posted by Scene -- @ 8:26 PM

The Secret Lives of Men
"Brokeback Mountain" and "A History of Violence"

The best part about Brokeback Mountain is not that it deconstructs and completes to its obvious conclusion the homoeroticism of the Western, and of buddy movies in general, but that it reconstructs masculinity in a way that is both touching and tough. The men of Brokeback, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gylennhaal) are far from fey, grunting and mumbling and unloading their fists when they can't find the words. Their sex scenes play like fight scenes, and their fight scenes are heated and sexual.

Heath Ledger especially captures the repressed and confused emotions – at times you can't even understand what the character is saying as much as he himself can't understand what he is trying to say. He explodes kinetically, jumping on Jack and tearing his clothes off, punching a wall violently, drunkenly attacking a man in a car. His urge towards physical action contradicts and perhaps is a symptom of his complacent conservatism. In his own life, he lets sleeping dogs lie. If not for Jack’s insistence on and organization of their many rendezvous, Ennis would prefer to live a simple life devoid of passion and full of honest, quiet work.

The women of Brokeback play the sidelines, confined to traditional roles of femininity. Wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, they hover around the males like satellites, receiving signals but never comprehending them. Michelle Williams’ Alma Del Mar eventually steps up (both actress and character) and rains on the boys’ parade. It’s a forceful performance from a previously vanilla actress. Anne Hathaway also surprises, breaking away from her virginal princess roles, shockingly baring both her intensity and her breasts.

Gylennhaal bridges the gap, playing the rugged romantic who doesn’t understand why things can’t be the way they seem while lying under the stars. Over the span of time the film encompasses, his character seems to age the most, rings growing under his already sunken eyes, and facial hair obscuring his boyishness. Ennis, on the other hand, doesn’t age so much as wilt, hunched over with frustration.

In one scene that brings together these themes of masculinity, Ennis brawls with two bigger guys beneath a fireworks display, the lights popping in the sky like patriotic exclamation points to Ennis’ strikes. In this moment Ennis is as rugged as any western hero, raging against the oafish behaviour that has come to define his gender in this genre and the country it represents. Like any western before it, Brokeback Mountain puts forth a credible archetype of “real man” – restoring the term “real” to its dictionary definition and shrugging off the tired signifiers its carried on its back for too long.

Whereas Brokeback Mountain moves masculinity into the realm of romance, A History of Violence moves in the opposite direction, into the familiar realm of hyper-violence and heterosexuality. The film’s title can refer to any number of things, from the secret past of Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), to the past films of director David Cronenberg, to the history of Hollywood or even the United States, and most probably refers to all those things and more.

The history of violence is more than cultural, after all, found in any civilization in any era of history, and found deep within any person no matter how pacifist in creed. Whether it’s mistakenly raising your voice in anger, pragmatically disposing of an enemy, consenting in rough intercourse, or raging back against the schoolyard bully, each degree is explored with the same earnest and urgency by Cronenberg.

Mortensen plays Stall, an All American Father with a beautiful wife and precocious kids. He is a quaint small-business owner, serving coffee, friend to everyone, all sheepish smiles and playful banter. But when some out-of-town late night muggers seize his diner after closing hours, threatening to injure one of his female patrons, Stall jumps into action, skilfully dispatching of his enemies and saving the day.

A media whirlwind ensues and engulfs Stall and his family. He’s not one for the spotlight and does his best to lay low until it all “blows over”. But some shady men catch wind of Stall’s heroism and come snooping around to find out just how and why Tom is so good at killing people. Tom has no answers, or at least, is not willing to give to any.

Ed Harris plays Carl, the lead bad guy with a horribly scarred eye socket. The visible history of violence as read on his face betrays Carl’s calm exterior. He’s too calm, just as Tom is too nice. The violence that is Carl’s and Tom’s (nee, Joey, as Carl insists is Tom’s real name) is chillingly practical, a means to an end. This detached demeanour goes hand in hand with their violence being by far the worst of all the characters’. They actually kill people, and unlike, say, Tom’s son, they show no more remorse other than for how the dead bodies inconvenience them.

Violence is a man’s game here, as Edie Stall’s/Tom’s wife’s (Maria Bello) chapter deals with sex and positioning. Where in her first scene she takes the lead, pleasuring Tom and playing to his fantasies of traditional femininity (a teenage cheerleader), her later scene with “Joey” is rough and jagged, playing perhaps to her fantasies of traditional masculinity. By the later scenes and expositions of violence, her character, and indeed all females, are absent from the film. Whether the film can only see women through sexuality, motherhood or victimization, or is in fact merely acknowledging that this is the traditional viewpoint of Hollywood, is regretfully unclear.

Mortensen skilfully switches from Tom to Joey, the difference being as slight as adjusting the enunciation of his words. The question arises as to whether a person can really change, or do actions of the past stay with and define you forever. Mortensen makes a strong case that you can indeed become a different person, though eerily so. Tom’s compartmentalization of his actions and abilities into two separate people is not well received by his family -- Edie wretches in the bathroom when she first hears him refer to Joey in the third person.

Like Spike Jonze’s Adaptation before it, A History of Violence unfortunately and yet necessarily becomes the film it is dissecting. The third act transforms into an all-male action flick, and when by its conclusion it tries again to reorganize its characters and aesthetic into a “normal” domestic setting, the result is uneasy and appropriately forced.

Jef.Catapang

posted by Scene -- @ 1:00 AM

Sin City

Aptly named, Basin City (Sin City for short) is a gutter of debauchery. Guns, torture, cigarettes, nudity, and ninja shuriken, all play a part in the film version of Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novels. Credited to two directors and featuring a guest appearance from a third, using a comic book for both a script and a storyboard, adapted from a comic book that itself hyperbolised film aesthetics, filmed on digital on a soundstage with an entirely CGI’d background, Sin City is not just post-modern, it’s post-everything. It’s post-caring. The aim here is not to deconstruct, reconstruct, reference, comment on, invent, or reminisce. Sin City simply is what it is: visceral and shockingly new, despite its familiarity.

Rodriguez and Miller’s obsessive attention to detail in bringing the comic to life drapes the film in rigid artifice. Driving scenes are rear projected and the exaggerated chiaroscuro lighting is always just so off. While some shots feel organic, others are forced and awkward, the directors tailoring their compositions to the askew perspective of Miller’s pencils. Aesthetically, it’s the most beautifully expressionistic film of recent memory. Even the tired effect of dabbing black-and-white images with spots of colour works well, whether chilling (Becky/Alexis Bledel’s haunting blue eyes) or humorous (Dwight/Clive Owen’s red Converse shoes). It’s an uncompromising style, and to the film’s credit it never gets stale.

Sin City the movie is held together by a vague structure, its plot strung together from several stories and volumes of Sin City the comic book series. Characters do roam in and out of each other’s stories, but it is the overarching sensibility and style that is the real story. Every revenge story begets another revenge story, women are sexualised and punished, and men are backstabbed or castrated (or both). It plods relentlessly, a marching parade of hookers with hearts of gold and men with grit teeth and cocked guns.

It would be a mistake for one to read too much into all this, searching for a commentary of some sort, for Sin City is all too sincere about its heroes and their characterizations. True, everyone is coloured a shade of grey in a black-and-white world, but this is more for looking cool than anything else. The film clearly chooses sides, and despite everyone’s penchant for sinning, there are clear angels and devils.

After enduring numerous deaths and bloodbaths the film is surprisingly able to dig deeper for its conclusion and actually shock you with further violence, both sexual and combative. It reaches a fever pitch, Bruce Willis’ Hartigan taking one last wheezing stand against the embodiment of Sin City’s deviance, That Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl). Hartigan endures physical punishment after physical punishment, all in the name of redemption, protecting one girl where he failed to protect others. He pleads for Nancy (Jessica Alba) to not scream, for it is audible victimization that gets That Yellow Bastard off.

In the end, That Yellow Bastard is castrated and disposed of, though instead of allowing Sin City’s wall of too-rigid black-and-white dominos to continue falling, Hartigan takes his own life, removing himself from the circle of revenges. But despite the nobility of his intentions, the cycle begins anew nonetheless; another female to be punished, another male to kill and then be killed. No matter how its citizens may struggle with their morality or against their fates, Sin City - as location, story, and text - remains bigger than the arcs of its characters.

Jef.Catapang

posted by Scene -- @ 10:50 AM

The Constant Gardener

Want to find out if your favourite independent/minority/international director has sold out to the Hollywood system? There are a number of litmus tests you could run, a number of telling questions you could ask. For example, does their new film feature beautiful white people saving the lives of brown-skinned secondary characters? Check.

But be careful with what assumptions you carry into The Constant Gardener. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles follows up his stunning City of God with a tale that is both global and introspective, both formulaic and non-conformist. It’s a hard film to categorize, which, in tandem with the criminally misleading title, explains in part how this gem of a film failed to garner the audience it deserved.

It’s a love story wrapped in a political thriller, starring Ralph Fiennes as the reserved diplomat and Tony Blair apologist, Justin Quayle, and Rachel Weisz as his passionate left-wing activist wife, Tessa. By establishing their relationship, the film ties both ends of the spectrum together and pulls, yanking their matrimonial knot into a political noose. And while other films tack on a love interest in order to appease the marketing department, the romance between the Quayles is the heart of The Constant Gardener, using Justin’s love for Tessa as a necessary jump-off into the world of government corruption and corporate dealings in the Third World.

Rachel Weisz exudes class and compassion, and it is her performance that anchors the film. Even as Justin delves deeper into the mysteries, Weisz’s Tessa reminds us that without love and compassion none of the policy-making or activism matters. It’s a lesson learned too late and too painfully for Justin, whom Fiennes unravels with sublime subtlety, carrying him from calm plant pruning in drab offices to sweaty, panicked car chases through unmanageable terrain.

Filmed on location and among locals, Meirelles does not create a world so much as captures it. The story is superimposed upon the reality of the situation, which results in beautiful, sometimes incongruous images, and a tension as fascinating as the story itself. “Everybody here needs help, we can’t help everyone,” says Justin to Tessa at one point, unconvincingly excusing themselves from helping a couple of locals, their otherness and subsequent guilt mirroring that of the film crew and actors themselves.

But that is also what separates The Constant Gardener from the rest of its class: it shows regard for accountability, does not dismiss or denounce the factor of guilt, and stays remarkably grounded in the human aspect of the story. The Constant Gardener ends on a note that is not only unapologetically polemical, but also unmistakably and beautifully romantic. In the end -- unlike with so many other rote thrillers -- the white characters rightfully and insightfully fail to save the day, and all we have left are our own bleeding hearts, newly beating.

Jef.Catapang

posted by Scene -- @ 12:02 AM

This is the Remix: "Sarkar" and "2046"

A lot of films are about film. Whether cumbersome Hollywood remakes, movies about making movies, or movies that reference other movies in a post-modern game of tag, cinema today is all about the meta, forever wink-winking and nudge-nudging us in the darkened theatre.

Results of this trend vary, and while the more dismal of these films are usually hack-work, the better of them gleefully play in the pool of cinematic history, recontextualizing and adding new meaning to the collective memories we share as children of the movies.

In two very different ways, both Ram Gopal Varma’s Sarkar and Kar-Wai Wong’s 2046 cannot exist in a vacuum. Each film carries with it a distinct recognition of and reliance on past films, and without having seen the films from which they sprang, it is easy for the viewer to not get what is going on, or to miss the point entirely. This is cinema at its most voracious and insular, demanding not only your attention but your dedication as well.

With Sarkar, Varma completes his “Underground” trilogy by remaking Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, this time in Hindi and set in India. Though I am unfamiliar with the rest of Varma’s work, the general consensus among fans and critics seems to be that this film is one of Varma’s most aesthetically beautiful. It’s not hard to see, with Sarkar’s sublime combination of lush colours and striking drabness, spotted with white fabrics that burn holes into the screen and through our retinas.

Breathtaking visuals aside, adapting a film that appears on any critic’s list of Best Movies of All Time seems unnecessary and destined for irrelevance. Unlike, say, Quentin Tarantino, whose homages are mostly of films that nobody has heard of, Varma goes straight for the canonical jugular. This type of adaptation is more akin to what Hollywood often does with hit foreign films, keeping the same plot and general narrative, recasting the roles with white American actors, and arbitrarily moving the setting to somewhere in the U.S.

It is the recasting that works best here, as Varma (wink-wink) casts real-life father/son actors Amitabh and Abhishek Bachchan in the Marlon Brando and Al Pacino roles respectively. Watching the two play off each other is truly a wonder, and it is their chemistry that buoys much of Sarkar through the deepwater it gets itself into. Amitabh plays Subhash Nagare, aka “Sarkar”, a politician/hero for the masses/gangster who simmers and stares with great intensity. Where Brando mused and pontificated, Amitabh keeps a rage seething just below the surface that is intangible and unsettling. Like Brando’s Don Corelone, Amitabh’s Nagare erases the line between hero and villain, at once caring yet caustic, eliciting both fear and empathy from the characters and viewer.

Nagare uses his own means to bring justice for people who cannot turn to the government for help. This is Sarkar’s world, one of blurred and slanted morality, where orthodox religion and constitutional laws play a part, but both remain in the corner of the frame as if the lawmakers and gods themselves can’t call who is right and who is wrong.

It has always confounded me when Hollywood remade foreign films without any regard for their cultural context. Like when Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance? was remade with Jennifer Lopez and Richard Gere, the removal of Japan killed what made the original film so energetic and cathartic. Without the repression of Japanese society as the backdrop, the movements of Lopez and Gere were much less, well, moving.

In Sarkar, without America (the epitome of capitalism and fatalistic idealism) swirling with the characters’ old-world values and Italian sensibilities in a melting pot of the American Dream gone wrong, what we are left with is an empty shell of plot, one size fits all. While the swelling musical score is fantastic, the costumes and production design brimming with beautiful Indian baubles and set pieces, there really is no valuable cultural shifting going on. It’s homage and nothing else, a cover song.

With Kar Wai Wong’s 2046 what we have is not so much a cover but a remix. Unlike Varma, Wong draws from his own films for influence, taking past themes, images, and even characters, and refashioning them into something entirely new and yet dependant upon the past for recognition. Self aware, Wong works this into his stories, which often deal with chance meetings and de ja vu: to the characters as well as the audience everything feels like it has happened before.

2046 sees the return of Chow Mo Wan (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, reprising his role from In the Mood for Love), now much less of a romantic and more of a playboy, sporting a suave moustache and serial-dating his way through life. Where Mood stretched a single relationship painfully and without consummation, 2046 runs through several of Chow’s relationships, relishing in sex and physicality in contrast to the previous film’s restraint.

In Mood Chow met and fell in love with Su Li-Zhen Chan (Maggie Cheung). In their spare time they worked on a martial arts serial novel, furthering the film’s sense of nostalgia by immersing themselves in a romanticised past that never really existed. In 2046, Chow writes not of the past but of the future (the titular year 2046), and yet his futuristic tales deal with the literal past — his relationship with Li-Zhen.

This temporal palindrome is one of Wong’s recurrent motifs, and through all of his films there is a yearning for what is not there, no longer there, or never was there. His fetish for clocks and constant references to years and dates is post-modern and yet prescient. Often his films express anxiety over the reunification of Hong Kong with Mainland China, which occurred in 1997 (see: the expiration date on the cans of pineapples in Chungking Express). In The Mood for Love ended in 1966, the year of the start of the Cultural Revolution. 2046, both the room number of Wong and Li-Zhen’s meeting place and the year that Chow writes about, is forty-nine years after 1997 — the year before the end of the fifty-year grace period allowed to Hong Kong to govern itself before China takes over.

Obsessed with anxiety and nostalgia, Wong’s characters struggle with the falseness of the future and past. But Wong takes this too far in 2046, throwing time to the wind, confusingly jumping back and forth between the future and the present and being only about the past.

Which begs the question: what is love at first sight anyways (Wong’s favourite trope), if not a nostalgic feeling of wonderful de ja vu? This is what made In the Mood for Love such a complete, enduring work, that its love story could stand alone from all the grander cinematic cartwheeling. 2046, on the other hand, though stunning visually and somewhat fascinating, fails to engage on any level other than intellectually. Like Chow’s character, the film is perhaps romantic underneath, somewhere, yet cold to touch and not living up to its potential.

Sarkar follows too closely to its original’s story, and never once lives up to it. Much of its strength and power comes only from referencing the The Godfather, which lingers in the memory and fills in the holes that Sarkar cannot fill itself. 2046, on the other hand, strays too far from its original, presenting a once-loved character as an unrecognisable misanthrope, and trading the heartfelt love story for a clinical, cold examination of human beings who don’t act like human beings. Both films, while perhaps unsuccessful, are interesting and noteworthy, but without the source material to fill them, these buckets are either half full or half empty, depending on whether or not you’re already a fan.

Jef Catapang.

posted by Scene -- @ 2:13 PM

All Ages: Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle"

(originally published in Halfway Magazine)

Hayao Miyazaki is the most imaginative and consistent filmmaker in the world today. Although it is sad that he is often relegated to the sub-genre of animation — Spirited Away should have been in the Best Picture category — it is of note that, along with Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles) and others, animation post-Eisner’s Disney is being lifted from the mass-production assembly line and back into the respectable realm of auteur filmmaking.

Howl’s Moving Castle is the latest feather in Miyazaki’s cap. It is a precious film, so overflowing with ideas and visuals that our boring flesh and blood and concrete world could never contain its charm. Good animation possesses an innate precocious sensibility that even CGI effects are at pains to achieve, which in part explains why the live action Fantastic Four was so far from the bar set by Bird’s similarly super-powered and family-centered The Incredibles. Aside from marketing forces, it is this precociousness that drives so much animation to feature children characters. Miyazki in his old age ingeniously stretches this sensibility to the world of senior citizens.

Castle features Sophie (Emily Mortimer), a young haberdasher who spends her free time making hats for herself from straw and lace. It is a clear day in her unnamed village when the famed Moving Castle comes limping through the countryside. Her fellow workers fawn and fan themselves in an echo of modern-day celebrity worship, sharing rumors of Howl (Christian Bale) and his reputation for eating the hearts of young beautiful girls. Howl’s castle is a wonder in itself, a hulking mass of conjoined parts that move independently of each other, bobbing and breathing, brought to life by smokestacks and pulleys and four tiny legs.

When Sophie unknowingly runs into Howl on the street, she’s taken off her feet literally and figuratively. Howl is equally enamored with the young girl, but it is his attraction to her that draws the wrath of the jealous Wicked Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall). Jealous of her youth and beauty, the witch places a curse on Sophie that transforms her into a ninety-year-old woman (now voiced by Jean Simmons).

The most remarkable thing about Sophie’s transformation is the ease with which she accepts it. At first frightened by her reflection, it is mere minutes later that Sophie says “oh well, at least now my clothes will match me”, and goes walking slowly through the streets ready to start a new phase in her life. She approaches old age with a simple curiosity that grows to a state of joy and contentment.

She seeks out Howl and his magical powers, and ends up working in his castle as a caretaker and housekeeper. There, she becomes the latest addition to an oddball family, each with their own personal curse: the fire-demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal) who must keep the castle powered and will kill Howl if he stops burning; Markyl, Howl’s apprentice who is talented beyond his years but must adopt an old man’s beard in order for people to take him seriously; Turnip-Head, a former prince now scarecrow who bounces around on a stick, following Sophie, and often landing upside-down in a ditch; and Howl himself, who’s heart has gone missing, is dodging the King’s war draft, and transforms into a winged creature at night to fight untold of demons.

Miyazaki draws together many elements that flesh out Howl’s universe. From a political landscape rife with real world issues, to a detailed geography featuring several countries and even an otherworldly dimension, to a believable network of witches and wizards and demons, Howl’s world is much more contained and structured than those seen in Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away. This, however, may also be the film’s drawback, as the viewer spends too much time keeping tabs of everyone’s alliances, where they came from, figuring out whom is cursed by whom, who transforms into what, and remembering where exactly everyone is located. At its worst it can be frustrating, at its best it distracts from the wonderful story and visuals.

The idea of transformation is the central theme. The Wicked Witch of the Waste is cleverly named, for, embodying the ideals of the West, she is superficial, greedy, fat and lazy. She is carried around in a hansom cab, perpetually sweating, heavily bejeweled and ostentatious with every laboured breath. When her transformation comes she turns into a kindly old woman, at times senile, though still tunnel-visioned with greed for (literally) Howl’s heart. Her only lucid moments are those of selfish wanting.

In fact, none of the characters change too much with their metamorphosis. Howl remains childish and dashing, noble and petulant. Sophie is forever caring and kind and bottling up her frustration with her circumstances. An interesting aspect of the film is how Sophie once in awhile, temporarily, morphs back into a younger version of herself, sometimes as a teenager, sometimes seemingly in her thirties or forties, and yet it is never dwelled upon or made a cause for rejoice. Like the Moving Castle itself demonstrates, change is a part of life, and no matter where you go or what you look like, you are never anything but yourself, never anywhere but home.

Each character and their respective curse comes with an important clause: you cannot talk about your curse. Therefore, Sophie is unable to tell her new friends of her true age, Howl dashes off at night to place only Calcifer knows about, and Calcifer cannot tell Sophie the secrets of Howl or the castle. Even Turnip-Head never gets to relay his story until the end, for he no longer has a functioning mouth. Miyazaki ventures to show that in order to grow you must not dwell on the past. In demonstration, the most rewarding part of Sophie’s life starts when she is ninety years old, and Howl and Calcifer must give up the castle in order to truly find their homes.

The messages and themes of Howl’s Moving Castle may seem overly cheesy or simplistic to some, but I’m willing to bet that merely depends on your stage in life, regardless of age. The deftest stroke of Miyazaki is that he restores a sense of wonder, intelligence, grace, and respect to two age groups that are often seen as a generation off from being “real people”.

Ever the humanist, Miyazaki’s concerns and politics may not reach everyone, but even the darkest cynic or hardest realist cannot marvel at the magical visuals displayed onscreen.

Jef Catapang.

posted by Scene -- @ 7:18 PM

Fleshed: Gregg Araki's "Mysterious Skin"

(originally published in Halfway Magazine)

I’ve always been a much bigger fan of Gregg Araki than I have of his films. A Gay Asian Male (as I’m sure he’s sick of being defined as), Araki has always fought to represent the marginalized. I’m constantly delighted by his interviews, as his thoughts on film and society are to be ruminated over and remembered. But his movies, on the other hand, seem to be at most times cold and disingenuous with their almost abrasive hipness.

Mysterious Skin, however, wrestled this preconception out of my hands and tossed it to the floor like popcorn. Although flexing strenuously with Araki’s trademark punk attitude, Skin balances the more sensational aspects of Araki’s aesthetic with genuine heart and delicate performances. This is the film his fans and detractors have been waiting for, and is also the film his long under-represented characters deserved.

Perhaps tellingly, Mysterious Skin is Araki’s first film to be adapted from an outside source. Based on Scott Heim’s 1995 novel of the same name, Skin follows the separate stories of two boys who long ago shared a common sexual involvement with the same little league baseball coach. Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose relationship with “Coach” (Bill Sage) is more akin to puppy-dog romance than to child abuse, grows up to be an unapologetic prostitute who never shakes the memory of the man who first taught him about love. Brian (Brady Corbet), on the other hand, has no such romantic visions of the past. In fact, he is so traumatized by his molestation that he spends his entire time in the film attempting to fill in the gaps of his childhood memories.

Despite being a novel adaptation, Mysterious Skin encapsulates everything we’ve come to expect from Araki’s films; from the frank sexuality and staunchly queer politics, to the hipster aesthetic and characters, to even a subplot involving Araki’s preoccupation with aliens and UFOs. Indeed, it is the handling of the UFO subplot that best demonstrates Araki’s maturation as a visual storyteller.

The movie begins with a nod to E.T — with Brian watching from his kitchen window as his backyard glows and his fence vibrates — a beginning that proves to be unsettling not because of its sci-fi/horror qualities, but because of the deeper darkness it represents. The film draws eerie visual and narrative parallels between the experiences of the UFO abducted and the sexually abused. It is the perfect way to frame a child’s dark past that gets across the horrific physical intrusions while maintaining the child’s innocence and sense of wonder. Araki is able to convey the horror of the situation without robbing Brian of his interior life. It is an intricate plot weave that could have been obvious and gimmicky, but instead works well and plays beautifully.

The story of Neil, on the other hand, speaks to the more salacious side of Araki’s themes. Neil, unlike Brian, remembers every aspect of his abuse down to exacting detail. One of the film’s most memorable shots is of Neil rejoicing in the slow-motion tinkle of rainbow coloured breakfast cereal as it comes down upon his head, a snapshot sensory moment of a food fight which took place on the first night Coach made his physical advances.

Neil grows up trapped in the sexual model of young boy/older man. He tricks himself out to neighbourhood johns, all of them older, all of them lusting after Neil’s youth and sexual confidence. In these beginning scenes, Neil does not look victimized. He gets off and loves it. It never even seems to be about money. Rather, Neil is just another stir-crazy small town kid, looking for a way out of his bland suburban nightmare. When Neil finally rages at the sky and vents his angst, it has nothing to do with sex or abuse or having a fucked up childhood.

The boys’ respective storylines are kept separate, and we never see them in the same frame (except for childhood flashbacks) until the end of the film. Still, their lives intertwine. Brian, in his X-Files-ish search for the truth, learns that his abduction is connected somehow to one of his little league team members. He searches for Neil, who at this point has escaped the town and moved to New York with his best friend, Wendy (Michelle Trachtenberg). Instead of confronting Neil, Brian forms a friendship with Neil’s other good friend, Eric (Jeffrey Licon). Together, Brian and Eric explore the mystery that is Neil; Brian because of their linked past, Eric because he is in love with him.

It is Neil’s time in the Big Apple where Araki comes close to losing focus of the film. Part of why Mysterious Skin works where Araki’s other films have not is because of the small town setting and its lack of a social scene. When Neil moves to New York Araki once again succumbs to clichéd big city aesthetic. Everyone is suddenly dangerous and vacuous, the buildings and bars are ominous; and Araki uses this as a metaphor for Neil’s downward spiral. Neil’s New York clients indulge in violent and weird sex, which has the odd effect of making Coach’s paedophilia seem sweet and caring in comparison. Neil’s plunge into darkness culminates with one of his clients beating and raping him. Araki draws another visual reference here, this time with Hitchcock’s Psycho, which unlike the opening sequence seems showy and unnecessary.

Luckily, the New York section of the film does not last long and Araki does not dwell on it (we never even find out what happens to Wendy in the end). Its effects on Neil go no further than to bring him back home, where he finally meets Brian.

The issue of paedophilia is both danced around and confronted head-on. Even the actual molestation scenes are shot in a way that comforts while churning the stomach. The tight close-ups on faces and appendages fill the frame with issues most would like to never to see in such detail, and yet it is reassuring to know they were shot in a manner that enabled the young actors to act without the Coach/Bill Sage present, and perhaps even in a manner that stripped their scenes of context.

Mysterious Skin is just that, a wonderful balancing act. Araki takes on issues, stories, and even visuals that tipped too far in one direction could have proven disastrous for a movie. Even his choice in actors, with stars from TV’s 3rd Rock From the Sun and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Elisabeth Shue to boot), shows incredible insight and faith in what could have been nothing more than distracting stunt-casting.

The end of the film demonstrates just how excellent the actors are. In the end, Neil and Brian go to the house where it all went down, Coach no longer living there and all of his personal effects gone. Neil fills in Brian’s memory gaps, and Gordon-Levitt’s stone-faced delivery is cold yet caring. Each actor nails this scene (Corbet is a future Oscar winner, and you can put money on that statement), which with its tidy catharsis could have ruined the movie but instead ties everything together and cuts everything open again. The film’s last frame leaves the boys like a stain upon the screen, a deep stain that sticks to you as you leave the theatre. Whatever mystery might still be left in the air, one thing is clear — Gregg Araki has arrived as a fully-fleshed filmmaker.

Jef Catapang.

posted by Scene -- @ 11:55 AM

Chanwook Park's "Oldboy"

Check out my piece on Oldboy at Halfwaymag.com

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I’ve tried to write this review of Chanwook Park’s Oldboy several times already. (You can ask my editor about how long it took me to finally hand this in.) But no matter what I talk about I can’t seem to get at the core of the movie’s appeal. I can’t seem to say exactly what I want to say.

As an experience, Oldboy gets deep into your gut and wrenches. Much hoopla has been made over the third act’s careening turn into incest and suicide, mutilation and humiliation. And as a film, Oldboy crisps over like bacon with sharp compositions, both static and fluid. But there is something else happening deep within the film, something that goes far beyond declarations of shock, schlock, or pure visceral imagery. It’s elusive and perhaps unintentional, but I couldn’t complete a review without acknowledging its existence.

It’s difficult to put my finger on it, but there is a dialectical debate at play within the film. At one point our villain, Lee Woo-Jin (Yoo Hi-Tae), asks our protagonist, Oh Daesu (Choi Min-sik), “Do you seek revenge, or do you find the truth?” At another point Oh Daesu muses to himself, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone.” The film posits truth as something horrifying and alienating, and demonstrates this within its own disturbing final scenes. But there is an escape: the shallow pleasures of the revenge film, the comforts of laughter. It’s almost as if Oldboy outright tells you that if you can’t handle its truths then just enjoy the movie as another hipster-friendly gore-fest. Watch through the ironic eyes of a Tarantino, rather than the pained gaze of our own Oh Daesu.

And so what do you do? Do you settle for the shallower pleasures of laughter and of the bloody revenge sequences? Or do you dare go deeper and risk all that “deeper” entails? It’s of note that the film’s most talked about scene is when Oh Daesu fends off an army of henchmen with a hammer in his hand and a knife in his back. For, sublime and impressive as the sequence is, it isn’t entirely successful. Many of the punches and kicks miss their mark and thus recall fight choreography from professional wrestling. The un-pivoting side-scroll, though seeming fresh, is merely theatrical, a regression in cinematic imagination. And really, the sequence has nothing to do with any of the film’s major developments.

The real star sequences of Oldboy are the ones nobody wants to talk about: the incest and humiliation scenes. It takes a lot of gut power to declare the love scene between Oh Daesu and his daughter Mi-do (Kang Jye-jeong) “beautiful”, and yet it is. It’s a hungry, passionate scene, with Oh Daesu gorging on Mi-do much as he did a live squid earlier in the film. It might seem baffling that attractive young Mi-do would ever be attracted to this dishevelled crazy man, half ranting lunatic, half Fear Factor contestant, but the film by this point has established Oh Daesu’s desperate need for human contact so thoroughly that we’re there with him. As a love story, theirs may not make sense but we allow it because we want it as well.

When Woo-Jin’s motivations and machinations come to light, the entire love story is recalled and shoved down our throats. We want to barf and it’s so easy to step back and reduce our reactions to “Ewwww, gross.” Gross it is, but Oldboy’s sincerity relents. It’s at this point where Oh Daesu’s love for Mi-do intensifies and in fact becomes more honest in the face of Woo-Jin’s duplicity. He falls truly in love with Mi-do the moment he finds out he is her father. He cries out, crawls on the floor in frustration and begs for her to be spared the unbearable weight of truth. This, the film’s second great scene, focuses on Oh Daesu’s face as it twists from emotion to emotion, leaping manic extremes, and it’s almost too much to bear. He can’t take it either and he cuts his tongue off, unable to scream, unable to spill anymore of these damaging truths. No more honesty, just blood, blood, and more blood. “Cooooool.”

Woo-Jin has his own incestuous affair, except with his sister (and unlike Oh Daesu and Mi-do, in full knowledge of his familial relation to his lover). Their scene is sweetly nostalgic, with diffuse images and bright clothing. He chases his sister with a camera, photographing her more and more provocatively with each snap of the shutter. When he removes her clothing and they begin their tepid interactions, it’s important to note that this is not a rape scene. It is not filmed in any way different than any other clumsy, teenage sex scene. If anything, it is tenderer, devoid of ugly lusting and brimming with awkward, curious love.

All this isn’t to say Oldboy should be read ultimately as a love story. Neither is it to say that the film condones or validates incestuous love. No, Oldboy is a violent revenge tale, no doubt, but yes, it is also more than that.

There is a recurring motif on Oldboy’s soundtrack where a song starts and ends abruptly. It’s clever, given that songs, more than books or movies, carry with them the expectation of a clean finish. Caught up in the momentum of a melody, we expect an ending, or at least an inconspicuous fade away to silence or another song. But nothing in Oldboy, least of all the soundtrack songs—ends cleanly or as expected. At any moment things crash around you, cut, torn, smashed, and served back to you for you to swallow. A shocking movie if ever there was one, Oldboy uses everything, from minute details on the soundtrack to colossal shifts in narrative trajectory, in order to shake you to your core.

But like with Oh Daesu’s tribulations, it’s not what or who, it’s why that’s important. Why is this film so great, so affecting? I can’t say exactly, but I’ll say this: When Justin Lin remakes Oldboy in Hollywood there will be something vital missing. And it won’t be violence, shock, or well-composed visuals.

Jef.Catapang