent comic book of a thriller that is an insult to Paris. Years ago, Besson wrote Le Dernier Combat and The Fifth Element, flicks that are still worth seeing. He either wrote From Paris With Love in one second on the back of a postage stamp, is imaginatively bankrupt, or really needs the money. (All three perhaps?) Here’s the so-called story.

James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), personal assistant to the American ambassador in Paris, dabbles in tame black ops, such as clandestinely swapping license plates. One day, Charlie Wax (John Travolta, gun in one hand, ham in the other) arrives from the States for some extra-special ops, and Reece gets to be his partner. You can tell Wax is a badass because he’s built like a wrestler, has a bald head and black goatee, and cusses out French Customs. Sure enough, Wax is not in Gay Paree two minutes before he annihilates a Chinese restaurant, walks off with a vase full of cocaine, punches out six gnarly Asians at once, and announces plot points (how postmodern!). He proceeds to liquidate Paki terrorists. Yes, “Paki,” because that's how Wax talks, spouting racist jive that we’re apparently supposed to think is jocular because, you know, it’s Travolta, and he can so do glib-cutesypoo-charming-funny while mowing down foreign baddies. That’s acting for you. Hah-hah.

Reese, downright priggish on mayhem and slaughter, reproves Wax’s methods. Not to worry. He is bound to come-on-over to righteous American slo-mo killing. What happens, see, is that Reece gets blood on his face from an offed terrorist and then observes himself in a mirror. (Get it?! He sees himself baptized in blood!) Consequently, he begins to male bond with Wax. In the end, Reece proves he is a pistol-packing man—just like Wax has taught him to be—so much an hombre, in fact, that he can shoot his girlfriend and strut off to play chess with Wax. Yup, that's Reece’s character arc: He changes from being reticent about killing to wholeheartedly embracing it.

Admittedly, the fight and slow motion sequences are crisply edited, but the narrative is just one set piece after another of shoot kill, shoot kill, kill kill kill. That’s why the film exists. The many males and couple of females gunned down are nearly all swarthy or almond-eyed types. Beaucoup spurting blood squibs interspersed with jokes accompany les massacres. Thus the rancidity of the violent, big-American-star, buddy film is on display once again.

You will notice I’m not disposed to speak well of From Paris With Love. Alas, honesty compels me to note that near the end of the second act there is a car chase. From The Keystone Cops to Bullitt and beyond, car chases are a worthy subset of film genres. In this “how-did-they-do-that?” chase, Travolta/Wax, clutching a bazooka, hangs out the side window of a monster silver Audi doing about 150mph (flagrantly effective product placement). Wax needs a clear bead on a car in front so he can blow it to smithereens. The road is a European super highway, so the other cars all around are zipping right along, too. The pursuit swerves between comical and death defying. Whichever, it’s a knuckle-biting gas and up there with the best car chases ever on film.

But is a great car chase a good enough reason to watch a stupid, ugly film that makes yet another spectacle of killing people? Perhaps Luc Besson and everyone associated with this dross may still be perceptive enough to discern a rhetorical question when they encounter one.

Written by: Neil Flowers, February 17th 2010

44 Inch Chest

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Directed by Malcolm Venville

Image Entertainment

Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) is a pot-bellied British gangster happily married to Liz, his wife of twenty-one years (Joanne Whalley). The problem is she’s not happily married to him. When Liz tells Colin she’s leaving him for a lover, he slides from incredulity to rage. Marital delusions wrecked, he resorts to gangster methodology. He assaults his wife (mostly off-screen) to get the lothario’s name—a studly French waiter (Melvil Poupaud).

Colin has a four-man crew with whom he toils at their underworld trade. Meredith (Ian McShane), Archie (Tom Wilkinson), Mal (Stephen Dillane), and Old Man Peanut (John Hurt) comprise the crew. The five men kidnap Liz’s lover and spirit him blindfolded to an abandoned building in some skanky corner of London. After severely beating the Frenchman (also off-screen), the men stuff him in an armoire (hence the film’s title).

As night passes in this lonely place, the crew decries Liz’s infidelity and assuages Colin’s wounded ego. Much of their embittered talk insists on the holiness of marriage and the treason of adultery. As they prattle on, the film feels somewhat like a bizarre, kvetching men’s group. This lends a comic edge to the proceedings—despite the kidnapping, hallucinatory episodes interspersed with realist scenes, and threat of imminent murder.

44 Inch Chest has received positive notices. Reviewers have praised its sharp, plentiful dialogue (in strong British accents), and fine acting. The script is by the duo who penned Sexy Beast, a superior gangster film from ten years back in which Winstone also starred and Ben Kingsley played the scary villain. The dialogue and acting in this new film are, indeed, superb; however, the ending has been described as weak, limp, and anti-climactic.

I beg to differ with this judgment on the last ten minutes of the film. On the surface, 44 Inch Chest seems to be a revenge narrative and gangster piece—both of which demand a boffo finale—and this doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because whatever its genre tendencies, this movie is not about underworld types locked in mortal combat. Rather, 44 Inch Chest is an exposé of misogyny, homophobia, and machismo. This makes the film a rara avis in the history of cinema.

Colin and his crew make much of marriage and the sacred bonds between men and women. They ground their intent to murder Liz’s lover in his betrayal of marriage and the sentiments upon which marriage is founded. As the film progresses, though, we discover that only Colin and Old Man Peanut, who has a history of spousal abuse, are married. Archie lives with his mother, Meredith is a gay man who prefers emotionless sex, and Mal would like to bed Liz—the very reason the waiter may be killed. All the crew betray themselves as violent hypocrites and sanctimonious egocentrics.

In Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence set about to liberate the c-word by using it in a context of love and sensuality (the c-word derives from cunnus, Latin for “nest,” a lovely etymology). These gangsters employ the c-word to describe each other and other men. The epithet occurs so many times, and always in a degrading and violent way, that its effect and meaning grows and compounds. While spouting their clichés about love and marriage, these men actually seem to hate vaginas and the women attached to them.

The triumph of 44 Inch Chest lies in its revealing of the misogyny and machismo that can lie beneath the surface of men’s attitudes. Apart from its considerable artistic triumphs, the film deserves to be seen for this reason alone. As to that ending, it’s perfect: surprisingly compassionate considering all that has gone before and optimistic about the ability of humans to change.

Written by: Neil Flowers, January 27th 2010

Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:33:00 +0000

By Steve Fox, Paul Armentano Mason Tvert

Chelsea Green Publishing

Cutting to the chase: The three authors of Marijuana is Safer—all active politically in pro-marijuana organizations—argue in favour of a regulated system for the distribution and sale of marijuana in America to allow its responsible use by adults. The evidence they accumulate to support their position is based on health, logic, science, and money.

A couple of chapters sum up the history of how, after U.S. alcohol prohibition ended (1933), the government demonized and racialized weed through anti-pot propaganda that distorted and exaggerated marijuana’s dangers. Reefer Madness (1936) is the best-known example of this propaganda, but dissing reefer was everywhere in the era’s media. Weed was the devil. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the first anti-pot bill, a bill that the American Medical Association, for goodness sake, spoke against.

In the sixties, challenges to demonizing pot occurred en masse when longhairs puffed joints openly. In 1972, a U.S. Congressional report concluded “there is little proven danger of physical or psychological harm from the experimental or intermittent use of the natural preparations of cannabis.” Thirty years later, a Canadian Senate report (2002) came to the same conclusions and recommended pot’s legalization. President Richard Nixon quashed the U.S. report; the Canadian report was ignored when Stephen Harper and his minority Conservatives assumed power in Canada.

Despite legal proscription and the risks that go with it, millions of people smoke pot. Millions more have tried. Yet you can still go to jail and have your life ruined by current pot laws. Marijuana is Safer points out in its rational way that this is a waste of billions of taxpayers’ dollars. The flip side is if weed were legalized, licensed, and taxed, billions would flow into government coffers rather than out.

Additional reasons the book marshals in marijuana’s favour are equally compelling. Experience has taught the pro-weed movement that addressing pot vs. alcohol health issues changes minds re: legalization. So pro-marijuana groups now emphasize health factors. Every year in the U.S 12,000 people die from alcohol-related illnesses; 35,000 die in drunk-driving accidents. Thousands upon thousands more are physically or sexually abused by drunken assailants. Three hundred people a year in the U.S. die from alcohol overdose. Apart from the human tragedy, it takes billions to finance the hospitals and courts this booze-created mess needs.

Marijuana, however, tends to make people peaceful; violent behaviour is hardly associated with its use. And no one dies from a marijuana overdose. Alcohol affects the lower brain stem, which regulates automatic functions. Drink too much alcohol and you could stop breathing. Or suffocate in your vomit during a blackout. Weed effects upper brain functions. Smoke too much and the worst that’s likely to happen is you’ll eat a whole key lime pie by yourself and fall asleep watching 2001: A Space Odyssey again.

Beer, wine, and hard liquor manufacturers have a huge stake in the legal status quo. The National Beer Wholesalers Association has a lobbyist in every state. Alcohol invests a billion dollars a year in advertising. Should marijuana play on a level field with alcohol, the booze industry could be very hard hit financially as recreational users shift to the safer alternative. Do those lawmakers who take alcohol industry money support the current draconian ganja laws because Big Booze money pays them to vote that way?

It’s a good question. This book faces it squarely. As it does other questions in the pot/alcohol debate, including use of pot by minors, who shouldn’t smoke pot, possibly salutary effect on U.S.-Mexican border drug wars if Mary Jane is legalized, health dangers of cannabis, and how weed could be regulated.

So stop bogarting that joint, my friend, and get loquacious with your amigos about this calm, well written and researched tome on why adult humans everywhere should be able to spark up responsibly, if they so choose, without fear of legal consequences.

Written by: Neil Flowers, January 5th 2010

Western

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:01:00 +0000

By Christine Montalbetti, Betsy Wing

Dalkey Archive Press

Nothing is so perfectly amusing as a total change of ideas.
- Laurence Sterne

Anybody that doesn't want to get killed best clear on out the back.
- William Munny (Clint Eastwood), Unforgiven

Christine Montalbetti is the best shot in town. She'll slay you in the street at high noon. So if tender, easily digestible reads are your favorite, best clear on out the back. Jane Austen or Suzie Ormond, Western ain’t. However, if what gets your blood going is a hard gallop across open space with terrain so changeable you could get thrown if you don’t pay strict attention, well, then Western is your mount.

The author of Western is French, a literary critic and theorist, and teaches French literature at the University of Paris. Western was—you’ll need a slug of rotgut whiskey to get this down—written in French. (The translation, by Betsy Wing, corrals the novel superbly in English.) Western is, therefore, nothing like an oater scribed by Louis L'Amour. Well, maybe not nothing.

There are genre tropes in Western. For example: a big sky, horses, tumbleweed, a ranch, a street brawl, and a town, called postmodernly enough, Transition City. Imagine these tropes filtered through phenomenology, Roland Barthes, Proust, Laurence Sterne, Jacques Tati, Lucille Ball, and god knows who or what else. The result is that Montalbetti uses and abuses all these tropes pretty much as she does with one cowboy, name of Dirk, who is so laconic it takes him three pages to say nothing. This expansiveness means Western upends what is a terse action genre and becomes hilariously, verbosely literate while making profound observations and asides. Western, therefore, has huge fun decimating its genre, honouring it, while being amazingly intellectually satisfying and wise.

The novel also takes a postmodern tack in narrative voice. It employs a first person narrator, a “writer” who speaks directly to “you”, as though we, the reader, were walking beside her as she creates the action and characters. At times, she fades off into a third person omniscient, only to pop up again as "I" just when you’ve forgotten there was a first-person narrator.

Many sentences in Western roll, twist, divagate, navigate, hesitate, stumble, detour, and come back on themselves for a page and more. Thank goodness, though some readers may be tempted to throw the book at the wall. Go ahead. You’ll be picking it up in a minute eager to see if the narrative will eventually exit that anthropomorphic ant world you’ve suddenly been dragged into with its hexapod characters’ imaginings—though just a sentence ago another cowboy was rocking on the porch waiting for sunrise. Hexapod characters’ imaginings? Yup.

Summing up this book is like trying to sum up life. Instead of trying, here’s an excerpt to give you some idea of the action-adventure you’re in for in Western. Slow down. Savour. This tiny, defiant memory, which distinguishes itself so clearly from the heap of fragile, scarcely sustained subjects briefly popping up in our man’s mind only to disintegrate immediately (those particular subjects would be just as hard for me to catch, in order to show you, as chasing butterflies with a net held out in front of me—picture it—while tripping over lumps of earth pushed up by moles; likely to lose my Lepidoptera if I start paying attention to the ground I’m walking over, but unable to catch anything as I’m falling all over the place), this thought, more vigorous than the others, no longer forming a single long wave along with them, driving its roller onto the beach, this thought, a sturdy residue rather than foam, though still, well, how shall I put it… Me, I put it like this: tour de force.

Written by: Neil Flowers, November 26th 2009

The Box

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:55:00 +0000

Directed by Richard Kelly

Darko Entertainment

Norma (Cameron Diaz) and Arthur (James Marsden) receive a small box with a red button on top delivered by a mysterious man (Frank Langella) with half the left side of his face missing (gruesome, courtesy of CGI). It’s a Faustian deal. Press button and receive a million bucks. The catch: Someone unknown to you dies.

Here’s a good thing about The Box: The special effects water and its climax are très cool. Would that the rest of the flick were as compelling.

The melodramatic plot of nosebleeds, the afterlife, lightning, zomboids, Mars hokum, and the CIA borders on incoherent. Certain plot points in The Box are so problematic, silly, or contrived that you are lurched outside the tale. You will laugh, or else scratch your head and think, “Huh, what?" You will also wonder why you should empathize with the principal characters—who have good jobs and a nice home—when they would bump off a stranger in order to bridge a rough financial patch and be even more comfy in the future than they already are. Richard Kelly, the director and screenwriter, seems to have forgotten that—unless you’re Brecht and consciously demolishing the fourth wall—such maladroit lurchings shatter the willing suspension of disbelief.

Then there's the pacing—mostly glacial—and not interestingly glacial as in an Andrei Tarkovsky or Terrence Malick film, just leaden. Then there’s the dialogue. Every neophyte drama student knows that exposition creates backstory. The trick with exposition is to bury it in dialogue so astutely crafted that an audience is not aware that it's absorbing past facts crucial to an understanding of the present story. Exposition in The Box is often obvious and crudely dispensed (and there’s lots of it in an attempt to make the opaque plot transparent).

The film’s faults might be forgiven if it lived up to the raison d'être of its genre. The Box is supposed to be a supernatural/sci-fi thriller wrapped around a morality tale. Thrillers must have thrills. I don’t know about you, but my indispensable criterion for thriller thrills is whether the suspense is so fraught that my skin crawls and I’m perched on my seat’s edge. Attendant to this crawling and perching, I want to flee the theatre because I can’t stand one more second of apprehension. Yet I can’t leave. I am riveted to my cushion. The Box riveted me to my cushion twice. The several times I wanted to leave the theatre were occasioned by boredom.

Of many wasted efforts in The Box, Cameron Diaz is the most misused. Diaz is a game comedienne; she can also deglamourize and disappear in a part not seemingly meant for her—as she proved, respectively, in The Mask and Being John Malkovich. One automatically thinks of her as beautiful in the tall, blond manner. In The Box, sometimes she does appear lovely, but sometimes her face betrays her typecasting and seems close to ugly. Such a complex look is fruitful for an actress because she can use it to embody all the hope, love, joy, disappointment, sadness, and tragedy life brings. Her face sets Diaz apart from, say, Jennifer Aniston, who is merely pretty and—so far—only middling good at her craft.

Furthermore, Diaz has aged beyond being even a youngish romantic comedy lead. In The Box, she’s the mother of a pre-pubescent son. This aging is her and our blessing. It would be a marvel to see her on stage as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She deserves, at least, a complex film role that struts her stuff as an actor capable of the most profound incarnations of multiple truths that drama can provide. The Box, however, is so vacuous that she has nothing worth playing with or for, though now and again you can see in her performance what might await. Let us hope she gets a great part soon, so she can triumphantly mark her development for all of us to witness. Meanwhile, spend your money elsewhere (see Bright Star again!) and hope that Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will be revived so The Box can receive the lampooning it deserves.

Written by: Neil Flowers, November 19th 2009

The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:15:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Harper

“Poor deer,” quoth he, “thou makest a testament/As worldlings do…” - As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1

Oak trees plan ahead. In any given area, in any given year, they produce shrunken acorns by design not disease. Such meagre bounty keeps in check acorn-eating animals. Deprived of autumn calories, many of these animals starve to death come winter. Thus fewer ravenous mouths eat healthy acorns in years following; thus more acorns survive; thus more new oaks sprout and thrive.

In fall 2007, the oaks around Peterborough, New Hampshire, resorted to shrunken acorns. This occurrence would have drastically thinned the local deer population. Enter Liz Thomas, who lives in Peterborough. She helped the deer that inhabit the woods around her family farm by feeding them dried corn every day that winter and into early spring.

The deer were lucky to have a benefactor; so are we to have the resultant book. Thomas is an anthropologist whose working life positions her to observe animals closely. She has worked with wild elephants in Africa. She has written books on dogs and cats. The fields in which she scattered small piles of corn lie outside her farmhouse office windows. This proximity allowed her to watch deer behaviour daily and take notes.

Twenty to twenty-five deer, plus an amazing flock of wild turkeys, showed up to eat the corn. Deer, we learn, divide into families of three or four fauns and yearlings with an older doe as matriarch of each bunch. Bucks, being exceedingly wary, live in deep woods. They show only in rut, when they need space to joust with other males. Thomas named the doe-led families (alpha, beta, delta, tau) and came to recognize and appreciate the individuals in them. We readers do, too.

As well as the deer, Thomas introduces us to a bear with history; a strategizing fungus; a brave elephant whose sad end will make you angry; and the habits and characteristics of numerous wild New Hampshire fauna, including the complex meanings of their scats.

The humans whom the writer encounters during her deer study make for interesting research as well. In one anecdote, remembering that brave elephant, she stares down two determined men, a cop and a neighbour, to prevent them from killing an injured animal. The author strongly disagrees on such killing and on other received wisdom concerning animals. This brings her into conflict not just with individuals but with New Hampshire Fish and Game. Whether humans should be feeding wild animals at all, for example, is a question Thomas faces squarely. Her decision—which is to feed if necessary—is reasoned with great interest. So, too, is her take on the anthropomorphizing of animals and her participation in a deer hunt.

Throughout her narrative, Thomas cites what she calls the Old Way, that time before humans were industrialized, mass produced, and virtualized. That time when we lived close to the real. That time when we could hear and read the communications around us made by many another of Earth’s elements and life forms aside from us. She also cites “Gaia” frequently. Referencing our planet as a single organism cycles us continually to the big picture, even as we witness tiny, local New Hampshire. This cosmic zooming insists on deer, humans, and all living beings as members of one family. Thomas accomplishes this purpose with the eye of a scientist and documentarian, and in poetic prose as clear as a limpid stream in the British Columbia backwoods. Come to think of it, poetry and science have similar methods and goals. Each observes acutely the particular while drawing large lessons. And so it is with this graceful, tough-minded book.

Written by: Neil Flowers, November 3rd 2009

When I Forgot

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:23:00 +0000

By Elina Hirvonen, Douglas Robinson

Tin House Books

This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest. – Clarissa Estes

The protagonist of this short, dense novel is Anna Louhiniitty, a twenty-something Finnish journalist. It’s a slushy April day in Helsinki. Anna sits at a café table. She’s supposed to be transcribing an interview.

On the table sits a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, that famous novel of war, suicide, and society parties. Anna’s lover, Ian, an expatriate American who teaches modernist literature at the local university, has given her the novel. But just as Anna cannot work, she cannot read the book either. Instead, she thinks of Woolf’s demise. Thus Anna spends the day alone gulping coffee and campari and reliving the events of her childhood and adolescence, her dysfunctional family, and Ian’s dysfunctional family. This remembering forms the substance of the novel’s scenes and trajectory.

Elina Hirvonen, author of When I Forgot, is a Finnish TV host, documentary filmmaker, and producer of current affairs programmes. She is also editor-in-chief of a feminist magazine, Tulva (The Flood). This fiction, her first, has become the most successful debut novel ever in Finland. Hirvonen’s writing style is spare and pithy. Her handling of the fractured narrative—temporal discontinuities, flashbacks within flashbacks, brief letters, imaginings, and other voices telling their stories—is skillful. The consequence of this style is that the reader, like Anna, must work to assemble the pieces from the past in order to understand the present.

That past has its redemptive moments, but is generally not a happy one. Anna’s wan mother is given to hectoring her only daughter. Her father, a minister, has beaten his son, Joona—until Joona grows enough to retaliate. Anna’s grandfather has been ruined by his soldiering in WWII, just as Ian’s father is from participating in the Vietnam holocaust. (Strong anti-war sentiments pervade the novel.) Ian’s mother becomes a basket case until she becomes a Republican (same thing in different guise?). Ian is plagued by 9/11 because he was living in New York when the planes hit the towers. Anna has scars on her wrists. This overlapping of themes and lives gives the novel great resonance. Traumatic experience and suffering, Hirvonen suggests, may seem different in particulars, but is universal in its visitation and effects upon us all.

This brief sketch could make When I Forgot appear to be yet another examination of the depressif realities of northern peoples (the literatures of Canada and Russia, for example, are replete with downbeat narratives). As a child, Anna prays to God; as an adult, she imagines Hollywood endings; both strategies prove fatuous. Yet the spring season, which is the present tense in this novel, hints that all will not be lost in Helsinki.

Anna’s childhood bond with Joona has been crucial; she has also been twisted by it. His mounting insanity drives her to the brink, too. Meeting Ian and falling in love with him helps Anna to break free from Joona and from her parents. Ian is no paradigm of mental health himself; however, the lovers’ connection ultimately directs them from their pasts and allows them to journey together renewed. Does this sound simplistic or romantic? Anna and Ian overcome so much personal detritus that their hard-won victory seems convincing enough. In this way, Anna’s story is an honouring of Mrs. Dalloway and its author—via themes and method—and a rebuff. Take those rocks from your pockets, Virginia. Happiness lives though it’s a tough go to get there.

In sum, when was the last time you read an excellent Finnish novel? Never, right? Well here’s your chance, and well worth the read it is. For this we have Tin House Books to praise. This little publishing concern up in Oregon, like Dalkey Archive in Illinois, is keeping the faith by printing interesting, somewhat experimental fiction that isn’t remotely like Dan Brown's or any other mega-seller like him. Yippee!

Written by: Neil Flowers, October 9th 2009

Garden Anywhere: How to Grow Gorgeous Container Gardens, Herb Gardens, and More—Without Spending a Fortune

admin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:05:00 +0000

By Alys Fowler

Chronicle Books

Gardens are a form of autobiography. - Sydney Eddison

Alys Fowler is British. Her book, The Thrifty Gardener, has been a hit in England. Garden Anywhere, the re-titled North American version, deserves the same success in Canada and the U.S. as it has across the pond.

Fowler started gardening as a teenager. Now roughly 30, she goes against the grain of British gardening—or so it seems. Her sartorial look—given to shades, plimsolls without socks, and a print shift that a First Nations artist might have designed—is somewhat neo-hippie. A shot or two of her dumpster diving for salvage to fashion into, say, a cold frame—a handiwork at which she demonstrates her grace and mastery of the power drill—captures her method and manner. This is very distant from Better Homes and Gardens.

As unorthodox as Fowler might seem, she’s no Sunday putterer. Trained at the Royal Horticultural Society, The New York Botanical Gardens, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, she’s earned her gardening rep. Currently, she’s head gardener for the BBC’s TV programme Gardener’s World. That’s a cornucopia of gardening bona fides.

Garden Anywhere therefore contains ace gardening knowledge, such as “Knowing your light conditions is half the battle,” and “The single key to a stylish garden is love—it’s that simple.” Other information and advice abound, from dealing with pests (organically!) to hand and power tools to building a worm box to surviving the garden centre (“never spend money where it’s not needed”) to pruning and composting. One of my favourite tips, because of its sheer joie de vivre, is to “avoid dull municipal planting” and instead “plant bedding annuals in great masses and allow them to run riot”. Her advice on sowing drifts of bulbs shares the same spirit.

However unconventional she may seem on first glance, this spirit places Fowler in the tradition of British horticulture, with its roots in early-modern Romantic thought, and in American practice of the period, which strongly influenced British gardeners. The result is tend the garden, sure, but let it grow thither and yon, too, as its vegetal imagination shapes it. This view is contrary to the controlled French outlook, monumentalized at Versailles, wherein reason and order are the objects of verdant desire. I confess to a general Francophilia (movies, paintings, street demonstrations). Yet when it comes to gardens, the British way, which encourages the surprising and unpredictable, is, IMO, the superior path.

Fowler’s persona, prose style, and content are all a serious delight. Plus the book is au courant _in its contribution to the slow food movement. This makes _Garden Anywhere of great use and pleasure and puts its author right up there with such British heroines as Jane Austen and Vanessa Redgrave. In addition, the book is creatively designed by Carl Hodson. Its pages are variously intermingled pastel colours: olive green, pink, lavender, blue—just like a garden. The illustrations by Aaron Blecher are friendly. The many photographs by Simon Wheeler serve to illustrate the text while often being artistic, notably a helicopter shot of Fowler hard at work and nearly lost in her garden.

Is there a shortfall to this book? If you live in dry conditions and need to xeriscape, that genre isn’t covered. Fowler’s British, after all, and has gardened there and in New York. Other than this desert lacuna, Garden Anywhere is as chockablock as anyone could expect. If you need one gardening reference, or if you have many, this excellent book belongs on your shelf—or rather, in your soil-encrusted hands while you ponder whether to plant bush beans or pole beans in that wedge of dirt over in the corner near the forget-me-nots beside the wild rose behind the chard.

Written by: Neil Flowers, September 26th 2009