The Hate Locker

Critical review submitted for my United States History class:

"You know, after my first tour I told myself I was never coming back to this fucking hole. After my second tour I was one-hundred percent sure I was never coming back to this fucking hole. And all that to say, good luck getting that fucking degree when you get back to Ottawa, buds." 

- Canadian Forces Sgt, Kandahar

The opening to Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker snaps the audience to attention. Everything feels very real - the cinematography catches the smothering combination of heat and light in the urban gingivitis of Iraq so well you can practically feel the sun squatting down on the back of your neck, or taste the dust and dried spit the Middle East tends to leave in your mouth. The American soldiers, Explosive-Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians all, go about their business with the effortless swagger of filthy-handed professionals  - from their frosty back-and-forth about dick-sizes to the rattling off of ballistic predictions and other jargon. When Guy Pearce zips himself into the bomb-suit and moonwalks his way over to their daily find, you can smell the gym-bag blast-blanket stink inside his helmet, feel every footstep thumping against sizzling asphalt, and every bead of sweat crawling spider-like down the back of his neck. Kathryn Bigelow can convey atmosphere. When Zero Dark Thirty hit theaters in 2012, her audiences experienced the longest ten minutes of their lives inching their way through Osama Bin Laden's compound and unempathetically removing all human obstacles across a bed of spent casings. The Hurt Locker's opening sequence promises a riveting premise - the daily lives of deployed American EOD technicians against a backdrop of adrenaline and combat addiction.

Unfortunately, what The Hurt Locker actually delivers smells more like the inside of one.  

Critical reception of the 2008 blockbuster was almost obnoxiously positive - its won nine more Oscars than it was worth and was joyously written-off by critics as "realistic", "harrowing", "powerful", and all the other spin-words movie critics use to market their Oscar winners. The negative backlash was almost exclusively from the military community, whose actual experiences conflicted drastically with the insipid, ignorant, and occasionally fantastical scenes depicted in the film. Jeremy Renner's cavalier attitude towards endangering his own team and lack of regard for his own personal safety inflamed the sensitivities of many returned veterans. Technical details, like the particular pattern of uniform worn by soldiers or the Vietnam-era helicopters which serve as MEDEVAC, were and still are ridiculed in Company-lines. Most egregiously; for someone allegedly embedded with an actual EOD-team in Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow seems to understand little to nothing about what EOD technicians actually do and where they fit within the greater military scheme of things. 

But how important are these technical details, really? Saving Private Ryan for all of its realism is guilty of a by-the-numbers Spielbergian plot almost hackneyed in its simplicity. The concept of an officer and several enlisted men pulled out of a Rifle Company during the Invasion of Normandy to find and pull some unlucky Private out of the madness of war is absurd. Apocalypse Now makes a better acid-trip than it does a mission, and Full Metal Jacket is a Kubrickian series of complex symbology sauteed in the Vietnam War. Even Oliver Stone's Platoon, one of the most famous cinematic portrayals of Vietnam, ladles out some pretty soupy melodrama courtesy of Willem Defoe. And yet, for all their warts and boils, these films sit atop the pedestal of war cinema among critics and military minds alike.

What was the deciding factor? The message? The anti-war undertones? The satire? 

For all its failings, The Hurt Locker covers a unique angle in cinematic war narration that has gained little coverage in Hollywood. The underlying theme of combat-addiction, by contemporary nomenclature, or the notion that some actually enjoy combat and participating in wars, is rarely explored and certainly overlooked in the media. It is a brave direction to take in this day and age, where in the wake of the Vietnam War the cultural respect for martial prowess had been replaced with social mourning, and condemnation. Today, soldiers go to Afghanistan, or Iraq, and in our popular mindset they are still fighting the war in Vietnam and surrounded by the same outdated controversies. The tragedy of The Hurt Locker ultimately is its inability to string together the powerful scenes which convey this message midst the movie's narrative wreckage. 

In the ending sequence of the movie, for instance, we are jarred out of the Iraqi war-zone without warning and dropped into an average American grocery-store. Jerry Renner's character is back home. We are jarred out of the war the same way soldiers are jarred out of the war - without proper decompression, or travel-time - and instead of facing the indifferent faces of Iraqi civilians and threatened by open window-panes we are facing miles and miles of cereal boxes, brand-name product, the meaninglessness of choice, modern life, and overwhelmed by it. The structure, the simplicity, the self-validation is all gone. As John Rambo states in his final soliloquy from the 1982 First Blood, "Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million-dollar equipment. Back here I can't even hold a job parking cars!". The notion that is is not merely the trauma experienced in war-fighting environments that cause mental disorders, but the mediocrity of the modern civilian world is a refreshing one to explore. There is boundless territory here to explore the shifting cultural perspective towards war in modern society, down to the shift-worker mentality by which our soldiers are deployed overseas versus the traditional campaign. When Renner steps off the transport in the final scene to join Delta Company, he wears a smile on his face. He's home. There's a moment of multi-dimensional characterization when he honestly admits to his infant son that he doesn't feel any real love for him at all.

Unfortunately the thematic depth that could be cultivated from this is wasted on Bigelow's direction. Instead of spending time developing the cast, we are treated to a Hollywoodized portrayal of a modern warzone. Disposing of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and other Un-Exploded Ordnances (UXOs) on a routine basis does not pack enough tension for The Hurt Locker - these EOD technicians must also engage in sniper-to-sniper combat, run free through the streets of Baghdad like criminals, spend the entire movie operating independent of any parent organization like some fantasy Special-Forces team, and get drunk and punch each other in a Paleolithic example of male-bonding. What these farcical plot developments commit is twofold - foremost, it is absolutely disrespectful to anybody who has served operationally to suggest that their job isn't interesting enough on its own merit to revolve a story around, and secondly, it shows more ambition than sense. The film itself can be taken as a poetic statement of our modern dissociation with the realities of war - even The Empire Strikes Back managed to get the details of a proper military defensive position correct and that was a science-fiction/fantasy epic. 

What separates Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan from The Hurt Locker is that the plot is true to the source material. Both films take the audience on a tour of the Vietnam War and the Invasion of Normandy respectively - and thus, the narrative is built around this. In Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard commands a lone Patrol Boat on an independent mission and acts as our Virgil into the dark heart of the Vietnam War. All the disconnected scenes of madness and chaos make narrative sense because for all intents and purposes it is supposed to be the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Saving Private Ryan pushes us out of the Higgins Boat into the bloody mayhem of the Omaha Beach landing and then, scene-by-scene, we are whisked up the Yellow Brick Road to Ramelle, and Ryan, and the Alamo. In both these movies the war in question is the backdrop for the narrative - either movie could have easily taken place during the Trojan War, or the Peloponnesian. These movies are not written for soldiers, they are written for audiences, and the plot is conveyed to us as if we are tourists (which we are). 

The Hurt Locker should have been made about an embedded or freelance Combat Journalist, a character who bounced unit-to-unit and whose story explored the Iraq War piece-by-piece. If you are just determined to have action sequences, make the film about Combat Engineers or Assault Pioneers. When dealing strictly with the lives and experiences of your characters, authenticity reigns - the 2008 HBO series Generation Kill reproduced the 2003 Invasion of Iraq down to the ornamentation on the Marine First Recon Humvees. It unashamedly shows off the modern Marine Corps sub-culture at war and allows us to interpret it as we see fit. Platoon is a morality tale set within a dismounted infantry platoon in Vietnam. The routine, the exhaustion, the formations, the weapons, the slang, the juxtaposition of mundanity and fear, all are so accurate that they smoothen out the narrative - characters stumble and slip in the mud, cigarettes take multiple attempts to light, and actual South Vietnamese Safe Conduct Passes are stapled to the mutilated corpses of American soldiers. When the environment your characters live in is authentic, their performances becomes authentic, and your message becomes authentic. The Hurt Locker, for all the power and good of its message, fails to authenticate that message with technical knowledge and it ends up falling flat.

The final nail in The Hurt Locker's coffin is its absence of humanity. While Jeremy Renner's Staff-Sergeant William James shows sporadic moments of depth, he still ends up being a flat character (which is a far cry above his entourage, who show about as much depth as gasoline puddles in a supermarket parking lot). During his final scene in Iraq, James claims he "[doesn't] know" why he is the way he is - why combat and war does not shake him as much as it does his team-members. The Hurt Locker does not even make inferences as to why James feels this way - this coupled with the ending sequence makes James out to be some sort of alien or sociopath incapable of "normal" human emotions. This is a disgraceful notion because there are legitimate (and aforementioned) reasons why he may enjoy his job so much. This popular idea that war is absolutely terrible and that everyone who returns from its is fundamentally changed for the worst (or that those who excel at it are somehow broken) is juvenile and insulting. Incidentally, James' flatness conveys more about the audience than it does about the characters - our cultural misunderstanding of war and war-fighting are reflected in James' smile at the end of the movie.

This lack of humanity is compounded by other supporting characters - Specialist Eldridge's fatalism becomes so melodramatic it becomes unrealistic and borders on being satirical. Eldridge himself becomes a smaller symbol of this cultural disconnect by proxy - he is less a soldier at war than someone imagining himself to be a soldier at war, and is unconvincing.  

There is no light-heartedness either, nothing about these characters that makes you smile. For the most part they merely crack wise, or moan and complain. There are no "Tracks of My Tears" moments, or "Field Fucks", or running in serpentine patterns, that truly convey the absurdity of war and mankind's ability to cope with it. In Jarhead, Swofford's ability to make us laugh made his psychological transformation under the external pressures of a combat deployment all the more shocking. At the end of the day, Bigelow is telling us how to think instead showing and letting us decide, and leaves herself and The Hurt Locker open to rejection. 

A Star Trek Into Darkness

So for those of you wondering, I unashamedly and blatantly lied four months ago when I implied I would be posting with more frequency. I could attribute blame to a heavy course load dealing almost exclusively in third-year History classes, but I will more honestly attribute blame to my lazy, lazy ass. Now, I've been meaning to coherently and in an organized fashion record my indignation after watching the new Star Trek movie for some time - this period of rumination has been broken up by heated, fiery oral rants to my friends about how fucking feckless and insipid the movie was for all its extraordinary production value. I would normally err on the side of caution and be somewhat diplomatic about the whole thing; but since nobody reads this and Simon Pegg is such a clown I think I'll slip off the kid gloves.

Without further audio,

Appropriate imagery.

Cinema is a very specific medium. It allows a visionary to do many wonderful things as long as that visionary adheres to the constraints indigenous to that medium - notably the run time of a feature film, clocking in at anywhere between 90 minutes to three hours, in my mind. I'd say one of the biggest mistakes both fans and producers make when attempting to translate source material from another medium to the big screen, say literature or television or comic books, is expecting that this material will be conveyed or attempting to convey it in its original form. Star Trek Into Darkness (sounds pulpy and adventurous, without the semi-colon) crams so much shit from both the numerous television series and the movie franchise into a single picture it immediately undermines any hope at having a coherent or engaging plot. And the plot is shambles - I could barely follow what was going on, between the farcical "moral dilemma" of saving an aboriginal people from natural events to the rogue Federation commander to the escaped terrorist/Khan Noonien Singh returning (from... the franchise, and nothing else) to Federation-Klingon Cold War. If this film did anything it was prove that you'd be better off taking all these great actors and money and ideas and use the first Star Trek film as a means by which to launch a series reboot on television. Gone are the days where TV is a technologically bankrupt wasteland rife with styrofoam scenery and soap-opera matte sets. HBO, AMC, all the networks have steadily been pumping out quality programming not only rife with excellent storytelling but exploding with production value unprecedented outside of the big screen.

So why are we taking a television series with such a colossal, mind-boggling wealth of material, and limiting its narrative scope to what we can achieve in a 90-180 minute time frame? What's the point? The time between one project and the next undermines the creative liberty the first Star Trek movie granted the writers by re-booting the timeline. It also sort of forces the writers to break away from that principle theme of discovery and exploration to typical Hollywood drama which is starting to hit a formulaic keyboard of genius-villain, genius-heroes, genius-betrayals, conspiracy, blah blah. Into Drivel's exposition is infuriating because it so casually brushes off story material that has fueled the series for decades - the moral conundrum of interfering in the affairs of an under-developed world contrary to the Prime Directive versus allowing such a culture to be wiped out by the natural ebb and tide of history. We are force-fed ten minutes of a potentially great narrative arc, choke it down eyes watering, merely to move past into a whole field's worth of potentially great narrative arcs only to barely taste any of them for the sake of gorging them all. We are also robbed of our chance to see Kirk properly at the helm of his own ship, for the first time, vulnerable to all the pitfalls and problems and drama of his own inexperience. Kirk, the voyage, the exploration... The whole film could have trashed the tawdry "revenge" theme and opted for Kirk's character growth amidst a dark and overwhelming plot. In all fairness, this was partially remedied near the curtain call - but we'll touch on that later.

Oh, spoilers. Shaddap.

We are also granted lazily written action to justify action, which has been lampooned elsewhere on the intarwebs so I feel I shouldn't repeat them and eat up space (eg. How the Federation has the Technology to Freeze-bomb (?) a volcano into dormancy and yet somehow doesn't have the ballistic capability to deliver the bomb from the Enterprise gaaah my brain).

Moving back to my primary argument here - that of the plot itself - Into Drek's garbage-barge of a story seems to be par with contemporary big-budget narration, where ambition supersedes good editing and story-telling. Ambition, or greed, as probably the case of The Hobbit trilogy. I'm actually boggled by the creative reasoning behind making this movie a Wrath of Khan reboot and not just making it its own movie. What was so instrumental in making that particular reboot the second movie? The original Wrath of Kahn made narrative sense - the antagonist had been introduced to the cast and the audience previously in the television series, and returned on the big screen to chew the scenery a little. In Into Darkness, the audience - for the most part - knows who Kahn is because we know Star Trek, but none of the cast does except "Old Spock", obliterating the tension and drama of a returning villain and hobbling the stakes of such an event. It would make narrative sense, then, in this cinematic medium, to introduce Kahn as a side-character as part of a larger more operatic story and then bring him back for the now anticipated Wrath-of-Kahn-is-coming Third Film! It doesn't even make sense from a marketing perspective that Kahn would be the main villain in this series because J. J. Abrams did everything he possibly could to deny Cucumber-patch was actually Kahn in disguise. And how fucking absurd and contrived is it, even just thinking about it again, that super-terrorist JOHN HARRISON is actually Khan Noonien Singh in disguise. If that isn't the purest example of soap-opera logic.

What makes it even more aggravating is that the setting of Into Cinematic Dark Age is brilliant. Yup, I said it. I probably should have proclaimed in some disclaimer how absolutely marvelous the whole film looks, and shmoop, but honestly production value is a given in this kind of movie and when production value starts taking plot for granted we have some problems. In any case, we have a tenuous political situation between the Federation and the Klingons, a kind of galactic Cold War. That a small, covert team of Federation agents actually crosses into Klingon space in order to hunt and track a terrorist at the risk of launching both nations into open conflict alone had me white-knuckled. The heights at which good writers could have taken this - the allegory that could be made with US Foreign Policy in Afghanistan and its self-interested activities in Pakistan, the notion of inter-national (inter-galactic?) jurisdiction. Star Trek has ever been science fiction - not science fantasy. And frankly, these two concepts do not necessarily obliterate one another. All the most off-the-wall set-pieces of plot-devices in the world would not put a dent into a great story, maybe to a few die-hard fans but who really cares about fans anyway. Why not use entertainment to ask big, blaring, serious questions about our own society? So here's an idea - Khan remains the terrorist (and remains Khan, without the need of a pseudonym), and after the ensuing conflict resultant of Federation action into Klingon-controlled space evades pursuit but remains marooned somewhere in hostile Klingon space, setting up his return in the next film. Or, Khan, to ensure that the tradition of the good-guys-gone-bad-make-the-best-bad-guys is milked dry, is one of the agents on this covert Federation team sent to eliminate this terrorist and is abandoned by the Federation under political pretext, suitably motivating him to seek revenge (and filling in the super-soldier requirement all in one). Hell some time, relativity, plotnium field could even speed up Khan-time so he'd have a whole settlement of revenge-seeking people to come back at the Federation in a future installment. The main players of Into Dankness could remain the rogue, militant Federation commander or even a Klingon political figure. We have enough latent drama here to light up Babylon 5 for an entire season. I'd honestly like to know who green-lit the plot to this movie and what could have possibly been discarded in exchange. "Brevity is the soul of wit.", is it not? You tell 'em, Shakesman.

To probe this even further - would this plot make the movie less interesting to the mouth-breathing, oxygen-gorging caricature of modern movie audiences? The answer is who cares - the plot is only engaging in how it's presented. That's why Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy shat the bed in the box-office. Casino Royale made a shit-gazillion dollars and yet that a bunch of obese oxygen-pirates probably didn't clue in to the fact that Le Chiffre was financing acts of terrorism to benefit from their after-effects on the stock-market didn't matter, did it?

"From Hell's heart I stab at thee!"

It amuses me to no end that Benedict Cumberbatch was chosen to play Khan Noonien Singh. This isn't a criticism of Cabbage-patch by any means - the man has chops as an actor, pork-chops even. He makes such a good Smaug I almost liked The Hobbit for sake of his screen time. But the ultimately sackless Hollywood decision not to cast a Sikh, Middle-Eastern, Latin, or African, or ethnic actor in the role of the famous antagonist says quite about the nonsensical sensibilities of the age we live in. How is being so fearful of casting a minority actor in the role of a villain (to quote co-producer and co-screenwriter Bob Orci:  "it became uncomfortable for me to support demonizing anyone of color, particularly any one of Middle Eastern descent or anyone evoking that.") any less prejudiced than casting a minority actor in the role of a villain? Audiences love villains - villains make a story; antagonism is usually the engine which drives a plot forward. This movie is practically more Euro-centric than the First World War in its drama. It actually undermines (and this has been said a million times) Roddenberry's multi-racial future and raises some eyebrows as to the composition of the federation - the roles would be occupied from people of all backgrounds (more so because the original actor was our good buddy Ricardo Montaban). And if we're going to talk about potential discrimination, I'd be more concerned that the only leading cast member of colour is completely fucking useless.

Call the Human Rights Association! We have a great villain of colour!

Uhura (sp?) is actually an interesting piece of this movie. That she was inconsequential in Star Trek didn't matter - not many characters were consequential in Star Trek, it was the first film of a new franchise and had more pressing issues like establishing its canon. She is interesting in Into Drabness because she against all odds manages to remain completely inconsequential despite momentous opportunities for the writers to steer her into an empowering role.

I will say one thing about this film, and that is has some very good scenes. Some of which are almost great. This is one of the latter. Spoilers.

So Kirk, Bones, Spock, and Oohoora are all aboard a stealthy Federation vessel venturing illegally into Klingon space and risking an intergalactic incident and, sure enough, are caught by Klingons. For the first time in the movie, there is real tension here - we know as the audience that Klingons are the warrior race and that these meek Federation humans stand no chance of engaging them in combat. The Birds of Prey will cut them down and a male Klingon could probably pull a human's head off his/her spine, right? The cast is equally perturbed, and for the first time in the franchise's history Bagheera decides that she will be a useful member of the cast by approaching this situation with some outside-the box thinking - diplomacy. Being a xenolinguist, she can speak Klingon and attempts to reason with the aliens - not only that, but she appeals to their sense of honour and culture to escape from harm and accomplish their mission (perhaps even enlist their aid?). This is some serious shit. All of the sudden all the blasters and dual-pistols and slow-motion in the world are worthless because the characters find themselves in a situation where they are completely out-gunned, and conversation is the only thing that can save them. I think Roger Ebert once said that in Munich tension is strung to breaking in a single scene involving an old man running across the street from a telephone booth to his comrade to stop a bombing. It's the context, not the action which empowers a scene. Argo didn't succeed as a film because it had gun fights and explosions. And yet instead of using this jewel, the writers elect to have Khan show up and go all Shaq-Fu with super-powers and the Federation cast become suddenly able to kill the shit out of every Klingon on Qu'onoS (no, I am not a Star Trek fan, and yet I am still able to research the spelling of the planet's name and not changing it so some simian knuckle-dragger can better relate to the movie - make alien look alien).

Not only does this grossly demean our conception of the Klingons as a threatening foil to the Federation (and the whole Cold War plot device), but tension is at once effortlessly dispelled in a light show designed to amuse chimps. To compound all of this, any sense of an empowering role for a female lead is made a mockery of (and the other female lead is both vacuous, pointless, and utilized strictly for eye-candy). You know, I took a 4-year old to see The Hobbit and watching his reaction to the movie was like living metaphor for the problem with the cinematic method in big-budget blockbusters. Would it shock you to know that he couldn't care less 5 minutes into the drawn-out fight between the dwarves and the goblins in their cave, but was both glued to his seat and riveted to the screen during the entire "Riddles in the Dark" sequence?

Now I don't want to sound like a curmudgeony old cynic here. I didn't actively despite Into Dimness wholly. One thing that Abrams managed to convey with strength was the characterization of Spock and Kirk. More specifically, the ending (that great scene I was talking about) - where Kirk, forcing himself to think like Spock, sacrifices himself. It's a cyclical process - Kirk's emotionally-driven attitude towards his crew and his mission is incompatible with the Kobayashi Maru scenario presented at the film's climax. Only Spock's emotional distance is capable of resolving the issue with the least damage. Kirk is fundamentally acknowledging his inability to captain without Spock, his personal failings, by resolving the issue as Spock would/had. And it's a powerful inversion of roles, glass-to-glass, Kirk not going out with the dignity that Spock exuded in his final moments, unable to separate himself from his fear of death. My only change (nitpicking) would be that Spock should only barely whisper "...Khan." as opposed to yelling it to more symbolically represent this inversion of roles.

And then they go and ruin the scene by bringing him back to life. What is this, Dragon Ball Z? This is the same sort of diet-drama that Downton Abbey spoon-feeds its leprous fan-base on a weekly basis. Where actions are constantly bereft of any real consequences and no one is ever forced to change or evolve. I don't even get this from a basic marketing perspective - again - why not kill off Kirk to make way for The Search for Kirk? Why not set-up the next movie and get audiences ready to see it before it comes out? Why the fuck would I want to pay to see the next Star Trek movie - what stake could I have in a fictional universe where no one can die? I am aghast at the sloppiness of this movie, for all the sleek-looking visuals and the minutiae of brilliance.

Well, that felt good. Like punching an html pillow. It also somewhat fills the review-void I'd been hoping for Red Letter Media's Mr. Plinkett to fill on this movie. I expect I'm going to have to gnash my teeth at this whole Hobbit thing, before long. I read the book again, and watched the first two movies, and the first two movies can suck my balls.

Pew, pew. 'Murica.

A perverted sort of forgiveness

Only God Forgives hasn't gotten the most positive reception in recent cinematic memory. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, perhaps the hype established by its precursors Drive and Val Halla Rising set the pedestal too high. Or perhaps it is merely undeserving of that level of praise. Now, I'm a Refn fan - as the handful of saps who actually read this blog could easily attest to - and may be subject to bias. But hell, the benefit of writing an open source blog is my opinions are, well, my own and I answer to no one. Especially since no one reads this blog, aha!

In any case, Only God Forgives is... interesting. Gosling has been criticized for his performance - or lack of performance - and this is probably due to his frequent portrayal of similarly withdrawn, almost entirely internalized characters. I believe it was more successful in Drive because his character was foiled by a very alive, emotional, and turbulent atmosphere of supporting characters. Only God Forgives' atmosphere is so flatly hostile it is like a desert of the heart. It is a heavily discomforting experience.

This is what the film achieves, more than anything. The pacing, tone and cinematography are carried through the film's body like a blood disease. I can't think of a single scene in which violence was not - if not the overt visual stimulus of a scene - the underlying theme. You feel the movie more than you watch it, if that makes any sense. Now don't get me wrong, art for the sake of art in my experience is usually shlock and I'm not disagreeing with the legions of cinemaphiles who've panned Only God Forgives as an excessive and even pornographic snuff film (watch Gosling fuck with his fists!) - just laying out what worked for me.

It actually reminds me of Kubrick's The Shining in that it functions on the same level - something subliminal and emotional rather than overt storytelling. The ghosts and violence merely dressing up what Kubrick was saying about the human condition. Actually, I was also reminded of Black Swan - the director achieves what Darren Aranofsky achieves on an emotional level. I walked out of Black Swan feeling filthy and guilty and morally bankrupt in face of the opposite sex. Only God Forgives is more surreal though - if Hollywood had a bad dream it likely would be directed by Nicolas Winding Refn.

Equating it to a cinematic nightmare seems appropriate to me - the film is composed entirely of narrative and atmospheric perversions which gnarl common cinema tropes. The jacket reads like a standard Hollywood cop flick; brother murdered, revenge, city. But (spoilers) the brother is killed after having murdered a 16 year old girl. The city is foreign and not North American, its values and mechanics alien, and so hued in blood and neon it makes a better Baator than Bangkok. The family values are grossly skewed - our protagonists are criminals at best and thugs otherwise and the ugly, Oepidal relationship between Julian (Gosling) and his mother is neither pleasant to watch nor contemplate. The fragmented relationship he tries to establish with Mai, a local prostitute, is sterile. There is a distinct absence of love as most audiences would typically understand it. Our characters navigate by a dark ethical compass. It is impossible to relate to them on any other level but by the lowest human compunction. The film and imagery move forward with the deliberate and inevitable onslaught of a nightmare until you can't quite remember if you chose to watch it in the first place or if you're just waiting to wake up.

Lieutenant Chang ismy favourite character in this movie. Cam, if you watch this, watch it for him. He is more a force of nature than a human being - he dominates the script like the Old Testament God. His presence enforces Julian and his family as farang (the Thai equivalent of gai jin) and their utter hopelessness. He sings beautiful Thai karaoke. He is the devil. I am reminded of Sheriff Cooley in O Brother Where Art Thou; fires reflected against the soulless mirror sheen of his sunglasses. "The law? The law is a human institution." Lt. Chang deals in justice, and in Bangkok justice is divine.

In any case, I'm going to try and update this more often - a whole summer of work has granted me little time to sit down and - ah fuck it. There's always time to sit down and write. And at the end of the day, I can just write about work, can't I? Maybe I will.

Ciao.

You were named after the dog!?

"70 percent of all archaeology takes place in a library - research, and reading..."

I'm going to take a moment to talk about the Indiana Jones movies, and maybe not so much the movies themselves as to why I love the whole concept so damn much. One of the reasons I placed so much value into going to University when I was younger was because I loved Indiana Jones (guess who wanted to be an archaeologist/paleontologist when he grew up? C'mon, guess). So many action heroes are just thugs with biceps (especially nowadays) it's refreshing and a depressing rarity to find an action hero that isn't pandering to a big dumb audience - one that, in fact, has a doctorate and teaches at a small-time university. Neither was this small piece of characterization a gimmick (as any characterization so often is). Indiana's higher education lent him a certain worldliness and open-mindedness (alongside masculine heroics) that if there was any Hollywood action-oriented role model you may want your kids to emulate in the slightest, there are much worst out there.

Maybe I'm reaching here. 

Thematically, the movies - the franchise - came out as pulp. It was, however, pulp of a very specific strain. There's tons of pulp; pulp fantasy (see Conan), pulp noire (see Sam Spade), pulp sci-fi (see Attack of the Fifty-Foot... whatever!), and Uma Thurman. Indiana Jones followed suit behind the kind of pulpy goodness shoveled into our faces by Doc Savage and Alan Quartermain and Benton Quest; deconstructed in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and satirized in The Venture Bros. Blending Archaeology with High Adventure and dungeon-crawling by replacing broadswords and shields with whips and revolvers. There was historical fictionalizing, set-pieces done up like real-world castles and ruins, and plots rooted into religion to ground them in our modern age. My principle issue with The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (and don't expect a good, in-depth analysis) is that the whole fucking theme is wrong. We have a movie with an old Indiana in the 1950s, post-World War II, and the options of where the story could go are limitless with a little creativity. Sure, the Last Crusade should have (for all intents and purposes) been curtains to the series, what with the good doctor drinking from the Cup of Eternal Youth and riding off into the sunset with his father and friends (I'm sorry - you haven't seen the Indiana Jones movies? What is wrong with you?). But they're just movies, let's make another one and have some fun - that's what speculative fiction is all about, right?

I'm going to avoid analyzing, and I'm also going to avoid slinging more mud on the grave of George Lucas' credibility. Yes, the inclusion of aliens was his idea. Yes, most of his ideas are bad. Yes, the only reason he was thought to have good ideas is because technological limitations and studio interference tempered his creativity to a razor sharpness. 

There was so much un-tapped potential in dealing with the Soviet Union and post-WW2 Indy and wealth of unexplored archaeological plot-devices. The Spear of Loginus, the Terracota warriors of Red China? 

There a CGI fight scene for you, Lucas you fat assh-*

What about sets somewhere in friggin Russia or Instanbul, Islamic religious artefacts? What about Sputnik? That would be leaning dangerously close to the James Bond pulp, but still - what about Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine? 

What I'm getting at here is there's a difference between religion and folklore in the same way James Frazer illustrated there's a difference between magic, religion and science in the evolutionary cycle of human civilization. One is slightly more credible than the other, and religion is second only to science. Aliens and UFOs and friggin Roswell are American folklore, and the whole Mayan thing is too unpopular and bizarre and clumsy to work. This defeats two inherent and formulaic concepts integral to the Indiana franchise; its credibility and its exotic setting. The first seems kind of eye-brow raising, but if the good doctor's adventures can be treated as fiction-fantasy-whatever, they can certainly be treated as hard rather than soft - using actual historical reference material for their plots, actual cities and citing religious mythology as their plot devices. This in addition to Indiana's grit as a character (his non-superhero superheroism); in that he can be hurt, is fallible, makes mistakes, loses his temper; lend the series a benefit-of-the-doubt sort of credibility. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with its lame UFOs and CGI monkeys becomes Yet Another National Treasure Movie. 

To speak to the latter; crucial to the Jones story is an exotic setting in which it must take place. North America is boring. The world is so much more interesting. It's a childish message, sure, but it consistently got its point across in the old trilogy as the time spent on North American shores was more often than not limited to a few expository scenes. Bringing North American folklore into the plot deviates from the formula which is a crucial component of the franchise. Bringing politics to the mix also denigrates that flawless wordly character Indiana embodies. I loved Temple of Doom. I've been to the Third-World and I appreciated the depiction of the small village in fictional India (I emphasize the fictional country of India which exists for no other purposes than to have an adventure and is loosely based off the actual country of India**). I love the eyball soup scene - I love how Indiana so casually eats his meal and discusses politics with the Maharajah while Willie loses her mind in the culture shock and acts grossed out and immature; it adds to that intelligent worldliness I keep going on about. It's an exotic location! 

Enough of Indiana Jones has seeped into, say, Dungeons & Dragons and the entire dungeon-crawling industry, too. The traps, the temples, the mine-cart rides... 

I think the whole point of this article was so I could write about how much I love Indiana Jones. Seriously, read the quotes page at imdb and tell me that's not good writing. 

*Lucas' original ideas for the Indiana Jones movies involved subterranean dinosaur Lost World and were so far removed from what clearly worked in Raiders it becomes questionable as to what point executives continued trusting him with script ideas

**The word "racist" is thrown around so much about shlock like Temple of Doom it gets on my nerves. Who is taking these movies so seriously? It's pulp fiction! If you find yourself under the impression that this is an accurate depiction of the Hindu people and that they eat monkey brains in India it's because you don't know any better, and you should. 

Swiftly goes the sword-play

"I will succeed to your throne — but what good is that? What good is anything?"

— Valgard

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is a rarity in popular speculative fiction in that it is one of the few works not influenced by Tolkien. Published in 1954, it hit the market around the same time as The Fellowship of the Ring and offers a very alternate lens through-which to view its genre.

While Tolkien dealt heavily in establishing an English mythology fashioned after its Norse counter-parts, Anderson deals heavily in Norse mythology; grimly so. The Broken Sword is soaked with blood and loss and tragedy and all the while lays under the shadow of the great doom which so perpetually hangs over the Norse cosmos.

I'll admit I wasn't exactly bucking at the fence to read this book; my perception of Tolkien and pre-Tolkien fantasy is of that rather Victorian, academic prose which stutters across the page with an almost audible clattering of type-keys. It's an unfair generalization; Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet both came out of that era, but hey, Tolkien's prose doesn't exactly leap off the page - at least not to me. The novel opens with a weighty nod to the great Scandinavian Eddas - "There was a man called Orm the Strong, a son of Ketil Asmundsson who was a great landsman in the north of Jutland. The folk of Ketil had dwelt in Himmerland as long as men remembered, and were mighty landowners. The wife of Ketil was Asgerd, who was a leman child of Ragnar Hairybreeks. Thus Orm came of good stock, but as he was the fifth living son of his father there could be no large inheritance for him..." And from there it quickly blisters the page and finger as the plot picks up.

Poul Anderson writes with that same frantic energy that Robert E. Howard and Jack London and Fritz Lieber and the pulp authors seem to embody. The Broken Sword is stripped of superfluous materials, energetic and economic. Clocking in and just around 300 pages it takes the reader from the iron-aired coasts of Jutland to deep, English forests, to the wintry wastes of Trollheim and the fae beauty of Alfheim and faery and finally on a doomed quest deep into the icy hell of Jotunheim, Giant Land at the end of the world, and back. Anderson strikes from this sorcerous tapestry larger-than-life heroes and villains and damsels and everything in between. The two pivotal characters are Skafloc Elf-Foster and Valgard Berserker. The former is the son of Orm the Strong, stolen from home at birth by Imric, earl of England's elfs to be fostered and raised as a weapon; the latter the hybrid changeling left in his wake. Both characters develop deeply over the course of the narrative and both are suitably deformed by Fate and forces far greater than the mortal and immortal powers operating on earth.

Valgard is born with Skafloc's likeness, but bereft of empathic reflex and human sensibilities. He is cast adrift from his heritage; soulless and doomed to a death without afterlife. His descent into villainy is merely a reflex action, vengeance in accordance with Norse conceptualizations of honour upon the forces which brought him into the world so twisted. Skafloc seems at first blessed but quickly is cast in a similar light. Both are manipulated by witches, elfs, trolls, Aesir and Jotun. Like the mythic heroic figures of the actual Sagas they struggle fruitlessly against their destinies, often their principles sink them even deeper to their doom.

I absolutely devoured this book - occasionally without chewing, as I am wont to do - I will have to re-read at some point and savour some of Anderson's spectacular prose a little more deliberately. There are so many brilliantly pioneered concepts here it's difficult for me to begin talking about them. The concept of faery - that it co-exists almost inter-dimensionally with Earth, invisible save to those with witch-sight - that the bluffs and knolls, mountain faces, or crag-ridden fells of the European countryside could reveal themselves to be prismatic Aelfheim kingdoms in just the right light... the elves, similar and yet drastically different from Tolkien's, more like their mythological counter-parts, lithe and alien - trolls are here splendidly horrific.

I'm going to digress momentarily here by stating that the female characters are handled with excellence unexpected from a work written in the 1950s, and when love is introduced into the narrative it is as believable and tragic as can be expected. The Broken Sword can be seen as a kind of fractured bildungsroman in its own way, with its human characters becoming adult and less vulnerable than their childhood selves through layered tragedies and missteps until they are barely recognizable from those to which we were introduced in the early chapters.

Great heroes perform great deeds, exalt in victories and suffer defeat; there is a frantic war between all beings of faerie, from Chinese demons who can only move in straight lines to more Euro-familiar dryads and Greco-Roman fauns. Neil Gaiman's American Gods must have picked up aspects of this, and Moorcock's doomed hero Elric seems far less unique and interesting in the shadow of the novel which influenced him. There is also high adventure of a thrilling sort - I don't want this appraisal of the book to come as a doomy, gloomy, ponderous shamble into unearthly tombs. When Skafloc sets out in a long-boat alongside the Irish sea-god Mananan to seek out the frozen bluffs of Jotunheim beyond world's end and find the blinded Giant who can re-forge the broken blade with spells and fire, my hair was standing on end. Poul Anderson is at his best when he's writing no holds barred Heroic fantasy and this is probably one of the better examples I've picked up and put down.

It takes a certain amount of skill to write such dismal subject matter but move the plot along so fantastically as to have your reader grin broadly the whole way. It's a testament to the fact that stories need not be morally uplifting to be uplifting at all. Stories need to be true to their characters. If things don't or do work out in the end, it should be because the characters' flaws are taken into account. It's what allows a reader to sympathize and emotionally invest in the narrative.

I now interrupt this review to explain to you how the ending of Predators (2010) is a perfect example of how to fail in this regard.

Spoiler alert.

As the movie (which wasn't at all that bad) came to a close, I expected it  (contentedly) to end like so: Adrian Brody's asshole character takes off on his own in an attempt to escape the planet, while leaving the more noble IDF-chick to defend the wounded Topher Grace. Brody's character has been an amoral, selfish mercenary throughout, and in terms of his character arc this really should have been the last straw pushing him past the moral event horizon. At this point, Brody should have been killed horribly (either shot out of the sky while taking off, or caught, or eaten by some loose plot thread; or whatever). The IDF-chick should either have then died defending Topher Grace, or survived and as the credits rolled looked up at the falling parachutes signifying another hunting season and another trial.

Why?

Because it is not enough to make moral choices under the pretext that everything will turn out alright; moral choices are made because they are morally right. By refusing to abandon Topher Grace, the IDF-chick deviates from the course of self-preservation and becomes heroic. Brody cements himself as a irredeemable coward and his future ceases to matter. What kind of guidance do young audiences get out of a plot-line like this? That you can be as much of a selfish scumbag as you want your whole life so long as you perform one good act at its curtain call? In the theatric ending, Topher Grace is revealed to be a serial killer and in true soppy, pedantic Hollywood fashion Adrian Brody comes back guns-blazing in a fit of out-of-character guilt directed by a moral compass that never existed to save her. I'm not going to delve much deeper into my discomfort with Christian notions of redemption and morality. After Phillip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 he began studying the psychological roots of 'evil' and heroism and concluded true heroism as a deviation, the moral equivalent of swimming against the current, sort of echoing the old 'men who do nothing' adage. The video can be found here. In Greek mythology heroes are punished for their crimes - Heracles must seek penance for the murder of his wife and son; he is not redeemed on any other account. I think it is a far nobler concept.

But what matters here is characterization, I'll stop digressing. In any case, I really should be writing a paper right now. Ta!

80s Film Noire

"You give me a time, and a place; I give you a five minute window."

The Man With No Name concept pioneered by Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa has been emulated, paid homage too, brought to strange new places and ripped off so frequently it has become a rarity to see the concept done right. I watched Drive fueled by heavy recommendation from friends and peers and in all honesty came pretty late to the show. 2011 was set a-rave by reviews of the movie and I can't quite remember what stopped me from checking it out earlier. If you're a fan of Michael Mann and the reserved, intense, drawn out fashion in which he infuses his work then Drive is a movie you shouldn't miss.

There isn't a single lackluster performance throughout and all of them revolve around the sobering gravity in which Ryan Gosling plays the driver. He is reserved and soft-spoken enough to give the impression of emotional handicap - any hint of joy breaks through his face like the sun through an overcast sky, such is the rarity. He exhibits none of the invincible characteristics of most action heroes; actually his success can be accredited to a ruthless professional attitude synchronized with vast emotional detachment. This is a movie that will only allow you to smile when it's the kind of smile that hurts. The plot unrolls with the unstoppable weight of a Greek tragedy - like the original cut of Mel Gibson's Payback - wherein every character could potentially save themselves but their natures and principles and circumstance only ensnare them deeper. Gosling is exceptionally skilled behind the wheel - the film opens with him coolly driving the escape vehicle for a heist, and evading the police not so much through a quick-cut high-intensity action sequence but by a maintenance of calm under pressure, great ingenuity, and the ruthless adherence to a sort of code or principle his profession demands. Very much like the samurai of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. The opening sequence establishes the mood and then the plot elements are introduced. The emotional triangle (I don't want to say "love" triangle because it seems to coarse a term) is established between Gosling, a young single mother and her child, and the estranged father soon-to-be released from prison.

Nicolas Winding Refn (director) is a master of showing and not telling. An intelligent audience will draw their own conclusions as to why a professional such as Gosling's character would allow themselves to be drawn into the complications of other people's lives. This is what makes Drive so god-damn compelling. The relationship with Irene (Carey Mulligan) which nevers gets off the ground, the implied guilt which compels him to unselfishly help her husband... you could say that the film almost languishes on these details but it draws you in so deep the next time violence and action occurs it seems almost an intrusion by comparison.

I'm going to take a minute here to minutely digress from Drive and speak on the presentation of violence in cinema. I mentioned before in my other blog that I often find myself obsessing over the realistic portrayal of violence in media; this is most likely because of my intimate exposure to actual violence across the pond. Stylistic liberties notwithstanding (and even then, there is a line between stylistic violence done right - 300 - and done wrong - Kick Ass) I often despise the way in which violence is thrown in our faces. There is nothing cool about it, and I'm a professional in terms of its application. There are dark, biological compulsions within us that drive us towards the violent resolution of conflict and as a First World Nation it should be our prerogative to seek alternate resolutions or use the controlled application of violence (military intervention) as a last resort. When violence does break out it's often short, nasty, unexpected, brutal, and traumatic. Anyone who's ever witnessed a street fight would do well to analyse the reactions of bystanders - stunned, mortified, shaken - if you're not too entranced by the spectacle itself. Alluring and toxic, like most dangerous things in our world. When Martin Scorsese presents violence, he often does so within two precedents; that violence is an inevitable part of everyday human experience, and that is shocking and traumatic. Take the department store fight scene from The Departed; Di Caprio's character brutally assaults two Italian gangsters with unapologetic brutality. The scene ends with Di Caprio gouging one of the men with a coat-rack while pop music plays in the background. Just another day in Boston, the music suggests. 

In Drive I don't think there was a single violent act that wasn't discomforting or shocking; and this is largely due to Refn's masterful use of pacing. The long pauses in between action sequences and the emotional depth and complexity these sequences have draw us so deep into the moods and interactions and motivations and curiosities and dramas of the characters that we are shaken out of our stupor when someone is say, stabbed viciously in the eye with a fork and then repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife. Gosling gets out of fights and kills the way an animal escapes and fights in the wild. He rarely pulls a punch because his life and the lives of others are at stakes. That being said, when he staggers away covered in blood we aren't pumping our fists or laughing; we are thrilled and sobered by the intensity of the scene. 

Drive is a fantastic movie, but don't expect to leave the theater or your couch with particularly uplifted spirits afterwards. The film is 80s homage and film-noire at its best and most unexpected; everything from the lighting, costumes, and To Live and Die in L. A-style credits font screams style. With its sparse dialogue and lack of exposition, the narrative is largely told through the shadows of its characters and their actions rather than directly and is stronger because of it. In the blog I write with Cam I recently explored the various ways in which villainy is outright perceived in fiction. I failed to touch upon another way, in that there is no villain, merely antagonists; in Drive there is not a single unsympathetic character, only characters whose nature may upset our sensibilities. The villains are only villains in that they act against our protagonists and their successes and failures only provoke sadness at the circumstantial nihilism that sets the stage. 

Before I step out I will mention that the movie also has a brilliant soundtrack and if we're going to talk about the mood Drive establishes, what more do I really need to say?

  

Oh, Crooked Warden

"Thieves prosper. The rich remember."

I'm not enthusiastic enough to say that the Gentlemen Bastard novels are great works in the genre of fantasy literature, but they are certainly a blast to read. The prose is very neat and descriptive and immediately accessible. I picked up The Lies of Locke Lamora on a bit of a whim (a small grain of sand had been planted by either hearsay or a glanced-at review), and found myself reticent to begin the first book. The story takes a little bit of a kick to get moving in the case of both novels, and likewise both novels hit a sort of phase line whereby the gravitas of the plots become inescapable. Though I inched through the first hundred pages or so, I ferociously gorged myself on the meat of it through til the end.

Both books are worth a sit down and a read. Red Seas takes a while to get going, but when it does - when the book takes to the high-seas, reading it occupied my every waking moment. The finales tend to, in a logical tradition, come down like stacks of cards around our protagonists' heads.

I'm worried that the series is going to grow to big for its skin. I like this whimsical tale about thieves and rogues and pirates, not as well put together a bildungsroman as Rothfuss' Kingkiller but endearing nonetheless. There enormous morale and ethical conundrums as to the motivations of the characters, conflicting largely with the period - but hey, it's fantasy, and that can be fun enough. If Lynch is to be commended for anything, it is the elaborate world he is creating - one city at a time, blending together artifice and alchemy so damn near anything is possible. The city of Camorr, specifically, still looms like a monolith in my imagination - with its crystalline cat-walks and glass bridges and canals. Part of me wants to suggest that, aesthetically, some of the Bastard books may borrow from Final Fantasy. Who's to say.