The Informant!: Matt Damon spills the beans, then the rice, and just keeps going

The exclamation point decorating the title of The Informer! gives us a helpful nudge from the get-go that where we’re going is going to be plenty goofy. It’s not a musical, but it is in one sense a hell of a song and dance. As imagined by obscenely productive director Steven Soderbergh and Bourne Ultimatum screenwriter Scott Z. Burns, this filmic realization of investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 nonfiction book of the same name—sans flamboyant punctuation—is less a corporate thriller than it is a punchy comic meditation on greed, compulsion, and manipulation. Mark Whitacre, the agri-business executive who secretly collaborated with the FBI in a campaign against his employers on charges of price fixing back in the mid-1990s, would have made a perfectly fascinating subject for a more conventional sort of white-collar crime movie. But Soderbergh and Burns have gone way out on a limb in terms of tone and narrative focus to render him a figure that’s at once enigmatic and strangely intelligible. They’ve taken some pretty crazy risks, and the risks pay off as terrifically audacious entertainment with a toothy social slant.

A large part of the credit for why this all works so well should go to Matt Damon, who in films like The Departed, The Good Shepherd and the Bourne franchise has nurtured a niche for himself via his remarkable talent for twisting his own boyish charisma into perverse shapes. His Whitacre is a golf-loving, Wal-Mart-clad, mustachioed Midwesterner, an imminently cheerful husband and father of three with a big, ugly suburban house and eight—count ’em—eight cars. Even his tics, such as his habit of constantly adjusting his glasses, feel so utterly normal and trustworthy. He approaches the feds as a guy who just wants to do the right thing, so naïve that he thinks he’ll actually become the company’s new CEO once all the fuss blows over and his current bosses are behind bars. But his innocence is always undercut by his evident intelligence. As he keeps reminding everyone, he is the only guy who knows the science and the business side of things at Archers Daniels Midland. He’s someone capable of big things.

The Informant!’s most winning distinction lies in what we’re able to gather of Whitacre’s private thoughts and obsessions. The use of voice-over is inspired. Rather than function in the past-tense as a way of conveying exposition or foreshadowing, Whitacre’s disembodied voice comes to us as present-tense reportage direct from his easily distracted brain, a series of frequently hilarious digressions into deceitful butterflies, polar bear camouflage, German words, and time-saving techniques, into ideas for TV shows about doubles and story of a man who drops dead upon realizing that the man across from him is wearing a tie with the same pattern—but in reverse. These interruptions are brilliantly timed and only seem like non-sequiturs until you gradually detect a pattern evolve that speaks, however obliquely, to Whitacre’s peculiar pathology, his desire to lead a double life. He’s a strange man, one who needs to talk, and listening to him let loose as the contradictions in his claims accumulate to preposterous degrees is an awful lot of fun.

Corporeal punishment: Jennifer's Body

The body in question belongs to the resident narcissistic teen hottie of Devil’s Kettle, the generic rural American town where a suitably demonic series of events, dreamed up by a writer whose own first name is Spanish for Devil, unfolds. Along with a limpid rock band on tour, lifelong pals Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) are the only survivors of a fire that inexplicably breaks out at the local watering hole, prompting what is surely the most poorly managed evacuation of a one-floor licensed truck stop in movie history, replete with extras running around, flaming, flailing, screaming. But only Needy will make it home that night. Jennifer will be abducted by said rockers in their boogie van—“agents of Satan with really awesome haircuts,” as she’ll come to describe them—and whisked away into the wilds of Devil’s Kettle to endure hardships only gradually revealed. When she returns from her ordeal she’s covered in blood, breaks in to Needy’s house, starts gobbling up mom’s roast chicken without even asking, and lets a massive black barf bomb erupt all over the kitchen floor. I guess it’s the barf that lets us know we’re watching a horror movie.

“Hell is a teenage girl,” declares Needy at the top of her excessively explanatory voice-over, setting the tone of flamboyantly hormonal high school journal-keeping which will prove to dominate Jennifer’s Body, the follow-up to Academy Award-winner Diablo Cody’s screenwriting debut Juno. Like Juno, Jennifer’s Body has a sassy and irreverent sense of humour to help ease us into the angst, but it has none of its predecessor’s modest charms nor its feeling for the ordinary messiness of teenage existence. Jennifer’s Body wants to tap into the thick ambiguities of female bonds, using supernatural conventions, namely telepathy and some sort of Satanic shenanigans, to flush the internal drama out into something heightened, fantastic and immediate. But the film’s teenage monster is only vaguely conceived and engages in no particular mythology. Its central relationship is undeveloped, and its attempts to characterize Needy as the geeky one are laughably reduced to disguising her beauty behind a pair of glasses. Finally, its rendering of adolescent psychosexual trauma is crassly superficial. So it’s no Let the Right One In, no Carrie, no Ginger Snaps. It’s not even Trick or Treat. It feels like a mostly cynical cash-in on the latest teen exploitation trends and Cody’s emerging brand.


More disappointing however is where this film finds director Karyn Kusama, whose feature debut Girlfight was such a knockout nine years ago. Between Girlfight and Jennifer’s Body Kusama’s sole feature credit has been Aeon Flux. (I didn’t see it either.) But it seems like Kusama’s career has gone in roughly the same direction as Girlfight’s star Michelle Rodriguez, who went from coming out of nowhere with a genuinely tough, Oscar-worthy leading performance, to a string of supporting roles as the snarling, more one-dimensionally tough girl in films like The Fast and the Furious, Resident Evil, S.W.A.T. and Battle in Seattle. While it wouldn’t have redeemed her resume any, I kind of wish Rodriguez would have showed up in Kusama’s latest, just to cut to the chase beat the shit out of Jennifer, preferably in the first act.

Just because we're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after Jews: David Mamet's Homicide

A fresh appraisal of David Mamet the filmmaker—as opposed to the playwright, novelist, essayist, or polemicist, which each present a whole other can of worms—prompts one to wonder if, as some seem to think, he really has lost his touch; if he’s honing and deepening his art, as at least his die-hard admirers think; or if in fact he is and has always been an acquired taste, which I suspect is closer to the truth. After finally seeing Homicide (1991), Mamet’s third feature, now available from the Criterion Collection, I’m struck by just how stubbornly adherent to the same approach to narrative and style Mamet’s films have remained. Speaking as one of the few people I know who actually liked the embracing of classical Hollywood artifice and stoic machismo of Redbelt (08), I see this body of work as less varied, or variable, than its often made out to be.

Anyone who knows anything about Mamet knows something about Mametspeak, that deliberately repetitive, fragmented, something wildly cryptic form of verbal exchange that pushes naturalism so far that it becomes abstract and flamboyantly stylized. People don’t actually talk like this, but there isn’t a word spoken in Mamet that isn’t drawn from the eccentricities of real talk. Over the years I’ve found this defining aspect of Mamet’s work less rewarding, at least not as rewarding as other aspects. Though mapped out in big, alternating blocks of silence and often over-heated patter, I’d suggest that Homicide’s real strengths, as with a lot of Mamet, lie more in story and theme, in engrossing complications that finally lead to simple conclusions. Simple, but not stupid. This is a movie about cops and criminals doing what cops and criminals do, about taking sides, about tit-for-tat acts of violence. But then again, maybe it’s not about any of these things. Maybe it’s about the same thing nearly all Mamet stories seem to be about, something to do with how the road to integrity gets narrower and lonelier the further you follow it, to the degree that even those who directed you down the road in the first place turn out to be false allies. It’s a world-view that can seem either bleak or existentially freeing.

Detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna), the protagonist of Homicide is, to be sure, a talker. He’s the resident hostage negotiator. His colleagues refer to him as the Orator. They depend on him when dealing with people in need of convincing. It’s not that he has some unusual style of speech but rather that he’s so eloquently plainspoken. Somehow this connects to Bobby’s being a Jew, something he’s worked hard to erase from his persona—he grew up being disparaged for his race and just wants to be a cop now, and a good one. He’s always the first to enter a door when danger could lie on the other side. Though his reputation is solid some part of him is always trying to prove himself. He and his partner Sully (William H. Macy, with a big-ass moustache) are supposed to track down a cop-killer (Ving Rhames) who slipped through the FBI’s fingers, but chance steps in and shoves Bobby onto another case. An old lady was killed behind the counter of her convenience store. The locals say its because she had some legendary treasure hidden in the basement. Bobby wants to shake it off, but his superiors demand he attend to it. Partially because the grieving family is wealthy and influential. Partially because they’re Jews.

Bobby’s journey is founded in identity crisis. It takes him from disdain for his own Jewish heritage to an all-consuming longing to belong to a community with deeper roots and a more profound cause than that of the police, who Bobby refers to as “the garbage men”; he goes from audaciously insulting the family of the murdered woman to desperately trying to penetrate their secret world of retaliation against the quiet but very active forces of violent anti-Semitism surrounding them; he goes from loathing what he sees as a Jewish persecution complex to realizing the conspiracy against them seems all too real. But without spoiling too much of what follows, Homicide comes to reveal that blood ties are never what they’re built up to be, that the only family worth trusting is the one you build, that those who seems closest to you are perfectly capable and actually far better equipped to fuck you over. We meet a man who killed his wife and children. We meet a mother talked into trapping her own son. And we meet Bobby, searching for meaning through connection to his ostensible People, only to find himself increasingly isolated and ill-prepared to take care of himself or his work—and early scene in which something as seemingly minor as a torn holster strap pays off in that old-fashioned dramaturgical way that Mamet has such enduring affection for. So Homicide is a lesson in noir, and for the most part about as good as Mamet gets. And I think if you watch it and (re-)try his later, less celebrated films—The Spanish Prisoner (97) anyone?—you might find the through-line has more consistency and integrity than naysayers claim.

Yurt not the boss of me: Tulpan

There’s this image in Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Tulpan that lingers in your mind long after seeing it, perhaps because it sort of sums up the particular blend of utter strangeness and delight that this film invokes so eloquently. Asa (Askhat Kuchencherekov) is moving along the vast flatness of some Kazakh steppe with his buddy Boni, who drives this souped-up tractor pasted over with tittie pics, blasting Boney M’s rendition of ‘Rivers of Babylon’ through the stereo on endless repeat. Asa dangles his slight frame off the edge of the vehicle as though he’s a sail catching the wind, doing so with a capacity for joy and optimism that silently defies whatever glum presumptions you might have of the two worlds he’s moving between, one being that of a low ranking officer in the Russian navy, the other that of a nomadic shepherd trying to support a family in this hardscrabble wilderness that might as be the fucking moon to most of us, so wildly desolate is the landscape, so remote from modern comforts.

Though straddling two worlds and probably not fitting in very well with either, Asa’s young and optimistic. He wants to get married and start a family and have some sheep and a settlement of his own, through he dreams not of a traditional yurt like his sister and her husband and their three kids inhabit, but some sort of big, Western-style spread with electricity, running water, and satellite TV. He is above all a dreamer, which doesn’t help much when there’s sheep to be herded and children to be clothed and fed. But the world around him is changing, a lifestyle is vanishing, and maybe some sort of special human fortitude along with it, so maybe a dreamer is just what’s needed to make the transition. He gets a hard time from his gruff brother-in-law Ondas, who doesn’t believe Asa has what it takes to build the sort of life Ondas has so tirelessly forged. And he gets little sympathy from the family of Tulpan, the “neighbour” girl whose hand he comes asking for in marriage. It makes for one of the funniest scenes in the film, Asa trying to impress Tulpan’s parents with his sailor suit and his terrifying and no doubt very tall tales of survival amidst the deep-sea food chain. “God, is she beautiful!” Asa raves at one point about Tulpan. But for all his efforts he’s never even been granted a peek of the girl he so wants to make his. Again, it’s all a dream.

Winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Tulpan is some kind of wonder. A bit like Atanarjuat, it offers an unusual combination of elements, a narrative that roughly adheres to a genre convention or two, a startling and rigorous ethnographic study, and a distinctive cinematic approach to characters that for the most part have likely never stepped inside a cinema in their lives. The results no doubt have a lot to do with the depth of Dvortsevoy’s investment into the people and place before his camera. He was born in Kazakhstan, and lived there for 28 years while working for an aviation company and developing his chops as a documentary filmmaker. He spent months casting the nonprofessional actors and then brought them out to live in a yurt for a month before production began. He’s said that only about 20% of the film was fully planned out, while the other 80% was prompted to some degree by the environment and its wildlife, which is found to be bursting with personality. When you see the film, you’ll understand just how attuned to its environment Tulpan really is. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that Dvortsevoy’s camera captures miracles. Messy miracles.

Of course, there are miracles and there are miracles. Kuchencherekov’s performance is itself something that verges on the transcendent, not only when he’s under extreme duress, but also when he’s just trying to drum up some good faith. Asa seems endearingly innocent to his lack of conventional handsomeness, and there’s a terrific scene in which he displays a picture of Prince Charles as evidence that guys with jug ears can be glamorous, too. It’s another sparkling moment of dry comedy, but there’s something more to it, something that testifies to the breadth of what movies can do, taking us to the loneliest places on the world, patiently waiting to find some vision to film there that’s pulled straight out of the uniqueness of that place, and still in the end coming up with something that has genuine old fashioned movie charisma.

On The Road, again

The Toronto International Film Festival gets underway tomorrow, and among the most anticipated titles screening, for me and I think many others, is The Proposition director John Hillcoat's much delayed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen. Below is a review of the novel I wrote for Vue Weekly when it initially came out a few years ago.

* * *

A man and a boy move along a wasted highway and through bush in tattered clothes, a shopping cart holding all their worldly possessions jumbled under a tarp. They carry a revolver with two bullets. They forage for hard-to-find items like food, gas and shoes, and are perpetually concerned with gathering sufficient materials to build a fire.

They head south, toward the Gulf Coast, for fear of not surviving another winter in colder terrain. The landscape they traverse is burned up, cloaked with ash, bereft of sounds of life and nearly all colour. Nights are “dark beyond darkness,” days “more gray than each one that had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”

All around them are dead cars, dead buildings, cadavers, “shriveled and drawn like latter-day bog folk, their faces of boiled sheeting.” Other living beings are few and far between and almost always best avoided at all costs. Despair has made ghouls of most survivors, and the man vows to protect the boy at all costs, believing his life to be of some as yet undetermined but superior, even sacred value. “If he is not the word of God,” the man thinks, “God never spoke.”

This is the story, rendered in a vigorous, austere version of the author’s exalted prose, of a pilgrimage to nowhere, in a forsaken land where art, order and progress have collapsed in their meaning. With the millennium having passed, new, less abstract fears singe the surface of modern life. The Road (Knopf, $30) offers an apocalyptic vision as demonically inspired as that of Cormac McCarthy’s masterwork Blood Meridian, except that now the apocalypse is complete, ubiquitous and absolute. Perhaps ironically, in this post-world virtually absent of all hope, the goodness of the man and the boy somehow holds fast to the novel’s thread where once, in novels like Blood Meridian, evil toppled everything.

Author Cormac McCarthy

Perhaps it’s a tough sell, this short novel about a future where all is truly lost and only blind faith (such as the father’s) or ignorance (the boy was born into this destroyed world) pushes our protagonists forward into ongoing nothingness and danger. Even the memory of beauty is so painful to maintain (“He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins”) that the man chooses to discard the last photo he carries of his dead wife.
There is no direct mention of what caused the great catastrophe, but it possesses all the signs of a nuclear winter. And the death of nearly everything seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

Yet, in the ashes of all our collective dreams, McCarthy uncovers surprising reveries of wonder and fragile pleasure: the rediscovery of Coca-Cola, the chemical beauty of a flare exploding over a pallid sea, the smoothness and delicate grace of fine china, the primitive music to be eked from a crudely constructed flute, the underground miracle of a perfectly preserved bomb shelter. And there are the exchanges between the boy and the man, who share many brief, terse but loving dialogues:

That hurt, didn’t it? the boy said.

Yes, It did.

Are you real brave?

Just medium.

McCarthy peppers The Road with a few brilliant, tense and explosively violent encounters, while in quieter scenes he mines spare poetry from simple activities and bursts of a survivalist’s necessary sense of invention. He also casts a much bigger image of the earth’s destiny that’s shot through with a detached, scientific sort of awe: “Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

But the splendour of what is lost nonetheless gets the final word, with memories of all the good things we know and take for granted rising to fill the novel’s final paragraph. McCarthy describes the brook trout that once inhabited mountain streams and his description calls the reader to see our world with clearer eyes and to grasp onto the ache of all things cherished that may soon slip away: The trout “smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of things that could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

Three fiery, famous lives, under-examined, overcooked, burnt to a crisp: Little Ashes

In 1933, while visiting Buenos Aires, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave a lecture on the aesthetic properties of duende, a force that can be located in certain works of art or folkloric traditions, such as flamenco, yet resists clean, orderly explanation. It has something to do with the abyss, with a deeper sadness that speaks from experience, with a strangeness that shakes loose unexamined fragments from the firmament of the unconscious, with an inescapable connection to one’s roots, with a sensuality never entirely distanced from the diabolical, with earthiness and desire and death. (Trying to define duende can be a bit like trying to define film noir; sometimes it’s simply whatever makes something otherwise routine, such as a crime drama, or a poem mediating on loss, into something rich, chilling, and mysterious in ways that extend far beyond the solving of a mystery.) Little Ashes is a movie about García Lorca as his formative youthful encounters with filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí, and, let me tell you, does it ever not have even a drop of duende.

Though made, perhaps, with commendable intentions, Little Ashes, written by Philippa Goslett and directed by Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor), effectively takes three of the 20th century’s more incendiary artists and tames their shared youthful reveries into something grotesquely bland and safe, an assembly of biographical conjecture in which the term “outrageous” is most firmly kept within quotation marks, and annoying affection, rather than artistic revelation, is celebrated. It’s like the worst thing Christopher Hampton never wrote. More earnest and awkwardly acted even than the Hampton-scripted Arthur Rimbaud-Paul Verlaine movie Total Eclipse. It goes to show that there’s nothing, not surrealism nor sadism, not dada nor death metal, that cannot be appropriated and converted into stuffy museum pieces, sordid soap opera, or soul-deadening muzak. My recoil exacerbated by the fact that at least one of the three figures in Little Ashes is among the artists whose work I treasure more than any other, I’m fighting the temptation to call the movie an abomination, because that word just sounds a little too exciting to be applied to what’s found here.

It starts in 1922, when the soon-to-be dark luminaries García Lorca (Javier Beltrán), Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) and Dalí (Robert Pattinson) converge at university in Madrid. Much ostensibly iconoclastic wankerspeak about revising the values of art is tossed about in mealy-mouthed Castellano accents, since, unfortunately, the proceedings are largely to be spoken in English by one Spaniard and two Brits. Dalí upsets the status quo with his foppish ruffled shirts, giddy non sequiturs (“I would love an enema!”), and advanced talents, arousing the admiration of Buñuel and the erotic desire of García Lorca, whose quiet homosexual longings find an eager receptacle in Dalí’s sexual ambivalence and overriding urge to be adored.

The development of artistic vision in Little Ashes is largely reduced to shallow manifesto spouting. To be fair, the story’s emphasis is meant to be on the peculiar and fragile dynamic of the relationships, yet here too, despite a valiant and genuinely sexy supporting turn from Marina Gatell as the sole woman to intrude on this very male milieu, we’re asked to be satisfied with boilerplate conflicts that depend on our acceptance that Lorca was a sensitive saint cursed by an oppressive culture, Buñuel a belligerent homophobic thug with, most astonishingly, no sense of humour, and Dalí a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot. Now, I’m not trying to suggest that Dalí wasn’t, too a depressingly large extent, a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot, since there’s an awful lot of evidence to support this characterization. But it is the most essential business of biopics to transcend the superficial depiction of their subjects, because otherwise what’s the point? I doubt that Little Ashes would have ever got any sort of theatrical release at all were it not for Twilight star Pattinson’s sudden stardom, but it surely won’t do his career any favours to be found hamming it up wincingly, playing a public figure all too large for life to begin with. Of the central trio only Beltrán can muster up any emotional integrity from the material, so Lorca, at least, might not be rolling in his grave.

Dalí, José Moreno Villa, Buñuel, García Lorca, José Rubio Sacristán

Industrial strength: A talk with Mike Judge

The blue collar cousin to his 1999 cult film Office Space, Mike Judge’s Extract examines the ironies of hierarchies in the work place. Joel (Jason Bateman, perfectly cast) built his company from the ground up. His patented flavourings and the small company that produces them have helped Joel ease his way into a big suburban house, a big pool, a big car, and other middle-class comforts that are slowly transforming him into a depressive eunuch, unloved by his bored wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), unappreciated by his resentful employees, left with nothing to do in his spare time except masturbate in one of his three bathrooms while Suzie watches Dancing with the Stars or get drunk with his New Age dope fiend barkeep buddy Dean (Ben Affleck, alarmingly convincing).

A thread of emasculation runs through Extract, whether it’s Joel’s dwindling sex life or the literal testicular injury suffered by staffer Step (Clifton Collins Jr.). The only sexually satisfied male character in the movie is a supremely dimwitted young stud-for-hire, and in his case that’s all he has going for him. Genuine empowerment is enjoyed only by Cindy (Mila Kunis), a small-time grifter hoping to make a big score by convincing Step to sue Joel and the ultra-manic bus stop ad lawyer played by Gene Simmons, groomed here to most closely resembles a rabid poodle. Joel will make numerous attempts to break out of his rut, including selling his company, having an affair, and smoking a bong the size of a lamppost. But in the end he may find his greatest consolation in Step, who for all his flaws is truly proud to consider himself “just a working man.”

Extract is unusual among mainstream comedies in that Judge conveys affection for his characters while at the same time refraining from sentimentalizing them. In the case of one of the film’s most memorable supporting bits, amusingly embodied by Beth Grant, he doesn’t shy away from making her a flat-out racist. When I spoke with Judge he recalled how a friend once described to him the real-life model for Grant’s character, listing all her external traits. Judge (see below) felt like without having met the woman in question he absolutely knew her as a type. And perhaps herein lies some of the problems with the characters in Extract. So many of them feel much more like types than people. There are times you can’t help but wonder if it would all come off better as a cartoon, like Judge’s greatest successes, his television shows Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill. To be sure, there are a lot of funny scenes in Extract, but some of them are so broad and familiar it’s hard to feel completely invested in them.

Mike Judge

I can’t say the same for my experience of meeting Judge. His demeanor was somber, yet his responses to my questions were never less than playful, bouncing improbably from his admiration for both Badlands and The Big Lebowski—“the kind of comedy you can meditate on”—to the unlikely kinship between Bob Newhart and crime novelist Jim Thompson.

JB : When you have an idea do you know right away if it’s a television show or a movie?

Mike Judge: There were moments when I was working on Office Space where I thought maybe it should’ve been a TV show. I’d be doing scenes with Gary Cole and Ron Livingston, or Gary Cole and Stephen Root, and thinking how fun it would be to just keep writing stuff for these guys and see where it goes. But for the most part the stuff I’ve made were things that always knew what they wanted to be from the beginning.

Office Space

JB: It must be tempting to turn any idea into television because then, in theory at least, you have an opportunity to build an audience.

MJ: At one point Fox did want to make a TV show out of Office Space. This was before the British version of The Office came out much less the American one. Now I feel like we’ve had two great shows about offices and we don’t need another one.

JB: Has your idea of what makes good TV or good movies changed since you started out, given that the industry has changed so much?

MJ: I think it’s the same. I always think in terms of classic TV. I haven’t really watched prime time TV since I started in this business. I watch a lot of TV but mostly late at night, so I tend to see reruns of old shows. And reality shows. I was actually hooked on American Idol for several seasons. I think in a way that’s a sort of classic. It could have been on in the 1950s.

The Bob Newhart Show

JB: Are there shows that were on when you were coming up that still feed you creatively when you see them now?

MJ: Oh yeah. I saw an old Bob Newhart episode about a year ago and it was just brilliant. That character Carlin, his whole thing was genius. It was that episode where Carlin ends up buying the building that Bob Newhart lives in, so during his therapy session Bob has to explain to his patient about the heater not working and so on, trying to tell the guy he’s a tightwad and a bad landlord. You know there’s this Jim Thompson novel called The Alcoholics. Seeing that episode of Bob Newhart made me think that The Alcoholics could make a good movie.

JB: Really?

MJ: It’s about a guy a guy who runs a treatment centre. He’s kind of a Bob Newhart-like character.

JB: Huh. I know the book. I never thought of it that way.

MJ: That book’s actually kinda funny. You keep thinking someone’s going to get shot or something. Thompson must have been in an alcoholic treatment place when he wrote that.

King of the Hill

JB: What about animation? Do you know when something is going to be live-action or animation? Do economics come into account?

MJ: Yeah. That or my limited drawing abilities. With animation I do best when it starts with something that I drew. What’s harder is writing something and then figuring out how to draw it after the fact. King of the Hill and Beavis and Butthead both started as drawings. King of the Hill was initially a panel cartoon of four guys with their beers with three of them saying “Yep,” and then I had Boomhauer thinking “Yep” in a thought balloon. But if it’s something that starts out as a script it’s usually going to be live-action.

JB: Did the script for Extract develop out of the milieu? The characters?

MJ: I remember writing the scene where Cindy steals this guitar. Sometimes I just write scenes. I wrote that not knowing where to go with it. At some point I know I wanted to write a script about a girl that’s really good-looking but kind of a sociopath—I’ve known a couple like that—and just the way that super-hot girls seem to live by different rules than the rest of us. I thought about doing something in the blue collar world, or something in the factory setting but from the boss’ point of view. This friend of mine had been a musician most of his life and had to quit going on the road, so in his late 40s he got a job in this parts warehouse. He started calling me to tell me about the people working there. I’ve worked in factories myself. He said there’s this woman, she sits on a stool, arms folded, shaking her head at everybody. She’s got a Tweedy-bird T-shirt on. She’s like 65, fanny-pack. I thought oh my god, I’ve never met this particular woman he’s talking about but I’ve seen her a hundred times. He had this one line of hers that he’d repeat. “I’m just gonna sit here.” So I just started imagining all these characters that are unique to factories, the same way there are characters unique to cubicles.


JB: And the Jason Bateman character? Did he come with this whole package you were envisioning?

MJ: That came more directly from my personal experience. At one point in my life I went from having nobody work for me to suddenly having 30 to 90 people working for me. I remember thinking, these people are driving me crazy, they don’t appreciate anything. I try to be nice and they take advantage of me. Then I realized, oh yeah, I’m the boss, and I was probably like that to my bosses. See, middle-management types like in Office Space tend to thrive on that stuff I think, the power trip, telling people what to do. I don’t enjoy telling people what to do. But I do enjoy steering the ship and making something on a big scale. That’s satisfying work.

Big, and black, in Japan: Nikkatsu Noir

Nikkatsu Noir, Eclipse’s new box set of mukokuseki, or borderless crime thrillers, from Japan’s Nikkatsu film studio, spanning the years 1957 through 1967, does indeed convey a persuasive sense of the trans-Pacific kinship alluded to in its title. By ’57, film noir, having been brewing in American studios for more than 15 years, had been given a name, and as a style/genre/theme/what-have-you it was becoming increasingly self-conscious. The films in Nikkatsu Noir prove that postwar Japanese filmmakers were taking notes. Noir lurks in the opening credits rolling over headlights on unspooling pavement; in the voice-overs and flashbacks; in the brutal violence and jazz-hued scores; in the haunted antiheroes, loose women and well-heeled heavies; in the cynical, urban and seedy but decidedly modern milieu. There are also numerous nods toward concurrent trends in western and teen exploitation imports. Yet for all that these films remain deeply Japanese in their formal exactitude, moral codes, awareness of tradition, and most especially in their social concerns during an era of seismic upheaval.

Set along the Yokohama waterfront, I Am Waiting (1957) re-teamed boyish heartthrob Yujiro Ishihara and taiyozoku siren Mie Kitahara after their collaboration on the incendiary hit Crazed Fruit (56). They meet on a foggy night after Ishihara’s ex-pugilist closes down his dockside restaurant to post a letter to his brother in Brazil. He sees her alone by the water, a “ canary who’s forgotten how to sing.” The image of their figures isolated within the gloom of night water will later be elegantly contrasted by a beautiful, tender scene that director Koreyoshi Kurahara lets play out in its entirety with the shadowy stars silhouetted against the dazzlingly sunlit surface of that same water in the late afternoon. The two are bonded by their longing for escape from a Japan that seemingly offers them nothing, by preternatural brushes with violence, and a connection to the Yokohama underworld that won’t let them rest until they fight their way out.

Ishihara returns in Rusty Knife (58), once more running a humble business, once more trying to wash blood from his hands, once more giving a dynamic, riveting, and rather hammy melodramatic performance. Kitahara returns too, though this time around as a noble figure as yet untainted by the surrounding corruption. Ishihara’s girlfriend was raped and suicided and he did five years for killing her assailant. Kitahara’s father also suicided, though it comes to light early in Rusty Knife that the suicide was staged by his enemies. As in I Am Waiting, their enemies turn out to be the same self-satisfied, overconfident yakuza gleefully capitalizing on Japan’s economic miracle. Highlights include French-speaking gangsters, a truck chase, and a sequence where a reckless kid takes his girlfriend for one crazy motorbike ride.

Things gets really crazy however with Branded to Kill director Seijun Suzuki’s arrestingly titled Take Aim at the Police Van (60). The images, shards of exposition and fragments of almost Godardian text-cues pile up in quick succession—a hand lovingly stroking a rifle; a series of road signs viewed through a rifle sight that ominously read IN THIS AREA HAVE OCCURRED MANY ACCIDENTS; a guy in a bus drawing the symbol for “Aki” with his finger on a steamy window over and over; a woman waiting alone under a freeway overpass—and then it happens, the attack on the police van carrying several convicts that results in two deaths and one six-month suspension for supervising officer Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima). He doesn’t mind the time off so much as the ambiguity as to who staged the attack, and why. “I’m just a prison officer,” Tamon says in voice-over. “I should leave it to the cops. But I’m not going to.” Tamon turns self-appointed detective, following a wayward trail littered with naked archery murders, attractive but suspicious women, and this one thug who’s always getting disarmed or spilling drinks all over himself. Sharing something with the kinetic style of Sam Fuller, Suzuki’s camera often seems on the verge of doing gymnastics. Take Aim at the Police Van is all over before you know it, leaving you dazzled and confused, and quite satisfied.

Giant-cheeked Joe Shishido gets thrown off a train in the first 15 minutes of Rusty Knife, but he’s back with a vengeance in Takumi Furukawa’s Cruel Gun Story (64). Guy looks like he’s got the mumps but still comes off as tough as Lee Marvin, here playing a convict with an ugly past let out of the pen early under the auspices of some big-time yakuza who want him to lead a heist involving a truck full of gambling receipts, one cold-blooded junky, a disabled lawyer, and a climax brimming with gunfire and dynamite, and a staggering body count. Anybody offering spectacular death workshops to movie actors in Japan in 1964 must have made a killing.

“Morals or money, what will it be?” a flabby old yakuza boss asks his nubile massage therapist. We know what her answer will be, but with Shishido’s hitman antihero Shuji Kamimura it’s a little trickier. Takashi Nomura’s A Colt is My Passport (67)—can these titles get any better?—opens with Kamimura’s careful execution of an arduous hit on a major crime boss. We’re disoriented with quick, jazzy cuts from one setting to another, from gunfire to an engine being started, from wide shots to close-ups, the contrast reflecting the eerie disconnect between an assassin’s rifle and his distant, silent target. Immediately following the killing, Kamimura and his young partner Shun (Jerry Fujio) are to destroy the evidence, take their earnings, and flee the country. But the film turns out to be mainly about just how difficult this last part can be.

Kamimura and Shun wind up at a seaside inn full of rough truckers and a waitress (Chitose Kobayashi) with whom everyone seems to fall in love, though she only goes for the brooding bad guys in suits. Harumi Ibe’s score echoes Morricone. The cubist cutting style seems aligned to Point Blank (67). Shun will sing a pretty song and get beaten to a pulp, while Kamimura will have to make some tough choices fast, and take a stand against an overwhelming number of thugs hot for his blood in a surprisingly rich and elegiac climax, not only to this film, but to Eclipse’s fascinating and very fun little cinematic showcase.