Youth at War: If... in Perspective, by Way of Columbine and Heathers

After the trauma of a school shooting, hands usually go from wiping tears to pointing finger. After Columbine, media forces like Marilyn Manson, Doom, and The Basketball Diaries all took a piece of mass outrage. Luckily, it seems like we've moved on since. After the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech, the allegations that Oldboy was an inspiration for the murderer never picked up steam.

Oddly enough, films that deal with these massacres like Heathers and If... seem to be left outside of the outrage. Maybe because of a lack of exposure but certainly not because of a lack of violent potential.

Beside the shotgun and trench coat fantasy sequence from The Basketball Diaries, I'm not sure another film could have had as explicit and noted effect as Michael Lehmann's Heathers. Like the real tragedy, the maniac here features the black trench coat, the violence response to overbearing social structures, and a failed plot to blow up a school. Although the film inevitably positions itself against these actions, the cool swagger, the gleeful hedonism, and the slow smolder of Christian Slater's performance glamorize the characterization to an extent.

However, the film counterpoints him with Winona Ryder, the real protagonist of the piece. She's the point of audience recognition and shares the glee at times but ultimately recognizes the insanity within. While Slater is allowed to have a murkier background and psychopathic divorced parents, Ryder gets to address the audience's outrage with the social structures while still paying heed to the overall morality of the picture (and its perceived viewers). If put on trial, Lehmann and Daniel Waters could call for this backup as an obvious indicator of their intentions.

With If..., Lindsay Anderson might have a harder time. The film has no buffer for the impressionable youth who would presumably see it. There's no Winona Ryder pointing out the insanity of the violent acts. Instead, Anderson lets Malcolm McDowell remain the film's entire center. An even cooler outcast than Slater's, McDowell faces injustice and cruelty (and returns them) but remains our point of identification throughout the film. He's funny, vulnerable, politically different, and brave. Namely, if you threw a ton of irony into the mix, he'd be a generation of Juno's dream hunk.

Without perspective, the sudden bloodbath that ends the film could indeed be dangerous as it seems like a natural response to the pressures of the school's screwy power structures.

However, the constant lingering presence of Che and Mao echo that danger for the film's main character. If we're willing to buy into the symbolic, mythic stature of such figures, the message of violence as a necessary response to political injustice will certainly carry over into bloodshed, especially when put into the microcosm of the school in which schmoozers and jerks obtain the power positions. The film was made right in the middle of it, 1968, a time in which guys like Mao and Che were being taken as visionaries fighting for a better world.

With the presence of such brave, brash figures in a youth's daily influence (remember, youth culture had only been a couple decades old at this point), traditional forms of outletting one's anger at society (represented in the film primarily through drinking, stealing a motorcycle, and getting laid) lose their relevance. After the idealization of figures who deal political change with violence, raging hormones and the abrasive discovery that the world doesn't function by way of square deals but by carrying out the society line keep the rational words of elders as simple rhetoric from "the man."

However, without that perspective, the final bloodbath simply seems like a radical, brave, and admirable occurrence, a simple response to how unfair things can be. The fact that the film features no Winona Ryder character is brave. Any consoling voice in the film ends up becoming part of the establishment. With the ever-burgeoning youth culture tied to political radicalism (and the perceived necessity of violence in some aims), the big If of the film basically shows what happens when the youths with such influences and the historical moment learn that the world's a place in which individuality and freedom are punished in favor of the moral majority, essentially, anarchy. Anderson's last moment, McDowell brazenly blasting down from a rooftop, emphasizes the focus on violent outburst. Can progress be made from there? What good can come from this? The fact that a young man who can gain access to the powerful men on the campus is implicated in these murders may be more telling even than McDowell.

So, back to the original question, is there danger here? What happens when confused and tormented youths see a film in which violent kids go out in a blaze of glory? There seems to be some potential for misunderstanding and the propagation of that era's myths. I'm not sure how much we should worry though. The same Che symbol that Anderson uses as a key to understanding Mick's willingness to take the violent route now usually sits on a t-shirt worn over a pair of pants from the Gap, worn by the same jerks who in another generation would have paddled poor Mick and his friends.

Arterial Spraying(s): Xavier Gens' Messy Handling of Genre Takes

2007 was a big year for French director Xavier Gens. After a number of short projects, he (with the help of Luc Besson) helmed his first feature film, Frontier(s) in France and got the job to do the feature adaptation of the video game Hitman (again, through Besson) here in the States. Frontier(s) got a spot in After Dark's annual “8 Films to Die For” horror showcase, so the year looked to be his big breakthrough.

Unfortunately, Frontier(s) got whacked with an NC-17 from the MPAA that forced it out of After Dark's fest, and some ambiguous studio interference came up with Hitman. Frontier(s) ended up faring okay, getting some press in festivals but mostly staying under the radar. Hitman, on the other hand, fared pretty poorly at the box office, facing mediocre reviews and little audience interest.

However, after seeing the two films, these developments might have been a blessing in disguise. After Eli Roth's Hostel: Part Two tanked, the market for these gorno flicks seems to have subsided. Eventually, Gens' flick went to home video, which is the proper medium for these kinds of films anyway, and can be found on the shelf of your local Walmart, along with Hitman, a poor film whose little recognition may work to Gens’ advantage when he tries to get funding for his next project.

Even with all this productivity and press though, does Gens really warrant it? The guy seems to keep his mind firmly in genre territory, and these kinds of filmmakers usually end up with a large base of fanboys who'll scoop up their stuff after the obligatory Harry Knowles review. Then again, a guy like Alexandre Aja (now Americanized to "Alex Aja," of course) did quite well with a remake, of all things, and French horror filmmaking as a whole is a rising genre due to the success of flicks like Them and Inside. Where does Gens fit in?

After seeing two of his flicks, Gens seems to want to present himself as this generation's John Carpenter, a low budget filmmaker who worked from genre to genre with deep focus on character and social commentary. In Hitman, Gens works with a script from writer Skip Woods (most well-known for that early 00's travesty, Swordfish). The story involves the title character duking it out with fellow agents of a shady religious organization and a political assassination. It even hops on the "who are we after facial reconstructive surgery" motif that's been popular ever since the 60's. The political context of the whole thing is a waste of time though with no real commentary on real religious organizations or anything of the sort. It serves purely aesthetic purposes with monks providing a visual background to our super cool, bald, and deadly assassin.

Viewed alongside Frontier(s) though, Hitman does pick up a thematic link in Gens' oeuvre. Scripted by Gens himself, the film follows a group of ostensibly leftist radicals (whose political affiliations are never really discussed) who, after the election of a right wing government, decide to flee to the country (evidently, they're going to face persecution. Gens doesn't bother to mention about what or even how). Once outside Paris, they run through the plot of Eli Roth's Hostel, only this time with neo Nazis rather than businessman and Takashi Miike. At first glance, the film's social commentary seems to say that "hey, it could be a lot worse, right?" Surely, the right wing government that the film's characters are so concerned about could never be worse than the insanity of the Nazi family living in a cottage with inbred children running about, right? That might explain the parenthetical "s" in the film's title with the different levels of what one perceives as a political danger and the actuality of how horrific a truly insane political ideology really is.

However, by the end of the film, I'm not so sure, especially after Gens makes comments about the 2002 elections in France being "the most horrible day of [his] life." I know I shouldn't take a filmmaker's words as too serious in a critical sense, but with Gens’ comment in mind, it becomes pretty clear that he sees the fascists in the cottage as the future of such a presumably oppressive government. I'm guessing, in that frame, that he sees the ending as a nihilistic submission to the new political machine. I personally see it as accepting a necessary evil. All of this might have been a bit clearer had Gens actually characterized the nature of the oppressive government. Instead, he opts to hop right into the thrills, which, given the possibility of developing a politically lobotomized attempt at social commentary, might have been the best thing for the film.

However, I must say that between this and Hitman, Gens' use of political backdrops for his genre trappings generally works to his films’ advantage, as long as they aren't dwelled upon. One of the very few things Hitman gets right is the sense that the political order as it exists could be, at any second, swallowed by oppressive figures. The same obviously applies to Frontier(s). Whether or not a plausible (or even intelligent) argument is made might be irrelevant, but the paranoia that it brings to the films elevates the tensions they present, which, as genre offerings, is key.

So, I guess that since the political discussion is nearly a moot point, the question of Gens' worth depends on whether he can deliver a capable genre flick or not. Although Frontier(s) is a pretty derivative work as a whole, Gens can shoot the horror, gore, and imposing Nazi freaks with a pretty steady hand, only occasionally succumbing to recent stylistic idiocy like excessive shaky cam or off-rhythm editing. His choice of the neo Nazis as villains, the whole treatment of their surroundings, and their eugenic-driven quest pays off quite a bit in distinguishing the film from similar gorno flicks, but his political radical thieves never take off, coming off as captivating as the teens who land on table saws in any number of crap American torture porn flicks.

Hitman never works quite so well, and I'm not sure that Gens is to fault for it. The screenplay's just as laughable as Woods' other screenplay for Swordfish (apparently, he's also working on the new G.I. Joe movie). Its attempt at crafting a political assassination plot, the religious assassin organization, and a pseudo love story constantly undercuts itself with terrible dialogue, vacant character work, and meth mouth pacing. The less said about Olyphant, the better. He mugs his way through the whole thing, taking a wannabe smug tough guy attitude to the film and failing continuously. He's the type of guy you'd end up beating up in a bar. You know you're in a tough place for an actor when the news that Vin Diesel was originally going to play the role makes you sad for the missed opportunity.

Gens tries though, putting a different kind of Bessonesque European arthouse look to a Hollywood actioner. The stylistics aren't deep, but they work to give something to look at other than the characters on the screen. The action is shockingly good with several competent gunfights and some nasty squib-popping. I can't give Gens too much credit when one of the pop pop fests somehow devolves into a fourway sword fight. Then again, it’s done with a certain amount of competency, so I’m actually willing to give him a pass on it. Unfortunately, even the better action sequences only come up sporadically in the narrative with the film more concerned about roundtable discussions between officials and lousy dialogue scenes between Olyphant and a Euro hooker, so a recommendation based on them alone is misguided idea, at best.

Still though, Gens does show promise as a director, able to deliver the technical goods that genre flicks depend on (shootouts, gore shock scenes, etc.). Although the films he’s made can’t be called politically apt, he manages at times to use the political backdrops to enhance the shallower enjoyment to be had. Frontier(s) works from a sometimes stupid and derivative script, but as a staple of what’s a silly genre to begin with, it’s better than most. His work in Hitman is visually interesting, and it’s a shame that the script for the film is so utterly idiotic and poorly-done. It seems that the key for Gens will be to work from good scripts, and with his next film, a cannibal flick set in the 18th century, I think we can look forward to fun things.

Once upon a Time in America (84, Sergio Leone)

As Sergio Leone's last film, Once upon a Time in America carries forward the advancements Leone had made with his last two films, Once upon a Time in the West and Duck, You Sucker! Like Once upon a Time in the West, Leone seeks and strives to reference, riff, and comment on nearly every (mainstream) gangster picture ever made. While doing so, he also addresses the big steps he took in Duck, You Sucker! and crafts characters with big psychological strains. Somehow, he manages to tie these two concerns into one big package that finishes the thematic concerns of the two pictures (the death of the West, flourish of revolution) and take his material up to the present day through his commentary on industry and the trajectory of American business practices.

Sound like a lot? Leone certainly takes on a multitude of subjects with the film, but with the release at just under four hours, he has time to look at a lot of things. Ever the entertainer though, Leone makes sure to keep the running time managable through his incredible sense of staging and pacing. The use of alternating time periods here is something astounding and allows Leone to frame his narrative while simultaneously building his characters, relationships, and the bigger questions therein. So the beginning of the film sets up De Niro as a destroyed man and then charts back to explain how he rose and fell and the larger implications of his story upon the changes in America itself.

Where Leone really improves upon his prior efforts is in the "before" stages. While backstory and motivation in his previous films had been largely handled through the use of revelatory flashbacks (Bronson in West, Lee Van Cleef in For a Few Dollars More, Mallory in Duck), he creates the character's pasts into a whole section of the film and utilizes his increased running time and the chance to fully explore these pasts as a way to develop his larger concern.

Through such an expansive narrative, the film can take a lot of thematic threads and follow them over time. Take, for instance, the concurrent developments of sexuality and business, the film's two major tools. As the boys start hooding around and robbing for small time, they also develop sexually. The two threads continually converge, most notably early on when the boys intimidate a police captain by photographing him with a prostitute and proceed to lay down their terms with him as they lose their virginity. Such a moment ties the big moment of puberty, the first sexual experience, with burgeoning business.

Leone never loses this connection but sees it through the rest of the film. The group's first big job, a knock down gig, comes concurrently with the film's first rape scene, a very bizarre moment that touches on some of Leone's shortcomings with female characters. As the group steals diamonds, Noodles, seemingly in the energy and motion of the moment, rapes the jeweler's lover. Even though he later states some regret in working for the big organization, the damage is done. Leone constantly portrays Noodles in this way, able to be violent (sexually or otherwise) but simultaneously pining for a chance to keep things small and presumably start a relationship with his childhood crush, the embodiment of purity (played by Elizabeth McGovern).

The relationship between De Niro and McGovern ultimately ends in the film's most disturbing sequence. After a date in which Noodles essentially plays Gatsby, he finds out that he can't have her and rapes her in the backseat of his car. The moment comes as a revelation to Noodles who seems to realize that the expansive business practices isn't the answer. Of course, things go south for the gang from there, and the film comes full circle.

The eventual ruthlessness of sexualized violence becomes a tool for Leone to show the depths of Noodles' flawed psychology but also as a wake-up call for the character himself. In the end though, even this symbol of purity ends up with the corrupt politician, implying, essentially, that all women are subject to money and really become whores when given the chance. Leone's treatment of women here and throughout the flick is quite atrocious and really plays into the virgin-whore dichotomy. They're used mostly as ciphers for the men and an echo for their business practices. Of course, Leone shows how such an existence is inherently unsatisfying for a woman, but the treatment of the characters is shallow in the first place. McGovern spends most of the film gazing off into space because she really has no character to play at all. The others try, but their simple promiscuous femininity is too cut and dried for any attempts of development. As stated above though, they are ultimately used as ciphers for the larger thread of business expansion and dead ideals.

This lazy character work runs concurrently with some of the others in the film. Despite a great James Woods performance, the Max character essentially operates under the radar with character development left out in favor of sporadic changes. The rest of the gang and other secondary characters (police, union leaders), while not given much work, function as a whole due to some great casting, including Treat Williams, Joe Pesci, William Forsythe, and Danny Aiello. Although none of the actresses get to play real characters, the men get some great, pulpy moments to push aside concerns over underwriting. De Niro is predictably great as Noodles, and the film's intense of that characterization and his psychology is unheard of in Leone's canon that normally concentrates on grabbing a character's essence and rocking it out for the film's running time (see: Henry Fonda in West and Clint Eastwood in the Dollars films). This emphasis on psychology and the effort put toward tracing it throughout the narrative is a big jump for Leone, and the film owes its success to how that character is handled.

Like the characters though, individual scenes occasionally flounder. The romance scenes between De Niro and McGovern are almost all an outright failure, which is a shame because the first scenes with the two as children are fantastic. As the pair age though, that naive flirting tries to become a romance without any meaningful moments between the pair. The relationship between Woods and De Niro has a lot more substance even if Woods' character doesn't get developed except in short sporadic bursts that cause the development of their friendship to get muddled and inconsistent at times.

Likewise, Ennio Morricone's soundtrack runs the gamut from gorgeous to sentimental to just plain weird with that pan flute. However, for the most part, his themes carry the emotional moments, and when it works, it works better than Howard Shore or John Williams could dream of.

Perhaps the conflict that sometimes arises between hard boiled and sentimental comes from Leone's obsessive genre take. At times, scenes will play out with stark brutality that recalls some of the meaner noirs and 70's crimers. Other times, there's a flowery sentimentality that also recalls an older era of filmmaking, something that Leone can never escape. Morricone's soundtrack reflects this with the pan flute accompanying the weirder and progressive moments mostly and the weepy themes accompanying some of the weaker moments.

In the end though, Leone's successful with his genre work, getting the eras and styles of yesteryear right while bringing in the uncompromising characterizations, violence, and sexual behavior more akin to the films of the 60's and 70's that he helped influence in the first place. In short, he makes it fun but keeps it sophisticated.

Although not as entertaining as the Dollars films, comprehensive in genre as Once upon a Time in the West, or as explicitly political as Duck, You Sucker!, Once upon a Time in America may be Leone's greatest achievement, a case in which character, construction, commentary, and cojones all come together. It's a swansong for one of the most celebrated and consistent directors ever, and it's a miracle of home video that the appropriate version is now the only version.

The Edge of Heaven (08, Fatih Akin)

If you've never caught a film about Turkish Germans, you can get a lot of bang for your buck with Fatih Akin's newest feature because it has incredibly familiar tracts and motifs even for someone who hasn't seen a lot of films that concern this particular group (i. e. me). Tackling generational conflict and questions of German (and Turkish) identity, this work seems to poise Akin as a modern day Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so much so that he makes sure to cast R. W. F. regular Hanna Schygulla. Consider the film a quick primer for the socially conscious cinema that German auteurs are world-renowned for.

However, the film may have less to do with Ali and more to do with modern flicks like Babel that take a social issue and spin labyrinthian narratives to comment on different angles of said issue. Here, the execution of these narratives marks Akin as a very special filmmaker. Rather than take three separate stories whose relation depends on subtext instead of content, the film relies on connections within the stories to highlight points but never panders to connect them. 

In fact, Akin's connections between segments come much more organically, and the missed connections within each disappoint the closure-seeking audience but create much stronger statements. For example, after a woman dies in the first half of the film (the segment appropriately preceded by a title card: "Yeter's Death"), the film's protagonist, Nejat, spends some time trying to find Yeter's daughter by posting flyers of Yeter's face everywhere. Because the next portion centers around Yeter's daughter Ayten and shares characters with Nejat's parallel journey, one might expect the natural conclusion to be Ayten's discovery of Nejat's poster and the cathartic conversation that would logically follow. Instead, Akin has Ayten only enter Nejat's bookstore in Turkey after he removes the flyer. These moments may seem like a tease or a downer, but they only reemphasize how empty such gestures would be, especially in light of the Turkish-German bonding that goes on throughout the film in individual relationships like Susanne and Ayten's developing friendship or the awakening and resolution of Nejat's Turkish-German identity. 

These meaningful connections also manage to subvert what I referred to in the opening sentence of the review: the familiar narrative tracts. I'm not sure if I've seen any more than five or six films about Turkish-Germans, but those experiences were enough for me to recognize a lot of the film's material, from the outburst of violence against a woman to the German-Turkish lesbian relationship. Akin manages to leap over any accusations of same old same old by not only summarizing these tracts but also through the creation of new meaning. The riff on the familiar image of a prostitute sitting in an open window in the prison at the end of "Yeter's Death" is maybe the best and most powerful example of such an operation.

At times though, it seems like this perceived attempt at a comprehensive film forces some questions into muddle. For example, after local hardline Islamic men discover that a blonde local prostitute can speak (and is) Turkish, they descend upon her on a bus to let her know that she can expect violence if she continues. Chilling as this moment is, it opens a page on the threat of violence from Islamic radicals that picks up after Ayten's stint in prison. However, beyond the statement that the mindset brings about violence, the film never addresses it or its place within the culture or even its effects upon the relationship between the two nations (although I guess it adds some irony to the "international incident" in "Lotte's Death" in that such an incident may have been presumed to be the work of terrorists). 

The above complaint may be moot in the film's greater attempt to discuss nationality and, eventually, migration. Every character leaves Germany in the end for Turkey, and a lot of tensions work themselves out in the "foreign" surroundings. The theme of migration might not seem so important in the face of Akin's depiction of national healing between Germans and Turks, but the fact that all of the emotions and issues come to a head in Turkey seems to indicate that such healing can't be done in the German nation but in the Turkish background. However, Akin always includes his German culture in some of the bigger figureheads of transition (the German bookshop), and the detached yet claustrophobic camera angles lend the private space that Schygulla has her breakdown in a certain sense of ubiquity. All the same, even with the insularity of German culture in each of the characters, Akin's exclusive placement of resolution in Turkey might lead his self definition to change from the German Martin Scorsese to the Turkish Fassbinder.