FILM REVIEW: MAGIC MIKE

A scene from Magic Mike.

The gazed male

By Don Simpson

The titular Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) is the lead attraction of the Cock-Rocking Kings of Tampa. In an effort to raise enough capital to open his own custom furniture business (he is a self-proclaimed entrepreneur), Mike also does custom detailing and works various construction jobs. It is on a construction site that Mike meets a 19-year-old college dropout, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is desperately trying to make enough cash to get out of his oh-so-serious sister Brooke's (Cody Horn) drab apartment.

By pure happenstance they meet again; this time Mike brings Adam to Club Xquisite, an all-male revue run with fantastic bravado by Dallas (Matthew McConaughey). At first, Dallas agrees to hire Adam to do odd jobs around the club; but it is not long until Adam fatefully appears on stage as "The Kid." It becomes increasingly evident that Adam represents Mike's past. (In a strange sort of way, Magic Mike takes on an A Christmas Carol-esque quality, except that this film is set in Tampa in the summertime -- does that make Scrooge a financially-struggling stripper who has still found a way to live in excess, albeit quite unhappily?) Like an apparition from Mike’s past, young Adam reminds Mike what his life was like before it started spiralling downward, and it is by spending time with Adam that Mike discovers an option to improve his life. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Dallas has offered Mike a slice of equity in a beachfront club in Miami that promises to be a much bigger version of Club Xquisite, which basically means that Mike's current lifestyle will soon be jacked-up on steroids. But as Mike observes Adam's downward spiral into the seedy world of perpetual parties, drugs, sex and easy money he recognizes the safety and security of Brooke, a woman who works a respectable day job and lives an extremely bland existence.  That's right, Brooke can save Mike from the seedy life of a stripper!

So, on one level, Magic Mike works as a portrait of working-class struggles; people who are striving for financial success and have learned how to (temporarily?) live in gross extravagance by way of the few options that are currently available to them. This is a world in while women represent security, while men aimlessly flounder around until they recognize the strength and maturity of the women around them. In other words, women allow men to realize their dreams and true potential. Without the guidance of women, men waste their money, they buy big ass SUVs and invest in get-rich-quick schemes (such as male strip clubs and drug deals).

But relationships in Steven Soderbergh's hyper-real universe are not just another business transaction. Relationships are just as much about sexual attraction. Against her better judgment, Brooke is attracted to Mike because he represents a sexier and more honest alternative to her boyfriend (Reid Carolin);just as it is Brooke's physical beauty that first catches Mike's attention. Playing with the concepts of observation and perception, Soderbergh's film is about watching people and watching people watch other people as well as what the voyeurs learn about the people that they watch. The most obvious example is when Brooke visits Club Xquisite. She stands in the back of the club, remaining totally detached as an observer, as if this is merely a sociological experiment for her. We observe Brooke as she reacts to the hordes of women swooning over Mike. It is clearly the way that the women are watching and reacting to Mike that interests Brooke, not his performance. Brooke explains to Mike later that by observing this particular moment she gets what he does and why he does it. (Not one for expository dialogue, Soderbergh refrains from having Brooke lecture us on her findings.)

The narrative comes to a grinding halt any time the camera enters Club Xquisite -- which functions as a total escape from reality for its entertainers and their audience. The stage presentations are choreographed like scenes from classic Hollywood musicals. Everything is hilariously over-the-top from the stage design to the lighting and the props, not to mention the cartoonishly hammy ringleader, Dallas (McConaughey is nothing short of brilliant). Visually, this topsy-turvy carnival turns 100-plus years of the objectification of women in cinema on its head. Soderbergh presents us with the Cock-Rocking Kings, men with impeccable pecs and 12-pack abs, flaunting their bulging banana hammocks and taut bare buttocks (which garner a fair share of close-ups and zoom ins) for the audience to ogle and fantasize about. All the while, Magic Mike is an overtly intelligent, message-driven film that is worthy of inclusion in gender studies curriculum.

FILM REVIEW: TED

A scene from Ted.

Barely bearable

By John Esther

Way back in the 1980s there was a boy named John (Bretton Manley). John was so lonely not even Greenbaum (Max Harris), the Jewish kid frequently beaten by the ungentle gentile kids, would play with John.

Then one Christmas morning John receives a special gift: a teddy bear. John and the teddy bear do everything a boy and a teddy bear can do. But it is not enough. John wishes Ted could talk.

Low and behold the next morning Ted (voice by Zane Cowans) is a walking and talking Teddy Bear. John has a best friend, a sui generis Snuggles to call his own. The clever boy names the teddy bear Ted. As the world's first talking stuffed animal, for a few fleeing moments Ted becomes quite famous and proverbially belongs to the crowd, but Ted and John will always be "Thunder Brothers" for life.

Flash forward 27 years later. The scientific, military, and religious community, plus the rest of the world, have all accepted a talking teddy bear as just something that is a part of the world. (In the real world they would have torn him apart for answers.) A pop culture flash in the pan, today the  beer-swishing, bong-banging, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist Ted (voice by Seth MacFarlane) is hanging out with his best buddy, John (Mark Wahlberg).

As inseparable as Ted and John have been all of these years, John has managed to develop a relationship with Lori (Mila Kunis),  a -- here we go, again -- woman who is, for the most part, out of John's league. (Do women ever get tired of watching female film characters settling for less in love?)

Lori has showed a considerable amount of patience over the past four years, waiting for John to get his act together but, at the moments where the storyline in the film picks up, she has just about had enough of John and Ted. What are a man and his teddy buddy to do? Well, get high, get crazy, then serious, then crazy, then stupid, then drunk, then high, horny, cry, plea, deny, fail, reunite, save...until the predictable and hackneyed ending.

Written and directed by MacFarlane, the brilliant and very cynical creator behind Family Guy and many other television shows, Ted, like those shows, is full, if not masturbatory, nods to pop culture -- usually of the populist type. Nods to TV, blockbuster films, pop singers and the ilk are the themes MacFarlane's texts are mostly made of and Ted takes the brow down with few efforts to enlighten his audiences. The Søren Kierkegaard quote in the film does not fit, but what does a stoned, horny stuffed teddy bear without a penis know about philosophy?

Some of these ir-reverent pop references are quite funny -- such as a Bourne-inspired fighting scene in the hotel room; a Flash Gordon metanarrative; a Tiffany video "cameo"; and the film's own nod to its creator ("He thinks my voice sounds like that Peter Griffin"). For the most part, those are the funniest parts in the film -- although I had to bite my tongue to stop laughing at Ted's impersonation of a trashy Boston woman having sex. MacFarlane knows American pop culture and, when at his best, he uses it in a critical way that is hilarious.

MacFarlane is also intelligent when it comes to American politics as well, but that does not show in Ted, unless you consider Ted a synecdochefor mind-numbing Americans, albeit of various ages, who are not adverse to disliking Mexicans, blaming dark skinned people for 9/11, making anti-Semitic jokes and treating women like sex objects. But Ted does not play Ted that way. Ted insults women and minorities and we are supposed to laugh. At least much of the audience at the screening I attended did laugh at such sentiments.

The film also sends quite a few mixed messages about gay men. One the one hand, Ted is a homophobe whose anti-GLBT jokes are supposed to be funny (they are not) and John's co-worker, Guy (Patrick Warburton), gets beat up at gay bars and yet he does not know why. But on the other hand, or eventually, Guy meets and falls in love with another man (Ryan Reynolds) and the film treats the relationship with respect.

Ted is definitelya mixed bag, a movie trying to reach the largest audience, even if that means lowering itself to a lower common denominator. Ted has its middle, low and lower moments. For every time I laughed until tears rolled down my face there was another moment where I cringed.

In a way Ted reminded me of Gasper Noé's Irreversible, but I have to stop here.

THEATER REVIEW: HEARTBREAK HOUSE

Hector (Mark Lewis) and Hesione (Melora Marshall) in Heartbreak House.

Shaw are screwball

By Ed Rampell

I was especially eager and curious to see the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum’s excellent adaptation of Heartbreak House because I know little about George Bernard Shaw beyond his plays, Major Barbara and Pygmalion. To be sure, Heartbreak House is veddy British, and the Theatricum troupe regales the audience with convincing English accents, although its thespians are mostly or all Yanks. But there’s much more to this work than being a mere drawing-room comedy of manners.

Shaw wrote Heartbreak House under the influence of playwright Anton Chekhov, subtitling it A Fantasia in the Russian Manner of English Themes. However, Heartbreak House seems in turn to have had a major impact on American screenwriting and playwriting: It is arguably the prototypical screwball comedy, a genre which hit its prime on the silver screen during the Great Depression. Shaw’s play has the attributes of this breed of humor, notable for its madcap perspective and cross-class romancing, such as in Frank Capra’s 1934 It Happened One Night and George Cukor’s 1940 The Philadelphia Story. Indeed, Heartbreak House’s Bohemian household seems to be forerunners of the wacky, freethinking Sycamore family in Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1937 play You Can’t Take It With You, which Capra adapted for the screen a year later.

Heartbreak House debuted just as the twenties started to roar, and must have seemed very libertine in its day. With its shifting romantic liaisons, dalliances and alliances, the play seems as sexually footloose as characters in Woody Allen films, particularly his 1982 A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.  The play is largely seen as an allegory of Europe on the eve of destruction, as World War I, that charnel house of trench warfare and poison gas (the WMDs of its day),looms. This conflagration is hinted at near the end, wherein director Ellen Geer makes good use of the Topanga Canyon grounds where the Theatricum’s amphitheater is set. In any case, what especially interests me about Shaw is that he takes complex theories about economics and class and renders them in dramatic form in a popular mass entertainment medium.

For example, in 1913’s Pygmalion, smug middle class Prof. Henry Higgins, that cunning linguist, indulges in class struggle (as well as the war between the sexes) with the plebian flower girl Eliza Doolittle, whom he endeavors to convert from a guttersnipe into a well mannered repository of respectability. (Along with Moss Hart, Lerner and Lowe famously transformed Pygmalion into the beloved musical My Fair Lady; incidentally, Rex Harrison starred in screen versions of My Fair Lady in 1964 and of Heartbreak House in 1985.) In 1905’s Major Barbara Shaw, a man of the left, dramatizes an economic theory about the role the armaments industry plays in industrial capitalism that is similar to that of the German Spartacist Rosa Luxemburg.

Shaw similarly skewers capitalism in Heartbreak House, and Alan Blumenfeld has good fun deconstructing Boss Mangan. At the heart of the play is whether or not the far younger and more attractive Ellie Dunn (Willow Geer) should wed this presumed man of means. Shaw poses the predicament: Is one to marry for money or love? He also reveals the dilemma of women during that era, disadvantaged by society’s chauvinist conventions and constrictions, and how marriages of conveniences were among the few options open to the so-called “fairer sex.”

Heartbreak House also references race relations. Captain Shotover, the world rover, mentions that he married a “Negress” in the Caribbean, which would make his coquettish daughters with their Greek myth inspired names, depicted by the Caucasian actresses Ariadne Utterword (Susan Angelo) and Hesione Hushabye (Melora Marshall), biracial. However, unlike in the Theatricum’s version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, also playing this summer in repertory, the themes of miscegenation and race are barely if at all explored in its Heartbreak House.

To my untutored ear Willow affects a flawless English accent, as does most of the cast, as they toss Shavian barbs about like so many verbal Molotov cocktails. Willow’s Ellie convincingly careens from girlish innocence to Lady MacBeth-like scheming. As the family patriarch, Captain Shotover, Hunt is alternately daft and worldly wise, and dispenses some indispensable pearls of wisdom to befuddled Ellie. Mark Lewis is suitably dashing as the rakish raconteur Hector Hushabye, while Ed Giron as the bungling burglar, Aaron Hendry as Randall Utterword and David Stifel as Mazzini Dunn, all have suitably comic turns. On opening night some of the best dialogue was delivered by a dog who repeatedly barked during the first scene -- before adlibbing lines in a droll improv that led to the canine thespian’s expulsion from the stage.

Ellen skillfully helms the ensemble cast of around 15, but one standout who demands to be remarked upon is the mellifluous Marshall, who marshals her considerable energy and talent like a preternaturally gifted shape shifter. In the Theatricum’s Measure for Measure Marshall plays a mustachioed male character, but in Heartbreak House she portrays one of Captain Shotover’s daughters, the eccentric seductress Hesione Hushabye. As she slings zingers with savoir faire, clad in her gown and wig of long black tresses, Marshall is simply unrecognizable from the Lucio she depicts in Measure for Measure. A non-actor can only marvel at how thespians can transmute themselves from one role to another completely different, even diametrically opposed part.

There is much to commend this play to the viewer, but Marshall’s performance alone is worth the ticket price. This type of sophisticated theater driven by the oral pyrotechnics of Shaw’s dialogue may not be everyone’s cup of tea and crumpets, but to them I say “pshaw!” I loved this sparkling, sexy, witty gem.

Heartbreak House runs through September 30 at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. For more information: 310/455-3723; www.Theatricum.com.

LAFF 2012: SEEKING A FRIEND AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Dodge (Steve Carell) in Seeking a Friend at the End of the World.

Amour at Armageddon

By Don Simpson

Admittedly, I went into writer-director Lorene Scafaria's Seeking a Friend for the End of the World with grave concerns about how convincing Steve Carell and Keira Knightly would be as a romantic couple; after watching the film, I am even less convinced than before.

Opening the film, Linda (Nancy Carell) leaves Dodge (Steve Carell) shortly after a radio announcement that a last ditch effort to destroy a giant earthbound meteor has failed. With three weeks remaining, most of humankind is understandably catapulted into a state of anarchy and sexual promiscuity. Dodge, however, opts to mourn the demise of his marriage, slipping right into Carell’s all-so-typical sad sack persona (a role he does quite well). On one fateful evening, Dodge finds Penny (Keira Knightley — who too is also playing a very familiar character) bawling on his balcony. Dodge lets Penny inside and we promptly learn that she can sleep through anything, as long as she has enough weed to lull her into la-la-land. (This point is reiterated countless times, as a build up to a pivotal scene in the third act.) Eventually the odd couple find themselves on the road -- with Penny’s favorite records in hand -- in search of a previous lost love of Dodge’s (despite his obvious affinity for Penny) and a plane to take Penny to her family across the pond. All the while, the countdown to the apocalypse continues.

A world premiere at LAFF this year, the recently-released Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is being marketed as a more believable take on the doomsday scenario, following two lost souls in desperate need for human companionship; but nothing about this film is even remotely believable. Would a 90-mile-diameter meteor instantly annihilate the Earth a la Melancholia? Would it really be so difficult to destroy (or lessen the impact of) such an object? Why is all hope lost 21 days before impact? Why are all aircraft grounded and phone service disconnected? But most importantly, what do Dodge and Penny see in each other? And how in the hell did “Stay with Me” by The Walker Brothers end up on Penny’s vinyl copy of Scott Walker’s Scott (nonetheless that scene is my favorite moment of the film)? It makes no sense, I tell you!!!

LAFF 2012: DEAD MAN'S BURDEN

Martha (Clare Bowen) in Dead Man's Burden.

Sins of the daugther

By Don Simpson

Dead Man's Burden is clearly made by someone who unabashedly loves the western genre, though writer-director Jared Moshé does make some notable updates to the genre. Most importantly, Moshé places a strong female character in the lead role, a character -- Martha McCurry (Clare Bowen) -- whose closest cinematic kin would be Michelle Williams' Emily in Meek's Cutoff.

Despite being married to Heck (David Call), a man with a violent criminal past, Martha maintains full control over her household. After murdering her father (Luce Rains) in the film's striking opening scene, Martha becomes a full-fledged landowner. The problem is, she does not want the land; Martha wants to sell her family's New Mexico homestead to a mining corporation for enough cash to open a hotel in the burgeoning town of San Francisco. With her father dead, it seems as though Martha's dream will certainly come true, but then a long presumed dead brother reappears. Wade (Barlow Jacobs) has lofty aspirations of turning his family homestead into a full-fledged farm. Thus, a family feud begins.

Shot on lush 35mm film (by Robert Hauer) with impeccable production design (Ruth De Jong), costume design (Courtney Hoffman) and art direction (Jason Byers), Dead Man's Burden is a visual masterpiece. Bowen's unsettlingly conflicted performance as Martha is nothing short of amazing; Jacobs and Call's performances are also spot on. Occasionally, a few performances do veer a bit too far into the realm of the melodramatic for my tastes. However, I will chalk that up to the periodically stilted dialogue and the film's studious allegiance to a machismo-yet-melodramatic genre.

LAFF 2012: NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS

Neil Young in Neil Young Journeys.

Rocking chairman

By Ed Rampell

Jonathan Demme is one of those rare directors who seems to effortlessly foray from major Hollywood productions -- including the 1990s features, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia -- to documentaries, such as 2003’s Haiti-shot, The Agronomist. Neil Young Journeys is Demme’s third nonfiction collaboration with the prolific performer and composer who has been one quarter of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, as well as a mover, shaker and rocker with Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse.

The documentary opens with Young driving around his old stomping grounds in Omenee, the town in North Ontario he plaintively sang about in CSNY’s "Helpless" on their landmark Déjà Vu album. Neil Young Journeys alternates between Young’s peregrinations around his beloved hometown and a one man show at Toronto’s Massey Hall where he performs new and classic songs from his considerable repertoire.

Some of those vintage numbers include "Down By the River" and "After the Gold Rush," wherein the socially conscious Young updated the lyrics, singing, 'Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 21^st century.' A rousing rendition of "Ohio" includes four names projected on the screen, who turn out to be the 'four dead in Ohio,' CSNY lyrically lamented after National Guardsmen killed a quartet of college students protesting the Indochina War at Kent State on May 4, 1970. The sequence is intercut with archival footage of the unarmed Kent demonstrators and the National Guard assassins. It’s hard to believe that each of the slain students was only around 20, youths robbed of their lives by Nixon’s henchmen. Thank you very much, Mssrs. Young and Demme, for remembering them, and for doing so in such a stirring, touching manner.

When I think of Young I remember a high pitched voice and acoustic guitar. Perhaps my memory is faulty? In any case, in Neil Young Journeys Young strums a variety of electric guitars, belting out amped up licks with lots of heavy reverb. He can still hit the high notes, but his voice is more gravelly and raspy here. It seems to be the opposite of the, say, Eric Clapton trend of taking and taming classic rock hits, such as Derek and the Dominos’ immortal "Layla," and updating them with more mature, tranquil acoustic, “unplugged” versions. In Neil Young Journeys Young is very much “plugged”; at the end of his set Young “plays” the speakers, inducing mindbending feedback worthy of Jimi Hendrix. (BTW, the only good thing about Hendrix’s untimely death is that we didn’t have to hear him play unplugged versions of Purple Haze and Foxy Lady on acoustic guitars when we grew up.)

The glammed down rocker also tickles the ivories of a number of keyboards during his solo performance, which features many searing extreme close-ups of Young, who is extremely emotive and soulful as he sings and plays. The film has a cinema verite, “you are there” flavor. At least one camera is, literally, in spitting range and some may have problems with Declan Quinn’s cinematography: Call it “Spittle-vision.” The audience is also rarely seen in this concert film, wherein the Canadian also croons newer tunes, such as 2010’s "Love and War."

At 66 years old, he remains forever Young.

 

  

  

 

LAFF 2012: THE FIRST MAN

Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin) The First Man.

The rebel

By Ed Rampell

I have many lead sentence ideas competing in my feverish noggin to launch this review with, so I’ll begin by declaring: writer-director Gianni Amelio’s adaptation of philosopher-writer Albert Camus’ The First Man is the best picture I’ve seen so far at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2012. It is sort of Francois Truffaut’s 1959 The 400 Blows meets Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, with a little bit of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 You Can’t Go Home Again tossed in for good measure.

Like Wolfe’s posthumously published book, Camus’ novel was autobiographical and unfinished when he died an untimely death at age 46 in a 1960 car accident. Shortly after The First Man opens Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin), a Camus-like prominent writer in France, returns to his hometown of Algiers. Just as Wolfe received a hostile reception at his hometown of Asheville after his tell all about these secretive North Carolinians’ sins, scandals, etc., Cormery is plunged into Algeria’s bitter division, as Arabs struggle for independence against the French settlers and state. Although Cormery is one of the “pied noir” (the so-called “dark foot” settlers of French origin) he speaks out in favor of a “just” and “equal” Algeria during his return visit -- much to the chagrin of some settlers. (This was a very brave if dangerous thing to do, even back in France, where French supporters of Algerian liberation, such as Camus’ fellow Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, faced death threats.)

Despite being warned for security reasons to lodge in a hotel, Cormery stays in the family apartment with his loving if illiterate mother, played as an old woman by Catherine Sola. As a solo mom whose husband -- like Camus’ actual father -- was killed during World War I when her son (Nino Jouglet) was an infant, Catherine (poignantly played as a young woman by Maya Sansa) raises little Jean with the help of her simpleminded laborer brother (Nicolas Giraud) and the strict family matriarch (Ulla Baugue). In real life, Camus’ mom was a deaf mute, but although Jean’s screen mother isn’t, the difficulties of his Algiers childhood are movingly evoked. And like all the troubled children depicted in French cinema, he grows up to become a great artiste (Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and, in that motion picture Parisian tradition, is shown going to the movies.

The First Man alternates between 1950s Algeria and Cormery’s 1920s childhood. There is a seaside scene reminiscent of the ending of The 400 Blows and checkpoint and café scenes suggestive of The Battle of Algiers. (By the way, it bears noting that Algeria has played a distinguished if little commented upon role in film history, from Pontecorvo’s revolutionary masterpiece to the 1969 Oscar-winner, Z, to 2006’s Days of Glory,2011’s Free Men, and now this stellar feature, etc.)

The film’s denouement may seem abrupt or even disorienting, but this may be the filmmaker’s way of indicating that the source work, Camus’ novel, was cut short and incomplete. In any case, The First Man is excellently acted and co-stars Denis Podalydes as young Jacques’ mentor. In 2011 Podalydes portrayed the recently and happily deposed French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011’s also superb, The Conquest (offscreen the activist actor campaigned for the Socialist candidates, including the contender who just beat Sarkozy, Francois Hollande). Gamblin is reflective as Camus’ adult alter ego, and he appeared in another recent great film, The Names of Love, a personal favorite, wherein Gamblin romanced a part-Algerian woman played by sexy Sara Forestier. Jouglet does excellent work, too.

Of course, the greatest existential question of all time is: Would you walk a mile for a Camus? Indeed, when it comes to The First Man, not even a plague should stop you -- strap on your shoes and run, don’t walk, to go see this beautifully shot (by cinematographer Yves Cape) Camus biopic of sorts about coming of age and dealing with revolutionary upheaval in a dignified, honorable way. Don’t’ be a stranger to a movie based on the last novel by and about the author who wrote The Stranger and The Plague.


The First Man screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival: June 23, 2 p.m., Regal Cinemas.

  

 

  

  

 

LAFF 2012: ROBOT & FRANK



Frank (Frank Langella) and Robot (voice by Peter Sarsgaard) in Robot & Frank.

Big mouth strikes again

By Ed Rampell

Jake Schreier’s wry science fiction, complex comedy, Robot & Frank, has plenty of plot twists and turns that keeps audiences guessing and takes them by surprise until the very last frame. Frank Langella plays the eponymous Frank, an aging man plagued by memory loss. Frank’s son, Hunter (James Marsden), coerces his old man to accept a robotic caregiver (voice by Peter Sarsgaard) -- or face institutionalization. Comic complications, however, ensue as the two title characters form an unlikely relationship and Frank’s prior choice of career is revealed.

Meanwhile, the apparent mechanization of Frank’s life is opposed by his globetrotting daughter, Madison (Liv Tyler), who jet sets back from some sort of anthropological work in Turkmenistan to rescue her dad from the robot’s clutches at his home in upstate New York. There, Frank is attracted to the librarian, Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), whose small town library is being digitized and yuppified. Jeremy Sisto plays the village constable who’s called in when valuables -- vintage books, jewels -- mysteriously go missing.

Just when you think the futuristic Robot & Frank is about one thing -- such as elder care being provided by robots -- Christopher Ford’s inventively witty script ducks and weaves and takes us into another completely different direction. In the end, this well acted, enjoyable romp is more about a theme than a plot: The aging process, persistence (or lack) of memory (deleting a robot’s memory is akin to Alzheimer’s Disease) and family. Then there is the mystery behind Jennifer.

But your plot spoiler adverse critic won’t ruin the surprises for you, dear filmgoers -- unlike the dolts on KPCC’s “Film Week” program who, on June 22, without warning revealed Woody Allen’s imaginative, hilarious sight gag in To Rome With Love on the radio, then promptly went on to tell listeners the funniest scene in the new Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley comedy, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. Blabbermouths who aren’t talented enough to know how to “review” works without giving away their best moments aren’t critics -- they’re plot spoilers. And there is a special seat in hell reserved for idiotic, incompetent “reviewers” who rob film fans of the joyous act of self discovery and finding out for one’s self -- instead of from some loose lips, no talent, big mouth.


Robot & Frank will at the Los Angeles Film Festival: June 23, 7:10 p.m., Regal Cinemas. 

  

 

  



INTERVIEW: KIRBY DICK AND AMY ZIERING

Kori and Rob Cioca in The Invisible War.

Power, rape and denials

By John Esther

A film destined to spur and stir up a national debate, writer-director Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War uncovers the perpetual cover up of women (and men) who are raped while serving in the United States Armed Forces.

A epidemic run amok, while it is estimated that 80 percent of sexual assaults remain unreported, the Department of Defense knows that twenty percent of all servicewomen have been assaulted while serving (an estimated 500,000 women have been sexually assaulted in the US military), and women who have been raped in the military have a PTSD rate higher than men in combat.

Rather than adequately address the issue, the military’s response is a tragedy, if not a flat out farce. They often blame the victim, dismiss or threaten her if she brings charges. Prosecution rates for sexual predators are abysmal. Defendants may resign in lieu of a court martial and educational tools often put the burden on women to make efforts to avoid victimization.

Providing proof in the pictures, Kirby and producer Amy Ziering interviewed about 150 victims before narrowing it down to eight women who are still searching for love, peace and justice years later after being raped.

No stranger to controversy when it comes to power, violence, sex and betrayal in highly regarded American institutions, Dick exposed the systemic cover-up of pedophilia in Twist of Faith (2004), the ethical vacancies within the MPAA in This Film is Not Yet Rated (2006) and homophobia and politicians hiding inside the proverbial closet in Outrage (2009).

Headed for my Top Ten of the Year List, I spoke with Oscar-nominated Dick and Ziering in Park City, Utah, during Sundance Film Festival 2012.

JEsther Entertainment: Why did you want to make this documentary?

Kirby Dick: Each one of these women’s stories is a documentary in itself. It’s an incredible injustice that I’ve just never encountered, really, in any of the filmmaking I’ve done. Every time we walked out of a shoot with one of these women we were really saddened, but we were both equally enraged, at least I was. I think maybe having a daughter makes it that more enraging. Rage was really driving a lot of this.
Amy Ziering: I say that Kirby came from anger whereas I came from emotion.

JE: Why do you think the level of injustice is greater than some of the victims want to admit?
KD: It must be an injustice for them. There wasn’t even a justice system. These people went in there with such idealistic reasons. That was true of everybody we talked to. Some had family going back to the Revolutionary War and they were just really looking forward to making a career of serving her country. And then they were devastated. It was interesting because I hadn’t had that many interactions with people in the military and I think I gained an incredible respect for their motivation and actually their accomplishments in the military.

JE: Did you try to get in touch with any of the alleged assailants?
KD: We did. Part of the reason we didn’t put it in the film was because of legal reasons. Part of the problem is these people are sometimes not even charged, or if they’re charged they are not convicted, so you have legal reasons and legal issues as to what you can put in the film. For me, the issue wasn’t these five or six individuals who had raped our subjects; it’s really the five or six individuals at the top of the power structure because it’s systemic. And those individuals are like the four Chiefs of Staff of each branch of service, The Secretary of Defense, the President; the people who are responsible for the system breaking down in the way that it has. That is what we’re really targeting. I didn’t want people to feel vindicated or, perhaps, feel like the problem was solved because we had either named these people or somehow brought them to justice. I really wanted to convey that it’s really a corrupt, systemic problem.

JE: Considering the long term damage this could do – such as none of these women want their children to serve in the military -- why do you think the military has not only grossly covered it up, but also has been so grossly incompetent at covering it up when they are confronted?
KD: It’s an incredibly hierarchical system, so nobody is going to take any responsibility; this has to come from the top. Even the two star generals were saying that they could run their own department, but it really has to come from much higher up the chain of command. Amy asked Major General Mary Kay Ann Hertog, who was a few months into her tenure, “Have you ever sat down with any of the survivors and talked with them one on one?” And she said, “No.” Until you talk with the victims you don’t know the extent of the psychological damage and the extent of the problem. Once you talk to them, you start hearing the intricacy of the injustice and the same type of injustice over and over again. I just don’t think they have a clue, at least not at that level. The military as a whole knows it a problem. It’s just business as usual: women in the military get raped and that’s just the way it is. Then the wars came along and they just decided not to deal with it, which was a mistake. It’s like the gay translators. They were losing great military translators because of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Women in general are higher achieving, because they have to be in this most patriarchal system. So for these women who have the courage to come forward are often times the strongest and the people who most believe in the system. They most want a very just and efficient military and those are the people who are getting pushed out by the hundreds of thousands.

JE: The military doesn’t trust any of the female advocates because they identify too much with the victims, but then they use females as the “face” of these issues.
KD: Right. In the case of Myla Haider, she was an investigator who was raped by her commander. And he had raped four other female investigators. And so everyone assumes that at the trials, the perpetrator is going down.

          Jerry and Hannah Sewell in The Invisible War.

JE: In past films, films of yours have had a positive social effect. This Film is Not Rated brought on change in the MPAA, certainly not to the degree that we would have like to have seen it, but did you see this documentary as having some kind of effect?
KD:  They said they were making those changes, but as far as I know I’m not aware of any important changes whatsoever.
AZ: But we see this differently. I am very hopeful that this will bring about change. We use the analogy of the Catholic Church. For so long nobody believed us, it was very hard to prove that abuse happened one on one. It was just anecdotal. It was just one or two priests. It was just comedians making jokes, and then all of a sudden when The Boston Globe broke the story. The whole public consciousness was, “Oh my god, this is a systemic epidemic. It’s not just a few isolated incidences. This is huge and covered up repeatedly.” As we show in our film, a lot of the reaction is, “Oh it’s just a few bad eggs, or it’s seen as a scandal,” as opposed to a systemic problem. This film absolutely makes it an unsalable argument. It’s not just a few isolated incidents; it is happening and happening consistently. Once that awareness shifts, there will be pressure. It’s clearly articulated. It is the top that needs to understand this problem and they don’t. We’re hopeful that if we get it to the right people it is going to be a no-brainer for them. It’s a win-win. If they take care of this, they have a stronger military. They just haven’t seen that or connected the dots yet.
KD: These people have come up in this tradition. The military, for the most part is a huge institution that is slow to change. But when they do decide to change, like with racism in the 60’s, they can do it. They had African Americans coming in and the military could see that they were becoming a very significant part of the fighting force. And they could see how it was going to rip the military apart unless they put in policies that really said, basically, there was going to be as close to zero tolerance as they could get. They did it over about a ten-year period. The racism went from being much worse in the military, versus civilian society, to being much better in the military. So they can do the same thing here. It’s like the Catholic Church and the diocese where a bishop comes out and says; “We really have a problem. We’re apologizing to the victims and we’re going to make sure they get compensated. We’re going to have oversight.” Then things change. But the military is a long way from that right now. Even U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta -- who on Wednesday, in sort of a preemptive strike, if you will, just two days before the premiere of the film -- said that, “We are very concerned. We have zero tolerance.” He reiterated some of the changes they already made. It almost looked like he was distracted. Somebody’s got to be passionate at the top and say, “This is it.”

JE: Looking at your recent films such as Outrage, Twist of Faith and This Film is Not Yet Rated,” why do you keep dealing with films addressing power, sex, corruption and lies?
KD: It’s the dynamic that adds a level of complexity. I made a lot of films that were sort of sick and other films that were sort of psychological profiles and sort of the examinations of individuals. Adding this political level to it adds a level of complexity. It got to a point where I knew I could make a good film and when you add not only the objective of making the film, but the objective of exposing something, of going after something, it makes the project more challenging, but it also makes it more interesting. I remember with Outrage, I’d been working on it for a year and I said to myself “You know, I have to make a movie here. It’s not all investigations.”

JE: Do you see a lot of correlation between the church and the military?
KD:  There is an arrogance and presumption on both parts that they have control over you. Obviously rape is a crime regarding power. It’s very similar too, between the Catholic Church and the military because in the Catholic Church you had serial rapists being moved around and protected by bishops and in the military you have serial rapists being moved around, again, and in some cases protected by, commanders. There is a real similarity there.

JE: Do you think some of the problem lies in the power structure in and of itself?
KD: Yeah. I’m sure a lot of the problem is there. This film is not taking issue with the nature of the power structure in the military, per se. In times of war it seems somewhat obvious that you need absolute types of command. But when it comes to justice and when it comes to conflict of interest, that’s when we’re saying you would have to move that part out of it.
AZ: Just as a social dynamic, you can’t avoid power structures.

JE: What do you think about these kinds of interviews? Do you think that you should speak for the work or that the work should just speak for itself?
KD: I’m not a purist. I’m not a purist at all. I think you can see a film in any form – from an iPhone to the big screen. It should exist in all manifestations. You should see part of it. You can walk in. You can walk out. In my mind there is no purity to the film experience. The discussion is all part of a larger part of that, whatever that discussion in. And with this film in particular, it is all about generating a discussion around this issue. Hopefully out of that discussion becomes action.

JE: Has it generated any negative discussions in any of the Q&As that you’ve had?
KD: None, which is interesting. Nobody has stood up and said, “I’ve been in the military for twenty years and I’ve proudly served and I bombed Iraq, and I object to this.” The film comes off as somewhat pro-military because these are people who believe in it. All the subjects believe in it. At Sundance you don’t get many pro-military films and this is one.
AZ: Out of independent filmmakers, not just out of Sundance.
KD: It’s taking the military as something that can be positive. We don’t want to alienate so many people who have served, especially people who have gone to war and risked their lives and who have lived in these hellish situations. And whether they were raped or weren’t raped, they have huge problems coming home. These are the people who we want to rally around the film. They know that these problems exist. If you’re in the military you know it’s no secret.