KevynKnox Blog

Under discussion:

Taking Woodstock  (2009)

(This review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 08/30/09)

Perhaps Ang Lee’s new film is quite the idealized look at its Woodstock subject. A dream of what it was instead of what it really was. An almost too-perfect look back at the seminal rock concert event of forty years ago. And perhaps too, Lee’s film is riddled with cliched caricatures. Emile Hirsch’s flash-backing Vietnam vet. Imelda Staunton’s Ukrainian battalion of a mother. The tough-as-nails ex-marine drag queen played with a nudge and a smirk by Liev Schreiber. The gaggle of flower children actors living in the barn and all those acid-eating hippies a half a million strong. But none of these flaws, mostly of the superficial variety, manage to change the fact that Taking Woodstock is a fun movie to watch.

Perhaps Lee’s choice of far-off idealization was a conscious choice. After all, this is not the story of Woodstock itself (for that go and rent the 1970 documentary on the concert – it is a well worth choice) but more the story of the periphery of the event. Taking Woodstock is less about the concert (we never actually see any of the performers and that may be a blessing in disguise as I dread the idea of someone 'playing' Hendrix or Joplin or the Dead as if this were an Oscar hopeful biopic) and more about those who surround it. To partake of a line from the film, Taking Woodstock is a film about those who surround that center of the universe that was Woodstock itself.

What Lee’s film is, is something a bit more intimate than a concert populated by nearly half a million stoned flower children, a couple hundred helicopter-riding organizers and thirty-some musical acts. What Lee’s film is, is the story of Elliot Teichberg, played with a surprising candor by stand-up comic Demetri Martin (having only a couple of bit parts under his acting belt) and his inadvertent importance in the making of a milestone in music history. Taking Woodstock shows how a young man trying desperately to save his parents run-down, out-of-the-way motel from sure foreclosure, manages, through sheer happenstance and maybe a bit of fortuitous will power, to become the catalyst for the concert event of all-time.

After making two openly gay films, the early Taiwanese rom-com The Wedding Banquet and the stoically tragic Brokeback Mountain (not to mention the homoerotic tension in Lee’s version of Hulk!) it is somewhat surprising to see Lee downplay the homosexuality of his lead protagonist. Though this choice, along with the quite matter-of-factly portrayal of Schreiber’s drag queen (he never even makes an attempt to act lady like) may be a conscious effort on the filmmaker’s behalf to make the film not about sexuality but about how it doesn’t matter what your sexual preference is. An ideal that goes along with the whole idea of what Woodstock was and what the Woodstock generation stands for.

Sure the story may be full of obvious stereotypes and dumbed down cliches, and this may not be Lee at his bravest (leave that for Brokeback Mountain and The Ice Storm) but that shouldn’t stop this film in its tracks as it would with many other movies. Lee’s use of split screen to evoke Michael Wadleigh’s original documentary style as well as his creatively placing amongst the half a million strong moments that seem like they are actually lifted straight out of that aforementioned doc works as an artistic flair that gives the whole shebang a sense of nostalgic awe. His use of long tracking shots (the most memorable being the motorcycle ride through the throngs that evokes the traffic jam shot from Godard’s Weekend) adds to that awe as well. What Lee delivers here is something more akin to what those aforementioned half a million concertgoers probably felt while muddily occupying themselves with three days of peace and music. A sense of bewildered awe.

All in all, the film works (to an extent) not only in spite of its flaws, but also sometimes because of them. Aside from the surprising turn by Martin, Eugene Levy as the iconic Max Yasgur (in the film's most honest, sincere performance) and Schreiber as the drag head of peripheral security (coming right off playing the feral Sabretooth in Wolverine – from X-Man to ex-man!?) both the film’s most ludicrous and most endearing caricature is the smiling horseback-riding knight in suede vest organizer Michael Lang, played with a preening aplomb by Jonathan Groff as if he were portraying a mythical hero (which to some he may very well be!). Perhaps then the whole trip has been an attempt at a certain kind of mythology. Joni Mitchell wrote that we are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves, back to the garden. This may not be the actual garden, or even a realistic facsimile of the garden, but this is Lee’s mythology of how it all came to be. Idealized warts and all.

Under discussion:

Summer Hours  (2009)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/22/09)

There is a moment in Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours when a father is showing his teenage son a pair of paintings hanging in his mother's country home. To the father's chagrin, the boy reacts by saying they are from another time. This too can be said of Assayas' new film. It is of another time. Away from the maddening present, Summer Hours is of another age, and it could be argued that the film is also of another director than Assayas. At least of what we know of Assayas.

Starring the intense triumvirate of Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling and Jérémie Renier, Summer Hours is an almost complete departure of sorts for the director. Usually delving deep in the quite claustrophobic industrial urban techno-thriller of the modern Parisian underground, both of its outcasts and of its artists, he hands us instead a beautifully and elegantly shot, lushly panoramic vista of a family, already disheveled by modern society who must witness the disappearance of their childhood memories, and thus, of their childhood.

But what Assayas leaves behind in wanton flush and youthful verve, he gains in a masterly stroke of impressionistic austerity. Not to knock his earlier films - both demonlover and Boarding Gate are intensely erotic films that border on some sort of metaphorical cyberporn wavelength and Irma Vep, the auteur's greatest work, is a luscious ode to cinema in the vein of Truffaut or Rivette - but here Assayas has changed gears from expressionism to impressionism. In this wake he may seem a bit out of place at times, wandering along lazily, without a care in the world, but it works for the most part with a film such as this. His lazy wandering in a film like Boarding Gate for example, ends up much more noticeable and thus much more disastrous. Summer Hours, despite this out of place strangeness, is a gorgeous pictorial on the breakdown of familial connections that borrows heavily from the visual legacy of Monet. In cinematic terms, it is like Rohmer without the burden of a morality lesson.

In another cinematic take, Summer Hours can be seen as an updating of Ozu and his gloriously moribund Tokyo Story. Lyrical yet purposefully claustrophobic in many ways (perhaps Assayas hasn't gone that far astray after all) Summer Hours can work as dual tragedy. Both the tragedy of losing the family matriarch, both mother and grandmother, and the tragedy of not being able, or willing, to deal with said death. Just like Ozu, Assayas uses his idea of modern society to show the devaluation of family ties. A time and place where we have no time to live and deal with life. We are too busy avoiding it altogether. If anything, Assayas has created the very antithesis of the family tale - the breakdown of the family done as elegant tragedy.

Whatever Summer Hours is - loving tribute, complacent homage, auteuristic off-topic treatise, autobiographical sketch, misplaced wandering - one thing is for sure - it is Olivier Assayas at both his most tender and, despite his past sardonic nature, his most subtly biting. Whatever it is, it is worth whatever time you can put into it.

Under discussion:

The Hurt Locker  (2009)

(this review was first published at www.thecinematheque.com on 07/19/09)

There has been a veritable onslaught of Iraq war movies over the past few years. Both of the dramatic variety (Jarhead, The Kingdom, Redacted, Stop-Loss) and the documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11, Voices of Iraq, No End in Sight). Some have been pro-America. Most have been anti-war. Some gung-ho chest-thumping, some thought-inducing and philosophical. The one thing they all have in common is their attempt to document, from a non-fiction or fictionalized viewpoint, an event so fresh in moviegoers minds that it is still actually going on to this very day.

What Kathryn Bigelow's new film, The Hurt Locker does, is take a completely different stand on the subject. Without seeming to be pro or anti anything, The Hurt Locker acts as a completely apolitical war film. What Bigelow shows is a group of three men, a bomb disposal crew, going through their daily routine in the craggled streets and bombed-out countryside of Baghdad. Three men who could at any moment, via an explosion, be sent to the "hurt locker". More than war, this film is about the psyche of human nature. We barely even get to see either a US or an Iraqi flag. If not for our pre-conceived knowledge, these men could be from anywhere. This movie could be from anywhere. It could be about anywhere. But this is Iraq and it is real. At least in the sense that it is something going on right this very moment. After all this, The Hurt Locker may well be the most personal war film I have ever seen.

As far as the story itself goes, The Hurt Locker stars Jeremy Renner (a relatively unknown actor who is hopefully going to finally get the recognition he deserves with the release of this film) as Staff Sergeant William James, a wild cowboy soldier who dismantles bombs as if not having a care in the world. One general praises him for the 878 bombs he's defused so far as if he were a sports hero of some sort. The Babe Ruth of Baghdad. He is a gung ho redneck who thrives on the adrenaline that pumps through his veins as he is dismantling bombs. Refusing to wear the protective suit (it's not going to do anything up close and personal anyway) or heed any warnings from his anxious teammates, Sgt. James is a renegade out to prove something to someone, if only to himself.

But James' loose cannon does not play well with his two teammates played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty. To these two, their brazen team leader seems the most dangerous man out there. There is even a conversation about killing their superior. It is a strange mix of anger and hate, with a sort of obligatory adoration, that serves these two soldiers only thirty-eight days from going home when they are assigned together. The love/hate tension comes to a boil in the relationship between the racist redneck James and Mackie's African American comrade. Eventually coming to a head the only way it can with men such as these. Mano y mano in a punching contest that, thanks to James' insistence on going too far, ends up with a knife at someones throat.

I could, as many critics have, gone the route of highlighting the (quite obvious) fact that Kathryn Bigelow is a woman. A woman who has made a career out of playing with the boys in the usually male-dominated world of action cinema. With such testosterone-laden films as Point Break, Strange Days, Near Dark and K-19: The Widowmaker, not to mention her 1978 student film The Set-Up, which was a thesis on why violence is so seductive (plus she directed a few episodes of the gritty TV drama, Homicide: Life on the Streets) it is almost obligatory to question how a woman filmmaker can make such films. The question is unnecessary though. Male or female, one can have an eye for action. An eye for bravado. An eye for the bonding of men (or women). Bigelow seems to take us to the very edge of cliche but then turns us on our heads instead.

Bigelow may be a pioneer of sorts, paving the way for future female action directors (if they ever show up), but to delve too deeply into such a theme only sells the filmmaker short. First and foremost, Bigelow is a director. A director who knows how to show action without it seeming comical. Something her male brethren like Michael Bay and his ilk cannot seem to do. Yet it is not this boys club her film seems in simpatico with. The filmic connections to John Ford's The Searchers is rampant throughout The Hurt Locker. So much so that Renner's Sgt. James could be seen as the evolutionary eventuality of John Wayne's iconic Ethan Edwards. Even Bigelow's final shot has Sgt. James, just like Ethan, turning his back on hearth and home and walking into the sunset with his demons.

It is this bravado of character, this seeming death wish attitude that is the focal point of the film. As Renner's Sgt. James goes about his business, done in the most methodical manner and therefore spiking the tension level up to about 11, he is like a machine that can do no wrong – or more appropriately, a machine that, just like Ethan Edwards again, doesn’t care if he does wrong, as long as he gets the job done. It is this very adrenaline rush that he needs to keep on surviving doing what he is doing. There is a scene in a supermarket (while James is back home for a while) which shows this misplaced soldier in an unknown world, his eyes dead to the sterile environment around him. His eyes only alive when he is surrounded by war and getting his fix of action. Just watching this highly intense film is enough action for this critic. I'll leave the high risk jobs to the likes of Sgt. James and his real-life heroic ilk.