FILM REVIEW: CITIZEN KOCH

A scene from Citizen Koch.

To divide they spend

By John Esther

Since the birth of this nation, the rich have held great sway over our government. If it were not for the people participating in the democratic process, namely voting, there would be no stopping the rich from infiltrating every aspect of government – starting with the campaign process. 

However, that changed in 2010 with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens vs. United. A backhanded ruling engineered by the rich neoconservatives, the ruling essentially diluted the influence of working classes in the political process by equating unlimited and often undisclosed campaign contributions with free speech. 

Embolden by the new ruling, billionaires such as Charles and David Koch (AKA the Koch bros.) started this new weapon in class warfare against the working classes in Wisconsin with the 2010 election of Governor Scott Walker, a staunch Republican fixing to dismantle the unions in his state. As a result, a recall movement is born in 2011. People realize the importance of unions. 

Then the Americans for Prosperity from Virginia steps in, becoming Walker’s biggest donor while recruiting Teabagger dupes to back a policy clearly against their best self-interests. Meanwhile Republican members of public unions begin to question his and her longstanding beliefs regarding the GOP just like former Louisiana governor and US Congressman Buddy Roemer did as he ran a different kind of campaign during last year’s Republican primaries. 

Capturing this whirlwind of activity leading up to the historical failure in 2012 to recall Walker, co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water) cohesively illustrate what happens when the bad financial powers-that-be cannot be stopped. 

FILM FEATURE: SIGHTSEERS AT THE ARENA CINEMA

Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) in Sightseers.

The new look

By Ed Rampell

The recent hacking to death of an off-duty English soldier by Islamist zealots in broad daylight in London chips away at that British reserve and the thin veneer of the Brits’ renowned stiff upper lip. Now comes the U.K. indie film, Sightseers, which is a sort of demented On the Road meets Thelma and Louise meets Bonnie and Clyde, with a dash of Manson tribe sprinkled on top for good measure.

Kill List's Alice Lowe and Steve Oram co-star as the thirty-something losers from Losersville, Tina and Chris, in this road trip-cum-black comedy gone horribly wrong, which the actors also co-wrote with Amy Jump.

It's England’s Midlands: Tina lives at home with her ailing, overbearing, over possessive mother and has earned degrees in canine psychology that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. (Aidst the gallows humor dogs play a fairly important role.) Tina embarks on an ill-advised week-long jaunt through the Midlands with Chris -- whom Tina seems to barely know -- in his “caravan” (that’s trailer, to we Yanks). We find out along the way that the bearded Chris, who has a bald spot, has been “made redundant."

At first they are hot to trot for one another as the couple drives about the Midlands, which includes some spectacularly dramatic scenery that mirrors the mood of this movie and its gloomy characters who are a sort of Heathcliff and Cathy gone off the rails. A series of seemingly trivial incidents set Chris, and then Tina off, as they embark on an odyssey that becomes a killing spree in this Ben Wheatley-directed movie. The authorities (who, as usual, are clueless -- no Sherlocks they) can’t make heads or tails out of the unfolding mayhem, which may be because it seems to have no rhyme or reason. As their crimes escalate the couple’s sexual ardor for one another inversely perversely cools -- very Freudian (Sigmund ended up in England, by the way).

Making a personal appearance at Arena Cinema, where Sightseers has an exclusive run through May 30, a rather fetching Lowe spoke about the film. In discussing Sightseers, which alternates between the bone chilling and the hilarious, Lowe cast some light on the filmmakers’ intent. Class envy is one of the elements that fuels the rampage of the couple, neither of whom have a full-time job in Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity-wracked not-so-Great Britain. In lieu of the fulfillment that worthwhile work and a full family and social life could provide them, running amok gives Tina and Chris kicks and thrills. They can’t get no satisfaction, so they turn to senseless crime.

Holding a meat-cleaver dripping with blood, one of the extremist fanatics who sliced and diced that British soldier was ready for his close-up. He melodramatically declared right into a camera lens: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone." (Bin Laden also said similar things like “if you leave us alone we’ll leave you alone.”) One wonders if the Western imperial powers, which are endlessly sticking their noses where they don’t belong into other people’s business, are listening? Probably not, so the tit-for-tat goes on in a vicious cycle of ceaseless violence.

Tina and Christian are not fundamentalists but, similarly, are the West’s powers-that-be listening to the restiveness of their own rootless  generation spawned by austerity? From the indignados of Spain to the Greek rioters to the 2011 English looters to America’s occupiers and so on, to quote Arthur Miller’s plaintive plea regarding in Death of a Salesman “attention must be paid.”

Like the fading Willy Loman attention must be paid to the Lowe woman and Oram man in Sightseers. This low-budget indie was actually released in the U.K. last November. In a sense, it is a motion picture prophecy of the brutal, senseless street carving of that British drummer, as it taps into the zeitgeist of a troubled nation roiling beneath the surface, as cutbacks, unemployment and more wreaks havoc.


Sightseers runs through May 30 at the Arena Cinema, 1625 N. Las Palmas Ave., Hollywood, CA. For more info see: http://www.arenascreen.com/.

 

 

 

FILM REVIEW: TOTAL RECALL

Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) in Total Recall.

Dismembering the way we were

By Don Simpson

It has been a very long time since I have watched Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall, primarily because I find any film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger to be overwhelmingly unwatchable. So, as a fan of Philip K. Dick's source short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," I was actually kind of excited when I first heard that Len Wiseman was adapting the same Dick short story. Okay, "excited" might be too strong of a word -- I hated Wiseman's embarrassingly flawed Live Free or Die Hard and I am not a fan of his underwhelming Underworld franchise -- but at least Schwarzenegger was not going to be in this adaptation. At least Colin Farrell seemed to be a somewhat legitimate choice for the leading role, so this adaptation had that going for it. Of course, by naming his new film Total Recall, Wiseman does risk the assumption that this is a remake. Like I said, it has been a long time since I have watched Verhoeven's Total Recall, but if my memory serves me correctly, Wiseman's interpretation is drastically different. Wiseman's film is also drastically different from Dick's short story. Unfortunately, it still does not come anywhere near the same intellectual levels of complexity as Dick's short story.

Douglas Quaid (Farrell) lives in a futuristic world in which the tyrannical ruling elite live on one side of the world and the working class lives on the other; the rest of the world is a vast post-apocalyptic wasteland. Every day, Douglas must travel via a tunnel through the center of the Earth to work on an assembly line in a factory in which a robot army is being constructed for the ruling elite. Douglas' wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), is a police officer. Together they are cogs in the tyrannical machine, helping the elite become richer while their own lives on the other side of the world are far from idyllic.

There is no escape for Douglas. There is no room for upward mobility; he and Lori will never live on the other side of the world. Douglas needs something to free him from his lackluster life so he turns to REKALL, a company that implants false memories into its clients allowing them to fantasize of a better life. Today we use cinema and television to escape reality, in the future we will use implanted memories. Sounds great, huh? Yeah, not so much.

Douglas' visit to REKALL unleashes a whole mess of shit. From that moment onward, he finds himself tirelessly running and fighting for the remainder of the film. Wiseman kicks everything into overdrive, leaving the story's inherent politics and philosophy in the dust. Suddenly, Total Recall turns into just another mindless action flick and once again Dick's heady original content is tossed aside for good old fashioned escapist entertainment.

FILM REVIEW: HOP

E.B. (voice by Russell Brand) in Hop.

Rabbit test

By John Esther

Assuming its audience is familiar with that lie most American adults tell their children about the Easter Bunny coming around annually to bring candy and hide colored hard-boiled eggs for children to find and consume -- as part of the celebration of Jesus Christ's reported resurrection from the cross -- Hop wastes no time with any holiday back story (the savior is never even mentioned in the movie) and immediately dives forward to a secret candy factory nestled under the Moai statues on Easter Island, Rapa Nui, a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean.

Owner of the wonderful, colorful, dazzling, frazzling, mind-numbing factory is the Easter Bunny (nicely voiced by Hugh Laurie). Running the factory is Carlos (Hank Azaria once again doing the silly Latino voice he did as Agador Spartacus back in the 1996 movie, The Birdcage, and continues as Julio in The Simpsons), an ambitious chick who does not care for the Easter Bunny's "privileged" son, E.B. (voice by the seemingly-ubiquitous Russell Brand), the hare, er, heir apparent to the fortune.

A bunny who just wants to bang on the drums all day, E.B. is not interested in following family traditions and when the time comes to take over the sweetest job in the world, E.B. takes off for Hollywood to become a professional drummer. Sure, why not?

After an accidental encounter, E.B. meets Fred O'Hare (James Marsden), a jobless Valley Boy who has finally exhausted the patience of his parents (Gary Cole and Elizabeth Perkins). Now, while most people would be curious, or notice opportunity, if he or she discovered a rabbit that talked and played the drums, Fred tries to get rid of the cute little creature. But E.B. just will not let go. He is here to fulfill his dreams, but he needs Fred's help. Of course, Fred comes around and is thus rewarded beyond his dreams.

Using animation and live action quite impressively, Hop takes one reactionary myth and uses it to reinforce that myth as well as others. From the Easter Bunny to the classic Hollywood populist carrot about the ordinary schmo who gets the job of his dreams out of dumb luck (just look at Hop co-star David Haselloff's career), Hop is a pretty puffy tale throughout the film.

In addition to the myths, Hop makes a mockery out of workers' rights. Carlos, out of his own greed, leads the chicks at the candy plant on a revolt. Whatever legitimate complaints Carlos may have had against his boss are nullified by his "Latino" tin pot dictatorship. His demands are foreign to the normal machinations of the plant. Ergo, we are to here to root for traditional business as usual and that does not include any advancement in the rights of "chicks." (Hop's most noticeable product placement, Hershey's, has a poor history regarding the use of child slave labor in West Africa.)

In addition to Latinos, what little there is of "The Other" serves as a hammy trope or very little more than something to deride. At best, they should just be happy for the white male heroes. Others may work harder at what they do than Fred has ever tried, but they will never take that great Hershey Highway to the sky and that seems the way things ought to be.

To be fair to the hare, Brand's performance is rather delightful. He accentuates the smarter scenes in the movie. There is actually a pretty amusing second act in Hop involving the developing relationship between Fred and E.B. -- with quite a bit of dialogue that will go straight over the heads of some members of the audience. Fred is a bourgeois brat and E.B.'s upper-class upbringing exposes more of Fred's shortcomings while Fred relays what would happen to a talking bunny rabbit if the authorities got a hold of one. (Actually, it is the same kinds of bad things that happen to non-talking rabbits already in the tragic "name of science.") It is the most honest part of Hop. Too bad the filmmakers had to ensure they re-return Hop into a fairy tale.

SXSW 2011: WHERE SOLDIERS COME FROM

Dominic Fredianelli in Where the Soliders Come From.

Class warfare

By Don Simpson

So, where do soldiers come from? As far as I can determine, soldiers are not delivered by a stork nor are they created by the gratuitous mating of birds and bees, but there have been several military decisions made in the last decade to make one think that soldiers are totally expendable beings.

Research shows that, for the most part, U.S. soldiers come from poor, uneducated, rural families and Heather Courtney’s documentary Where Soldiers Come From gives us an example of one such group of young soldiers from the Upper Peninsula of Northern Michigan. Dominic Fredianelli and four of his friends joined the National Guard when they graduated from high school because they were enticed by the college tuition support and $20,000 signing-bonus (the average annual income in their county is only $21,186).

When Courtney first meets the young soldiers, they are just 19. Where Soldiers Come From follows the soldiers for four years, beginning with their monthly training sojourns at the local National Guard base and remaining by their sides until the inevitable happens -- they are deployed to Afghanistan to sweep for IEDs. (While the young men are awar, Courtney makes a few return trips to Michigan to find out how the soldiers’ families are holding up.)

Then the narrative returns stateside as the five 23-year-old combat veterans attempt to readjust to their civilian lives . The most amazing aspect of Where Soldiers Come From is watching Courtney’s five subjects evolve from being politically apathetic -- showcased brilliantly as they listlessly observe Barack Obama win the 2008 Presidential election on television -- to becoming damningly incredulous about the U.S. military and its role in Afghanistan.

Despite the obvious temptation of bombarding the audience with additional footage of the war-torn soldiers and their families railing against U.S. economic, military and foreign policies, Courtney refrains from turning Where Soldiers Come From into a heavy handed political diatribe. Instead, the resulting film is a deeply humanistic tale of five young men yearning to earn some basic financial stability in their futures.

Americans rarely acknowledge the existence of a rigid class system. Instead we are led to believe that free market capitalism allows everyone equal opportunities to become successful, but that is far from true. Since the nation’s poor cannot afford higher education, they are left with only a few options, one of which is to join the military (during a perpetual state of wartime, no less). It is a sorry state of affairs when an entire segment of our population has to risk their lives -- for senseless wars, no less -- for the sole purpose of having a chance to claw their way up from the lowest economic rung of our oppressive class system.

With two full-immersion documentaries about the Afghanistan war -- Where Soldiers Come From and Armadillo -- screening at SXSW 2011, it is difficult to avoid comparing them. Courtney’s film utilizes an array of styles and techniques of cinematography to keep things visually stimulating, though Where Soldiers Come From never becomes as over-stylized as Armadillo. In fact, other than both documentaries utilizing cameras mounted on the soldiers (and their vehicles) while out on maneuvers -- thus throwing the audience right into the middle of the action -- Where Soldiers Come From and Armadillo could not be more different. Not only does Where Soldiers Come From approach its subjects with much more intimacy, but (thanks in part to its more humble production values) it also seems more honest and, dare I say, real.