Bad language, bad glory, bad memory, bad movie

Based on Marcus Luttrell’s eponymous memoir, this recreation of 2005’s failed Operation Red Wings, in which Navy SEALs got stuck on an Afghan mountain while attempting to capture or kill Taliban leader Ahmad Shah, is itself a failed attempt to honour those men who died or nearly died on said mountain. The closing montage displaying photos of Red Wings’ (exclusively American) casualties is immensely moving. The problem is the preceding two hours, which begin like a recruitment video, build up to the war movie equivalent of torture porn, and end with an oversimplified resolution that’s willfully oblivious to any larger context.

During the opening teaser, Lutrell (Mark Wahlberg) explains in voice-over that “there is a storm inside” SEALs, “a burning, a river, a drive, an unrelenting desire,” and a lot of other stuff. Once the shit hits the fan, most of what’s spoken in Lone Survivor varies between “Goddamn motherfuckers,” “Fuck you,” “Ow, fuck,” “Fuckin’ fuck,” “Fucker,” “Fuck,” and “Fuuuuuck!” Carnage, chaos and imminent death will stifle the poet in any of us, but such expletive-laden dialogue seems designed foremost as a way of bluntly heightening the rat-a-tat and crunch of bones, which seem to be the key point of interest for director Peter Berg and his collaborators, who strain verisimilitude not only by reportedly grossly exaggerating the number of Taliban involved in the film’s central firefight, but also by hurling our already shot-up heroes down the mountain at high speed, smashing their torsos and skulls into pointy rocks, and having them continue to walk, talk and fight afterward.

Reverence for the dead shouldn’t make this film bulletproof—it should make us that much more concerned with truth and consequence. This is a serious movie, ostensibly dealing with serious questions about war, strategy, policy, and ethics. When discussing whether to eliminate or set free a trio of civilians who accidentally blow their cover, among the four SEALs (Wahlberg, Emile Hirsch, Taylor Kitsch and Ben Foster) only Lutrell speaks passionately about the imperative to be humane. Which leaves us with an uneasy feeling since—hardly a spoiler—he’s the only one who lives to tell the tale. And in the moral causality of Lone Survivor he’s rewarded for his humanity, by having his life fearlessly defended by an entire Afghan village—though in the closing voice-over he thanks only his brothers. The issue isn’t about what Lutrell feels or says in moments of trauma or mourning; it’s what’s said by this movie, which has the advantage of time and distance, and the burden of memory. 

                      

"So much of life scares the shit out of me, and it’s reflected in this movie": Joe Carnahan and Frank Grillo on The Grey

A plane crashes in Alaska. The survivors are left to fend against merciless cold, hunger, and unusually hostile wildlife. This is a story of manly men in a manly place, bearded men without women, fire-lit bloody faces sticky with snow, and man-eating wolves. Resourcefulness, persistence and solidarity are their only hope for survival. But survival itself seems unlikely.

After many years of torture-laden horror films that encourage audience delight in their characters’ mortal terror, there’s something refreshingly noble in The Gray’s insistence on depicting the ways in which fear works on the psyche with a certain rugged empathy. It’s a bracing film of fast violence and existential angst, from that initial plane crash to the first wolf attack, from the crossing of a gorge along a flimsy improvised cable to the final alpha-on-alpha showdown.

Filming in Smithers, B.C., director/co-writer Joe Carnahan, finally making good on the promise of his 2002 film Narc, immerses us in the frigid milieu and ramps up tension through the pulling in and out of sound and disorienting shifts between tight and wide shots. Carnahan may prove to be that rare thing in contemporary movies: a devoted genre filmmaker, inventive but not ironic.

Carnahan’s enthusiasm for his work in certainly infectious. I spoke with both he and actor Frank Grillo last week in a Toronto hotel about the film’s themes, their process, and working with Liam Neeson, The Grey’s smartly cast star. Carnahan and Grillo are old friends. They finish each other’s sentences. Honestly, I didn’t have to do much. Most I just sat back and enjoyed the wine they kindly offered.


JB: From the outset The Grey works nicely as a visceral thriller. Then there came a point where I realized that this entire movie is going to be about facing death, preparing for death.

Joe Carnahan: When did that occur to you?

JB: Maybe it was that campfire scene where the guys are huddled round, talking about faith. I thought that if Ingmar Bergman made action films without any women in them they might look something like this.

[Carnahan gets up]

JC: Brother, that’s one of the highest compliments anybody’s ever paid me.

[Knuckle taps all around]

JB: [to Grillo] This also has much to do with the way your character develops. As we get to know these guys we see how each deals with fear differently. And gradually we start to understand that Diaz’s gut response to the terrifying situation he’s in is to act like an asshole.

Frank Grillo: Right. Angry. Very angry. It’s the way that I dealt with fear for a long time. Bluster, you know? As men, these are issues that we deal with on a daily basis. I’ve said this before and people laugh, but it’s tough to be a man in this world. We grow up with that phrase: “Be a man.” My father used to say that to me whenever I was afraid of something. But what does that mean? I’m afraid. But what does that mean? I’m afraid. Who do I tell?

JC: From a very early age we’re meant to stifle that. But you know what? So much of life scares the shit out of me, and it’s reflected in this movie. What these guys are dealing with is real.

FG: Death.

JC: Neeson says it in that campfire scene: “What’s wrong with being afraid? I’m scared shitless.”

FG: And I say to him, “That’s ’cause you’re a punk.” I went and stayed in some prisons in New York to prepare for the movie. I felt like Diaz was a guy who had his own creed, this thing that he lived by. The prison thing, where it’s about respect. If you’re afraid in jail, you’re a punk. And you’re going to get punked. It’s a survival mechanism. That’s all that Diaz is going on. As soon as he’s called on it, as soon as he realizes that these guys are going to save his life, it turned him around.


JB: I haven’t read the source material. How much of this meditation on the fear of death was in the short story?

JC: What was great about the short story was that it was an introduction to what the world could be. The prose style is very punchy, staccato. It took me four and a half years of revisiting it to get where we got with the script. Which was great. There was never a deadline. So time passed and you have this little epiphanies that life brings you and very slowly you find little things you can add. The process was like sculpture. Just working away at it, shaping it.

JB: It’s tempting to place The Grey in the tradition of Howard Hawks, but in Hawks’ films guys don’t really lose their cool. In The Grey just about everybody loses their cool.

JC: It’s more like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, except that the characters are simply clinging to life. But, brother, evoking Hawks in any way with regards to this movie, I mean, put that on the fuckin’ poster!


FG: It’s interesting to consider this in light of this terrible tragedy that just happened with the Mediterranean cruise ship. Not just the captain, but all the officers jumped ship! They were afraid to die. They didn’t care about who was still on the ship. So I’m thinking to myself, Wow, those storybook endings about heroic men—it doesn’t always happen that way.

JC: And it’s not like these guys were stranded in the middle of the North Atlantic. They could see the shore! That’s a level of cowardice that, well, God help me if I ever experience that.

FG: But, you know what? You don’t know. You just don’t know.

JC: But dude, did you hear about this Mark Wahlberg quote?

FG: He said that if he were on the flight from Boston on 9/11 things would have panned out differently, that he would have killed the terrorists and landed the plane safely. It’s that hubris of a guy who’s read too many action movie scripts.

JC: In retrospect we’re all heroic geniuses.

FG: We’re more afraid to be killed than we are to die. Dying doesn’t seem so bad. Being killed is awful.

JC: There’s some part of us that eventually makes peace with the fact that we’re not going to be here forever. To be killed is to have death imposed on you.

FG: And there’s pain involved.

JC: And there’s pain.

JB: But it’s also easier, right? If someone kills you then you don’t have time to come to terms.

JC: Right. You’re not left with your final thoughts. That’s why I wanted to put that first death scene in The Grey, the guy bleeding to death, the one Liam presides over. Because a lot of people are killed in movies, but not a lot of people die.

FG: You’re watching him die.

JC: It’s a moment where a guy shakes loose this mortal coil, and that’s that, man.

FG: In combat, in serious situations like that, friends have to watch other friends die. I thought Badge did a beautiful job of dying, of conveying that, that...

JC: Something just slipping away.

FG: Yeah.

JC: Yeah.

JB: Frank, you were signed on long before production, right?

FG: Joe just called me and said “Don’t take a job in January. I don’t care what your agents say, you’re doing this job.” Which is risky. I’m a working guy, a blue collar actor. But the advance notice afforded me time to work things out very thoroughly. I was a pain in the ass, constantly emailing and calling Joe with ideas.

JC: But also, what are you right now, brother, like, 170?

FG: 165.

JC: He was up to almost 200 pounds. He built himself up, preparing himself for this film. That’s the level of engagement I knew I’d get from Frank.

FG: But I could barely keep up with Liam Neeson. 58 years old, this guy never stopped.

JB: And he looks like a wolf.

JC: He looks like a wolf!

FG: Doesn’t he look like a wolf?


JB: After doing this project do you guys feel a little closer to knowing how to meet your maker gracefully?

JC: I think so, brother. If there’s any kind of pacification that can arise from an experience like this it’s hopefully the presence of mind to believe that whatever you hold in your heart, that’s what’s going to shepherd you through.

FG: I have three sons. I don’t mind dying, but I just want it to be pleasant. I want to know my boys are okay. I don’t want to be taken from the Earth in an instant and not have the time to do it in a way that would be beautiful.

JC: That’s great, brother, because as we sit back and admire this horrific plane crash we just put on screen we both got to get on a fuckin’ plane tomorrow!

[Both laugh]

2010: the year in movies

The classified ad version might go something like this:

DAUGHTER SEEKS BIRTHPARENT; SECRETLY UNEMPLOYED DAD SEEKS JOB; WELL-DRESSED SEXUALLY REPRESSED MOM SEEKS LOVER BUT DOESN’T KNOW IT; OVERPROTECTIVE PATRIARCH SEEKS SEX PARTNERS FOR SEQUESTERED ADULT CHILDREN; BOXER SEEKS GIRLFRIEND TO ASSIST WITH MEDDLING PARENT-MANAGER, CRACKHEAD BROTHER-TRAINER; PSYCHOPATHIC IMPERSONATOR SEEKS BACK-UP DANCERS; AILING FATHER SEEKS MONKEY GHOST OF CHILD, REGULAR GHOST OF WIFE.

Does the fact that the majority of my favourite films of 2010 concern families parting, reuniting, expanding or contracting reflect some renewed tribal impulse brewing deep in our collective cinematic unconscious, or am I just getting sentimental with age?


Truth is I have my reservations about a few of these, particularly with regards to those tricky final acts, you'll spot them when you get to them. But in every case there was something at the heart of the film sufficiently charged with real vivacity, audacity or fascination to merit their inclusion.


Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
The latest from what’s arguably the most playful and provocative new voice to emerge within the last decade opens with fecund visions of errant livestock and fleeting sightings of mysterious jungle-dwelling beasts before crafting a gentle, funny, funky portrait of Thai country life, interrupted one evening by apparitions of loved ones who have either died or been transformed into exactly what you’d get if you crossed a wookiee with a jawa. Using the simplest of screen tricks, this sequence is the most magical thing I saw at the movies last year, though it was nearly matched by some even more oneiric episodes that follow, which include nocturnal spelunking, a slide show about an oppressive future-world without movies, and a catfish hip to cunnilingus. The author’s name is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but he says we can just call him Joe.


The Social Network
You tired yet of discussions about whether or not David Fincher’s bio-pic about Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg “says something about the times we live in”? Me too! I’m still itching for a second viewing to confirm how well it all works once the initial rush has washed off, but in the meantime I’m confident declaring The Social Network an awfully smart, at times exhilarating piece of entertainment, with rich characters, pithy exchanges, and a central performance so shot through with boyish smugness and wildly articulate spite it makes your nerves ache. To call it the 21st century’s Citizen Kane isn’t to equate Fincher with Orson Welles but rather to acknowledge that this film knows something about enterprise, opportunity, ambition, and buckets of money, all wrapped up in an elegant achronological structure.


Dogtooth
Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ very memorable, very strange, and finally very resonant sophomore feature concerns a father and mother who have sequestered their children within the family compound and controlled their education right down to their most basic uses of language—new meanings are invented for common words—their notion of how they’re related to icons of popular culture—the kids believe Frank Sinatra’s their grandpa—and their understanding of perspective and depth—they see planes flying overhead and wish one would fall so they could catch it in their hands. So it’s a comedy, kind of. There’s a stunning interpretive dance sequence improvised to Irene Cara’s ‘Flashdance… What a Feeling.’


Tony Manero
Speaking of dancing... It’s Santiago, Chile, 1978, and there’s blood on the dance floor. Literally. The terrors of life under Pinochet prompt some toward resignation and despair, others toward resistance, and a select few toward the recognition that destiny has granted them tacit permission to act out fantasies both heinous and tawdry-glamorous. Pablo Larraín’s deadpan character study, about a middle-aged guy who lives in a commune yet is chillingly antisocial, who just wants to transform himself into the hero of Saturday Night Fever on local television—at any costs—is also a study in vast, consuming darkness, in how evil proliferates, and in the secret perils of Hollywood disco fantasy.


A Prophet
Jacques Audiard’s The Beat My Heart Skipped remade, of all things, James Toback’s seethingly creepy cult classic Fingers, so you know we’re dealing with an artist ready to follow the most morally fraught criminal figures to the very end of the line. The rough but basically innocent Arab youth imprisoned at the start of A Prophet kills another, seemingly benevolent Arab convict more or less by force. He thereafter spends the rest of this bracingly violent, quietly polemical, often surprising, not un-Scorsese-like crime drama figuring out what that makes him now. The power of Audiard’s vision derives in part from its leaving viewers with the same question, and no simple answer in sight.


Shutter Island
Still more ambiguous is the nature of Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled visit to the Aschecliff Hospital for the Criminally Insane, located on an island in Boston Harbour almost perpetually cloaked in many kinds of fog. He’s ostensibly there to investigate a disappearance, yet he’s increasingly disinclined to trust any of his designated aids. The fabric of reality in Martin Scorsese’s heavily stylized adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel seems as potentially unstable as those DiCaprio encountered just a few months later in Inception, but I have a feeling that time will prove Shutter Island to possess the more enduring mysteries. It already seems more genuinely dreamlike.


The Kids Are All Right
Mark Ruffalo, Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson each gave one of my favourite performances of 2010, and the fact that all these performances occur within the same movie must say something about its director and co-writer, Lisa Cholodenko. Yet this warm, witty, sexy story of a family trying to sort out whose roles are whose and when it’s time to let go is so supple and complicated as it sets up expectations and demolishes presumptions—about parenting, about desire, about gender, about lifestyle choices—that you can’t help but feel like the film falls a little short of it’s goals with what’s finally an oddly conservative, overly tidy finale.


I Am Love
I don’t know that you’d deem the finale of Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love tidy exactly, unless you call sweeping an unholy mountain of dirty dishes off the table to fall crashing ever so operatically onto the floor a method of tidying. A dual-homage to the films of Luchino Visconti and Douglas Sirk, with a little Lady Chatterley thrown in for extra spice, this is nonetheless an exemplary high style melodrama about fleeing wealth and duty for haute cuisine and hot love amongst the birds and bees. Playing the universally admired but under-loved matriarch, Tilda Swinton’s iconic visage seems designed for such total transformation, and John Adams’ thundering music gloriously ushers us through the protracted climax, even after a fairly dopey crisis point.

Carlos

“Weapons,” our titular terrorist seductively tells us, “are an extension of my body.” Revolution turns this guy on—or is it simply the promise of spectacular violence undertaken with whatever sort of justification? Oliver Assayas’ wildly ambitious, action-oriented, 333-minute bio-pic, made for French television, starring the tireless and valiant Venezuelan-born actor Édgar Ramírez, was 2010's marathon matinee, and a fascinating double-study of the abstraction of criminal celebrity and the palpability of a human body trying to merge with a mythical idea of itself.


The Fighter
David O. Russell’s latest may be his most conventional picture, but it’s a knock-out, featuring an unforgettable coven of big-haired sisters, a shrewd understanding of boxing technique, Amy Adams in short-shorts, and yet another sublimely entertaining, ultra-committed performance from Mark Wahlberg, who, in his way, may just be America’s most underappreciated movie star. Yes, Christian Bale’s also very good as the crazy, drug-addled brother to Wahlberg’s aspiring fighter, but I’m a little more drawn to the less technically polished fiery spunk of Wahlberg, Adams, and of course Melissa Leo as the mother you wouldn’t want to face in the ring.


Exit Through the Gift Shop
Legendary mysterious street artist Banksy made a movie about a goofy French guy trying to make a movie about him, and it is the fucking funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. This documentary presumably takes a few liberties with facts on its way to a breezy but sly analysis of how art is commodified and everything gets domesticated sooner or later. But you could do worse than simply watching it for the unfathomably enthusiastic, sublimely inarticulate Thierry Guetta, aka Mr. Brainwash, whose particular artistic limitations will refresh your notion of what “so bad it’s good” means.


Tokyo Sonata
Has cinema ever experienced an about-face quite as successful as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s? He’s helmed some of Japan’s finest horror films of the last 15 years—Séance is especially creepy—but they started to get a little stale, so he tried on a poignant comedy about the strains of contemporary middleclass family life, and it might just be the best thing he’s done. Dad gets downsized, Mom’s taken hostage, one kid joins the US military and the other has to save his lunch money to fund secret piano lessons. As with Kurosawa’s Cure, there’s a contagious disease driving the narrative, but in this case it causes those afflicted to want to start their lives over. Wonderful.

Good cop, bad cop, batshit cop: The Other Guys

Two adrenaline junky celebrity cops dive 20 stories to their senseless deaths for no apparent reason other than the crazed bliss of suicidal recklessness. A punch-up breaks out at a funeral and everyone whispers while beating each other so as not to disturb the grieving guests. A guy gets loaded and eats a priest’s arm. A chopper’s taken out by an onslaught of golf balls. An NYPD captain moonlights at a bed and bath store to put his bisexual son through DJ school. Steve Coogan bribes investigators with tickets to Jersey Boys. These are some of the movie’s highlights, though they could just as easily be enjoyed as stand-alone slapstick shorts. Their being part of a feature film constitutes nothing beyond a convenient framing device.

It must be some kind of genuine praise when I confess that I dunno what to make of cop buddy gutbuster The Other Guys. When we talk about the necessity of approaching movies on their own terms rather than as variations on familiar templates, we typically do so with regards to relatively obscure or “difficult” movies in danger of vanishing into the art house fog, but this same re-negotiating of expectations can be applied to comedies. The Other Guys is a miserable failure at lots of things we typically consider essential. The narrative, for one, which seems to want to be some sort of satire at times, isn’t merely stupid, it’s also inconsistent, incoherent, and flamboyantly lumpy. But throughout film history we can find numerous comedies that work, sometimes beautifully, as nothing more than tautological accumulations of gag-assaults, knowingly absurd situations that are funniest when we realize they’re going absolutely nowhere—the Marx Brothers were at their best when using this tack. Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell get into a childish yet tense verbal sparring match based entirely around how animal versions of themselves could consume each other in a nonsensical food chain. The conversation is so silly, but they just keep at it until it seems utterly exhausted, and keep at it further still, until it’s not just funny all over again but actually funnier than it was to begin with. Like Van Morrison repeating a single lyric into blissful abstraction, these guys beat funny ideas to death so as to raise them from the dead.

The Other Guys was co-scripted and directed by Adam McKay, who helmed the earlier Will Ferrell loser comedies Anchorman, Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. The approach here is similar if perhaps more insane. This is busy, spastic, anxiogenic comedy, so the narrative isn’t really supposed to hold together. Wahlberg, as a humiliated high-strung peacock champing at the bit for some super-cop glory, and Ferrell, as the partner content to stay at his desk and quietly build cases against developers for neglecting to apply for scaffolding permits, do brilliantly funny things with the uneven material by making it all so deadly serious. Though its less recognized than Ferrell’s, Wahlberg has always had a very special gift for comedy—just go back to certain bits of Boogie Nights, the singing especially, or even the way he simply parks a bike in I Heart Huckabees—because he heroically hurls himself headlong into playing stakes rather than jokes. I was in tears at times. But for every well-drawn character there's one that just gets more half-assed with every new appearance—such as Eva Mendes as Ferrell's sketch of a spouse. For every inspired scene there’s another that falls drearily flat. Holding it all together is little more than our patient waiting for the next, hopefully better scene. Still, I’ll take this over a tediously over-manicured, story-edited-into-a-coma comedy any day of the week.

It just ain't Happening: don't look, but the killer's right behind you (and yes, that's sort of a spoiler)

Having made his name—and perhaps exhausted his potential—with The Sixth Sense, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan became the guy known for the big twist, that twist being the inevitable third act reveal that would invariably blow what was arguably an otherwise absorbing, often marvelously creepy movie. As evidenced in Unbreakable and Signs, the follow-ups to his initial breakthrough hit, Shyamalan’s greatest strength by far has been his control of atmosphere and pacing, a remarkable ability to generate disquiet, to develop an almost hushed air brimming with elements of utter normalcy that made the gradual intrusion of deliciously ambiguous threat that much more effective—and the resolution that much more of a let down. Not one of his movies has an ending worth the name.

The big twist in The Happening however happens right at the beginning, when we quickly realize that Shyamalan’s not even going to bother with building up mood at all—not to mention character development—but rather dive right into the terrible conceit driving the picture. (And yes, I mean terrible in every sense of the word.) It’s as if rather than continue to take his cues from Hitchcock, Spielberg or Val Lewton, Shyamalan decided he actually wants to be Larry Cohen, the marvelous maker of outlandish low-budget hystericals like God Told Me To and Q: The Winged Serpent. Or better yet George Romero, whose legendary apocalyptic zombie movies more or less carve out the turf for The Happening’s scrambling trajectory. Problem is, unlike Cohen or Romero, Shyamalan takes himself so goddamned seriously, even when his ideas are so impossibly lame.

It all starts with crowds of New Yorkers suddenly going catatonic in Central Park before suddenly finding the handiest way to off themselves. The suicidal impulse spreads quickly, soon erupting in other cities dotting the Northeast—though, curiously, the phenomenon never crosses over into Canada—and pundits start guessing it must be the work of terrorists with some new biological weapon that reverses our survival instinct. Along with everybody else, high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a veritable cheerleader for the scientific method, grabs his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and tries to escape to Philly, but when their train grinds to a halt in Filbert, the Moores are suddenly put in charge of a friend’s little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez) and must make their way through rural Pennsylvania while trying to figure out just what it is that’s, well, Happening!

Replete with James Newton Howard’s typically overbearing boilerplate score, The Happening is one mercilessly silly movie, which you’d hope would mean it’s also a fun movie, but what fun there is to be had is often had at the expense of the movie’s ostensible integrity. There’s a subplot about commitment anxiety that feels lazily tacked on, with Wahlberg and Deschanel, normally quite charming actors both, making what must be one of the most unconvincing young movie couples in recent memory, though it does arguably allude to Shyamalan’s own inability to commit to making something cohesive. There’s also a big-ass message to be rammed down our throats about environmental decay, yet even on the level of pure propaganda it’d handled clumsily and is devoid of any resonance in the story’s details. Wearing his influences so brazenly on his sleeve anyway, Shyamalan’s a filmmaker who might be best advised to just decide what kind of movie he wants to make—and given his way with exposition, it should probably be a B-movie—and work diligently toward it instead of fighting against it. There are far worse things in this world than a solid genre stylist—and in fact these days there are far too few of them—and if Shyamalan would just apply his talents toward something leaner, meaner and less pretentious he might just have a career yet.