joem18b Blog

Under discussion:

Clean  (2004)

Clean (2004)

Dedicated to reviewers who recognize and appreciate a real star when they see one. Now back off!

At the outset, Maggie Cheung is clean but she's not "clean." A friend of mine saw the movie and all he could talk about was Maggie. This is a guy who'll watch a flick with Michelle Yeoh in it, or Sandra Oh or Lucy Liu or Gong Li or ZiYi Zhang, no matter what it's about, him just sitting there taking in the sight of Maggie or Michelle or Ziyi onscreen in all her Asian-ness, Sandra in "Last Night" living up in Canada and working in indies long before becoming a doctor on TV, or Lucy slicing and dicing in "Kill Bill" with that Siamese-cat crossed-eyes thing she does, or Michelle the quiet, reserved, classy force in "Crouching Tiger" as opposed to her glamorized American persona when she does those interviews on DVD. Or Margaret Cho, if that's your thing, popping up for a quick turn in "Lost Room," strapped. And then my friend will say, oh, she was soooo wonderful, she's soooo beautiful, blah, blah, got her up on a pedestal, the guy's yellow fever running wild irregardless of the woman. What's wrong with these men? Are they afraid to commit?

When Angelina Jolie (not interested!) starred in A Mighty Heart, the question that arose was whether she could disappear into her role in spite of her celebrity. With Maggie in Clean, it's can she wrap up the role into her own selfness and walk through the movie without my friend jumping off the couch shouting That's not you Maggie get ahold of yourself for the love of God! Because he's used to all those Hong Kong action flicks she's made, and then Kar Wai Wang. Now in Clean she has to be a 2nd-rate faded rock star junkie. Anybody who's watched "Behind the Music" on VH1 knows what that's all about. In other words, can we stay with her at least till she gets to her epiphany at 52 minutes into the film where she lowers a window in the subway train (which right there is why we should all move to Paris) and throws all her methadone and her methadone prescription out onto the tracks because she's just tired of waitressing, arguing with her father, getting stood up at job interviews, working in a department store, and what else, oh yeah, her partner OD'ing on the stuff she brought him and then some other guy OD'ing shortly thereafter? And by the way, is it so wrong for her to look so good even if she's supposedly using, because for a 43-year-old singer with a bad habit, she looks better than most ladies do on their best days, not like Courtney or a young kid like Lindsay Lohan, at 21 already showing major signs of wear and tear. More like Jennifer Connelly in "Requiem," who even at the bottom of the barrel, hard used and I do mean hard used, is still looking pretty sharp. Let the Burstyns of this world take their parts over the edge using the Method or whatever. Maggie, getting out of a car in Canada at sunrise, down from a high: lookin good. Then out on the street after six months in prison, still heavily on methadone, with the hair intact just begging you to run your fingers through it: lookin good. But I will say, her so imposing onscreen, it's shocking to see her standing next to Nolte and her ex in a publicity shot, looking as small as she does. But that's good too. She's delicate. They're all delicate. Delicate fighting machines. Except Margaret. So anyway, just to have Maggie up there onscreen with that low, breathy, English accent, talkin oh so low, or easin along in Frenchy, or rating her papa in Cantonese. That's what I'm talking about. Commit to a woman! Throw Nolte up next to her for the contrast. He's the big dog in this production. Assayas and Maggie both were shy and in awe when he showed up. He's got that Smoking-Gun mugshot look down pat, but he'll always be Thomas Jefferson to me, scoring with Gwyneth and Thandie (not interested!) in Paris. (That's Thandie before the eating disorder.) Btw, Maggie claims to do everything, be everything, make every sacrifice, all for Hong Kong, just for the Hong Kong fans. She says that. You could look it up. Not for Hollywood. Not for Europe or anyplace else in the world. Just Hong Kong. And me taking Cantonese classes like mad for her. And THEN she goes and marries a Frenchy.

Olivier Assayas, namely. That lout. Get a shave, Skinny! Are Asian women all attracted to hairy white males? Give some love to the man of color! Ass-ayas makes a couple of movies and thinks he's God's gift to women. Maggie's well off without him.  I don't see that he's remarried or has any children. Is he still carrying a torch for Maggie? Pray God he's not. He treats her like a queen in this movie, even as she was signing the final divorce papers. The camera moons over her. He said that he just wants to allow her to be herself, show herself on screen. I'm not complaining! She dropped him; he didn't drop her. I don't know that for a fact but I hope it. I surmise it. "In the few years that we were together," she says, not sadly. I definitely don't think about the time they spent together, if you know what I mean. That's water under the bridge, the time they spent together. He says he's imagining her as a widow in this movie. You wish! Feel sorry for yourself, Olivier! In the movie, she doesn't like any of the guys that much. You know she's hanging out on the set with Emily Haine and the rest of  Metric, and Tricky (who blows her off in the movie but as soon as the cameras stop, he's back there, I guarantee), and David Roback, who wrote her songs for the movie, and James Johnson, who plays her partner. Johnson's not even a real actor; it's his first movie.  He has a band and also sings with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Maggie argues with him in the movie and I didn't buy that for a minute. It wasn't bad acting on her part! She just doesn't really care about the guy. I'm definitely not threatened by the Indie rock scene of the 80s; it's extinct. The kids in Metric enthusing about staying in a nice hotel for a change during the shoot, and riding in a van that doesn't smoke, whereas they're used to rolling up to the gym to play for 40 minutes at a dance in Indiana. And btw, in their interviews, neither Metric nor Tricky nor Nolte ever MENTIONS Maggie. Why? Because Assayas cut it out. Jealous.

Just to say about Assayas: Maggie's not goofy or all existential or mailing it in in Clean. Assayas lets her be herself, WANTS her to be herself, not some crazy sidekick to Jackie Chan or moonbat for Kar Kai Wong. That's how I know Maggie dropped him, not the other way around. If you were in love with her but you could only, you know, film her, then you'd want it to be HER you were filming, right? In the same way, if you were in love with her but could only WATCH her movies, not really be with her live in person but only vicariously? Well, she's been in more than 800 movies, believe it or not, so if you just ran two movies a day, that would be 730 movies a year, so you could spread out her other 70 or 100 movies over the year, maybe one extra movie every third or fourth day. Would that be enough to sustain your romance? No, but you'd also have her 358 YouTube entries. And you could go Google Maggie Cheung images. And you could also read reviews of her movies, but every clown out there has an opinion, knuckleheads trying to suck up to her and soreheads ragging on her. Speaking of YouTube, you can see the tribute clip I put together with shots of her and me getting together. It took me weeks to make it, especially using a handheld to get those shots of myself in action. [Rats they took it down.]

Maggie doesn't get to interact with her son until we're 60+ minutes into the movie. And by the way, if you're the president of the oldest, most exclusive Maggie Cheung fan club in the U.S., shouldn't you be entitled to at least a personal interview with her? Dinner together while we discuss her life and her work? She's got this child in the movie whom she apparently doesn't see much for his first seven or eight years, and then when she does, she's pretty remote, like you'd expect, but does she have any children of her own? I'm trying to imagine her pregnant. Forget I said that. I think she'd be a good mother. I can imagine her being my mother. I'd run home and fly into her arms and bury my face... Aw what's the use? And by the way, how seriously should we take the lesbian/bisexual aspects of this movie with reference to Maggie's aspirations toward motherhood? What's the cultural take on an individual's casual liaisons with beautiful people of both sexes in the context of family values these days? I'm sensitive to any untoward discoveries that I might make if she and I would actually form a relationship. She's used the name "Man-Yuk Cheung" in some of her billings. Not a good sign? But what if her "special friend" were Michelle or Lucy or Sandra? Man. Not much to go on in the film, though - she just admits it; it's actually just a little distraction, but you know why Assayas put it in, the dog. Anyway, she's an addict, she's bisexual in a somewhat uncommitted way, she drinks and smokes a lot, but she looks great. A Maggie quote: "Because I've done so many different roles, I don't want to repeat myself. It's getting harder and harder to find something interesting." This after only the first movie where she plays a normal human being? She says she's not a lonely woman, which means she is. She should try hanging out with one of her greatest fans ha ha. Same as with her son, we don't get her dealing  with Nolte much till 60+ minutes into the movie. I'm like Nolte, sort of, under the skin, all wise and practical and whiskey-voiced. If she liked him, she'll love me. If she does have kids, they could visit every once in a while. I could handle that. But I would tell her one thing: no singing. She wants to sing. She says so. But no. Talk, Maggie, in any of your various lingos. Just don't sing.
 
Is it really so wrong to stalk a movie star? Folks are watching them all the time anyway. As long as you don't bother her or do something inappropriate, why not? Join the paparazzi! Assayas is practically stalking her with his camera in Clean anyway. It's a Vogue shoot. He's not over her, is why. In the movie she's running around Canada and Paris like she owns the place, just at home anywhere in the world. (What about those Canadian police, eh?) Assayas says it's because she was born and raised in London, spent so many years in Hong Kong, and now in France. She doesn't know where her roots are, so she takes them with her whereever she goes. One little stalker like me isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.

My interview with Maggie: Finally caught up with Maggie last night at Mr. Chow on North Camden just off Wilshire in Beverly Hills. She was eating rabbit. A glass of red wine, high-gloss lipstick (she doesn't need it), and a B. Romanek Crocodile Rockstar Clutch on the table next to her plate. Those dark, dark eyes, my God. I only had a second to ask her some questions about Clean, so I went with that scene in Paris: How do you lock somebody INTO a bathroom - is that a French thing? And how come Nolte's son in the movie had such a thick English accent? And that final shot in the movie - Is that taken from Marin? Reversed? Doesn't seem right to me. They were on location in S.F., but is it a Vancouver shot stuck in there? Anyway, Maggie answered me in Cantonese. I should have worked harder in that Chinese language class! The only word I caught before I had to leave was "rabid." Must ask her to use English next time.

Under discussion:

Men At Work  (2006)

Men at Work (2006)

Four men in their fifties, driving back from a ski trip in the mountains. Late morning. They banter as they head for the city in a shiny new black Peugeot SUV, anxious to get home in time to watch a big game on TV. They're all dressed for the slopes, in good humor, gabbing in that ironic, guy-talk way about work and women. From their conversation, it's obvious that they've known each other all their lives. Three of them work together in a multinational advertising agency. The fourth is a dentist.

One of the men is on his cell phone, talking to his daughter in L.A. She has just given birth to a baby boy, the first grandchild for the group. One of the other men in the SUV will be traveling to L.A. soon with his new wife. "Is there anything he can bring you from here?" asks the new grandfather. His divorced wife is already in L.A. with their daughter.

The four men stop at a turnout on their way down the mountain, so that one of them can answer the call of nature. While parked, they notice an eight-foot-tall free-standing rock at the edge of the turnout. They decide on impulse that it would be fun to push the rock over and watch it tumble down into the lake far below. For the rest of the movie, they try to move the rock.

The film is based on a story idea by Abbas Kiarostami, Iran's most influential filmmaker (A Taste of Cherry (1997), Crimson Gold (2003)). Mani Haghighi, the 38-year-old writer/director of Men At Work (Kargaran mashghoole karand), received his B.A. in philosophy from McGill University in 1991, an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Guelph in 1997, and an M.A. in cultural studies from Trent University in 2000. His grandfather is Eberahim Golestan, an important writer and filmmaker in Iran. I'd like to know how the story idea passed from Kiarostami to Haghighi - perhaps over dinner one evening? At any rate, Haghighi is on record as trying hard to resist the pressure on Iranian filmmakers to emulate the Kiarostami touch. Haghighi wants to introduce new styles of cinema into Iran. Haghighi: "When you say Iranian films, audiences expect 1.) a child, 2.) preferably, a child looking for something, and 3.) set in a rural context." Men at Work is his second feature-length film. Later, when he made Abadan, he was criticized by the Iranian film board for making a movie that "wasn't Iranian enough."

When Angelina Jolie's "A Mighty Heart" opened, there was some discussion about whether her celebrity would overwhelm the film. It didn't. A similar question occurred to me as I watched Men At Work, because although the men could be returning to Denver from Aspen, or to L.A. through the San Gabriels, they are in fact descending into Teheran, with Iraq just over the horizon to the west. Could I watch a movie about ordinary men living their ordinary lives with ordinary concerns that seem so similar to my own, without being influenced by the U.S. Administration's current posture toward Iran - the accusations, the general vitriol, the naval buildup in the Gulf, and especially the ongoing trainwreck in the country next door? As I started the movie, its livingroom seemed crowded with elephants, to torture the metaphor.

In the event, the first time through, the elephants set up a certain dissonance between what I was seeing onscreen and my mental image of the region and its people. Political questions distracted me. The second time through, however, having learned the characters' names, professions, and basic histories, and having admired the scenery, which is spectacular, and having sorted out a variety of questions that arose for me during the first viewing, I found that my preoccupation with Iran qua evil-axis member had dissipated. No horns, pitchforks, or AK-47s visible in the movie. Instead, there was something quite heartening to me about watching these ordinary men grappling with middle age in a context perfectly understandable to me. An anecdote that one of them tells the others, which includes excellent English that they all understand, and California Dreamin by the Mamas and the Papas blaring from a car radio, add cultural linkages between the actors and the typical U.S. viewer. (Although one of the four did look a little like Saddam. But then, another resembled Richard Gere, and another, a cross between Richard Dreyfus and Freud. All four men are important in the Iranian film industry; none are principally actors.)

I read once that most Iranian films take place outdoors because there is a rule that to appear in a movie, a woman must keep her head covered, and filmmakers do not like to compromise their work by having women appear in their own homes with their heads covered. Don't know if that is still true, but since this movie is shot at a mountain turnout on a cold winter day, the fact that all the women (in thoroughly modern clothing) had their heads covered didn't stand out as a cultural identifier.

A moment that does highlight cultural differences: the men want to harness a donkey to the standing rock so that the donkey can pull the rock over. The donkey's owner points out that if the rock falls over, it will plunge down the cliff with the donkey still attached to it. One of the four men points out that the fate of the donkey is in God's hands. Although this line of reasoning is played as farce, it isn't Hollywood farce (for the Hollywood equivalent, refer to Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction).

Do the rock and the men's struggles to topple it comprise the elements of an allegory? Perhaps. Is the rock a symbol for an inflexible government? For a stultifying, immovable patriarchal system? Do the men's struggles represent the simple idiocy of the male animal? An allegory in the cinema requires that the viewer accept the situation as it is, plus accept it as something else again. No problem doing this for Men At Work. Every individual action is natural; the complete situation is absurd. The presence of allegory and symbol didn't engage me, but it relieved some pressure for me as I watched; it let me sit back and enjoy what I was seeing while I played intellectual hooky from that aspect of the film. At no moment was a correct interpretation of the symbolism in the film important to me. The rock is simply the film's mcguffin. It's job is to hold the four characters in place long enough for us to spend some time with them - time well spent in this case.

...A break here to note that there is digging with shovels in Men At work. Have I ever seen a hole dug realistically in a movie? The shovel comes out. A few spadefulls of dirt are turned over. Cut to a nice big hole and a sweaty actor with the shovel. When I go out in the back yard, a couple of licks and I've got my first blister. I remember no actors complaining about blisters from digging in a movie.

The film is made on DV and cleanly transferred to 35mm. Gray and black mountains, silent, unmoving, snow-covered on top, masses in the distance, with orange and red and gold strata miles wide running on a diagonal across the screen in the foreground.

The musical score is uncredited in the English titles and on IMDB, but is beautifully done - solo piano in a minor key with an electronic vibe, alternately spritely and contemplative.

The focus of the film is on the weight of accumulated history felt by men of this age. There has been disease. A new generation is entering the world. Careers have peaked. Marriage is history, not future. One of the men is divorced, recuperating from surgery, and lonely. One has a wife who is terminally ill. The wife of the third is a woman in her twenties, a beauty the age of the man's daughter; the marriage, if in fact they are really married, is not expected to last very long. The fourth man says that his wife hangs out with "a collection of 50-year-old crazy women." He meets an old flame at the rock, a woman of spirit and energy who reminds him what he missed when he let her get away; and then she is gone. The director cares about these men. He handles them with respect onscreen. The fact that he probably knows them all well in real life and that they are all fifteen years or so older than he is and well-travelled in the industry adds power to their presence in front of the camera, mentors to him behind it.

I had the sense that in the movie, for these men the past was as important or now perhaps more important than the present or future. I thought of Rupert Murdock, in his late seventies as he buys Dow Jones, and Sumner Redstone, in his eighties as he wrestles with his daughter over Viacom policy and tries to dump his 44-year-old wife. What percentage of men keep moving into the future; how many slow down and become permanently embedded in the past? Whatever the future holds for the four men in Men At Work, in the universe of the movie there is no future. It is the past that is present onscreen, in their conversation and in the aging and history marked in their faces.

Men At Work concludes with an unironic, touching ending that embodies the final innocence I've experienced in many of the Iranian movies I've seen.