24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

Post-punk is my favorite genre of music (one of these days, I must get back to my series of posts on The Fall, possibly my favorite band), and Michael Winterbottom's glibly self-referential, knowingly material work is not only the greatest possible snapshot of that freewheeling mini-era of music in the wake of punk's return to zero, but maybe the single best evocation of a musically defined time period put to film. Hilariously funny, the film's put-upon, sad-sack nature fits its subject well, not only quixotic Factory Records head Tony Wilson but the broader post-punk movement, which infiltrated pop charts with subversively catchy rhythms before becoming simply the new pop, period, intellectual exercises ultimately hoisted on their own petard. There's something grimly amusing about the film being at its brightest when misery purveyors Joy Division start to gain traction and at its lowest when ecstasy hits the clubs, but that's the contradictory, witty way of the film in a nutshell.

Read my full review at Spectrum Culture.

Re-Make/Re-Model: Rollerball (1975) vs. Rollerball (2002)

My latest Re-Make/Re-Model column looks into dubious futuristic satire of corporate power that spawned one cult classic and the most scathingly reviewed film of a great but neglected artist's career. Surprise, surprise, it's John McTiernan's remake, a jumbled and mediocre affair dotted with bad acting and chaotic patterns, that handles the material with more honesty and moral depth. Norman Jewison's holds the conduit of its satire at arm's length, treating the sport, and, more specifically, the television medium through which it is transmitted, with disdain. McTiernan recognizes how much cinema has tried to keep ahead of TV since its inception (widescreen, color, 3D, etc.), and with cinema about to fall behind and start desperately trying to keep up with TV, his Rollerball makes no distinction between prestige cinema and boob-tube brain-drain, shooting everything with the same rollicking, occasionally incomprehensible style. At the very least, it indicts Hollywood in the material's vision of a society tamed through bloodsport. I'll take that over Jewison's sense of superiority any day.

My full piece is up over at Spectrum Culture.

Graveyard of Honor (Takashi Miike, 2002)

For this week's Shelf Life piece at Movie Mezzanine, I took a look at the Takashi Miike film that, more than the few others I've seen, makes me want to really explore his vast filmography. A stylish but muted yakuza thriller, Graveyard of Honor leaves the criminal element choking equally on its own blood and hypocrisy as they bring into their fold someone who shows just how absurd their codes of honor really are. One of the best gangster films ever. My full piece is up now.

Insomnia (1997) vs. Insomnia (2002)

With The Dark Knight Rises in theaters, what better time to examine the film that, after Memento, proved to Warner Bros thatChristopher Nolan could handle a larger budget and an A-list cast. In remaking a sly, subversive Norwegian neo-noir, Nolan offered a glimpse into the good and bad he would bring to spectacle cinema over the next decade. True to his hard-to-summarize nature, Nolan at once simplifies the psychological and moral miasma of the original while adding various touches that make his more streamlined, narrative-centric version more ambitious an overview of guilt. I know of no one else who can simplify his way into some form of depth, which may be why I cannot dismiss Nolan as I think I should. Nevertheless, I prefer the rawer, harsher original.

My full piece is up now at Spectrum Culture.

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

I continue to love Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of his most shamelessly white elephant features (topped only by Miracle at St. Anna and, more positively, Malcolm X) but also one of his most affecting. Buoyed by a stellar cast, 25th Hour manages to walk its tightrope between an intimate portrayal of the crippling fear of consequence and a vaster portrait of its application to the September 11 attacks. The final, desperate fantasy alone rates among the best and most bravura work Lee has ever done.

My full review is up at Spectrum Culture.

25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

The aftermath of the September 11 attacks affecting cinema subtly at first, most noticeably the digital removal of the Twin Towers in films then in production (Spider-Man, etc.). But all eyes were on the filmmakers from New York, directors who'd collectively defined the city cinematically. Woody Allen, who gave an impassioned speech at the following Oscars concerning the need for filmmakers to continue working in the city, never touched upon 9/11 as a subject in his subsequent films, more concerned with the cosmic tragedy of mankind to focus on any one event. Martin Scorsese responded with a sprawling tribute to his beloved hometown in the only way he knew how: by charting its history of crime. And so, fittingly, the task of directly commenting on the attacks fell on that most dogged and irascible of NY directors: Spike Lee, a filmmaker so gifted and visceral that even his weakest efforts are worth watching.

25th Hour, it's safe to say, is not one of his weakest efforts. Taken in context of the rest of his career, it stands out as a highlight of a career peppered with a handful of modern classics. Under his fiery hand and David Benioff's adaptation of his own novel, Benioff's original story of social strata in New York City becomes a commentary on the city's present and the choices it has for its future in the wake of 9/11.

In the opening scene, Monty (Edward Norton), a swaggering thug, and his Russian compatriot stop on the way to an assignment from their crime bosses when they stumble upon an abandoned, severely wounded dog, likely a fighting hound who lost someone money. Monty approaches to put the poor beast out of its misery, but the dog comes alive and snaps viciously, impressing the man. The dog is the first of many symbols of post-9/11 New Yorkers, partially buried in the trash, bruised and bloody, but dammit he's still alive and as temperamental as ever.

Lee then cuts to the opening credits, played over shots of the Tribute in Light at Ground Zero, then resumes the film four years later, only a few months after the terrorist attacks. The intervening years have not been kind to Monty: we learn that he dealt drugs for his bosses until cops "touched" him. Feds show up at his apartment and find bags of money and drugs (the DEA agent heading the investigation is played by Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who ports over his elongated pronunciation of "sheeeeeeit" from She Hate Me, the same he would later take to The Wire, for a perfect enunciation of just how screwed Monty is).

Facing seven years in prison, Monty looks for one last night of fun with his pals and girlfriend. Norton's performance rates among his finest: the cocksure, brash thug in the first scene morphs in the sudden temporal leap into a withdrawn, doomed individual, barely capable of masking his terror behind a stoic cool. His world's been turned upside-down, and even the little things chip away at him: he heads to his old high school to visit his friend Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who teaches there, and while he waits he brags about his old basketball skills to another teacher. When he mentions that he holds the school's all-time assist record, the teacher casually informs him that a student beat it last year. When things go wrong.

Jacob and Monty's other friend, Wall Street trader Frank (Barry Pepper) portray the class differences of Benioff's original novel and how the characters, for their vastly different social standing, all have a impressive amount of money: Jacob was born into wealth but feels embarrassed by being a man in his 30s with a trust fund; Frank is entrusted with tens of millions of dollars and tasked to make those tens into hundreds; and lowly Monty earns his opulent lifestyle through selling bricks of heroin. In that sense, they're all the same, but they rag on each other for their backgrounds: Frank insults Jake's lack of "true wealth" and uses that to justify his made-up ratings scale of a man's prospects of finding a woman in New York, though Jake retorts by noting that Frank eats with his fingers and is just generally forceful. At several intervals, Frank rages against the path Monty chose, ranting that his oldest friend drives in a car "paid for by the misery of other people," yet we met Frank investing money according to how he believed the unemployment figures would affect stock numbers.

All three men serve as representatives of some aspect of post-9/11 New York life: Jake, the intellectual, hides in the ivory tower of his preppy high school; Frank profits from the unemployment figures in the financial uncertainty in the wake of the attack, and he even lives in an apartment overlooking Ground Zero; Monty, of course, comes the closest to reflecting the "average" New Yorker. Obviously, the average New Yorker is not a criminal living on drug money, but of the three he maintains the closest ties to a working middle class background. His father (the always entertaining Brian Cox), owns a bar where he cheers the Yankees with all the firefighters and other hardworking fellas. Where Frank and Jake enjoy relatively stable life trajectories, Monty, the man on the streets, faces a dismal future and doesn't know what to do.

Of course, lest we define 25th Hour as one big symbol of New York without the World Trade Center, it's important to note that the film has its own narrative. Its characters want instant gratification in life, Frank and Monty through their get-rich-quick professions (one illegal, the other the backbone of our economic self-perception) and Jake through hisephebophiliac crush on one of his students (Anna Paquin, oddly hypnotic even before taking into account the ethereal manner in which Lee shoots her). In a way, 25th Hour is a coming-of-age tale, about three immature, emotionally retarded men -- Jake's trust fund wealth suggests a much younger man still under his parents' care, Frank escaped from the Irish neighborhood but now fervently talks of opening a bar with Monty when he leaves prison, and Monty is going to prison essentially for being a glorified courier. By the film's end, each must confront his hangups and decide whether to continue on his current life track.

To say that Lee's direction is exemplary is almost an insult to his talents as a filmmaker. I always enjoy his ability to inject his film school knowledge into such immediate character studies; among other, subtler references in Do the Right Thing was an open nod to The Night of the Hunter, and the Cool Hand Luke poster in Monty's flat smacks of a modern update of Michel's idolization of Bogey in Breathless. The film's centerpiece, set in a swanky club where Monty and co. spend his last night of freedom, is a dramedic masterpiece where the fast-paced editing of the preceding scenes morphs into dreamlike state of floating characters, blinding color schemes and slow trance music. Lee uses the sequence to get to the root of the characters' hangups, from the amusing black comedy of Jake struggling with his infatuation with student Mary (Monty brought her in with the gang) to more serious development between Frank and Monty. The question of who sold Monty out drives the tension of the sequence, and the reveal of his Judas allows him a moment to prove that he's outgrown the brutish behavior that got him pinched, though by turning his back on his Russian bosses' punishment of the rat he demonstrates that he's not quite mature yet.

The sequence and the resultant conclusion brilliantly draw the demons out of the characters and reveal the depths of their immaturity: Frank makes those drunken promises about opening a bar and assures Monty that he'll be there when his buddy's done with his sentence, but the boisterous tough guy balks when Monty begs him to rough him up to avoid entering prison with his handsome looks attracting the attention of other inmates. Jake exhibits self-control and obvious discomfort with his urges toward Mary, but all he needs is a bit of alcohol to tear down the barriers he built for himself.

Ironically, the most mature character, Monty's girlfriend Naturelle (Rosario Dawson), is the youngest. We see the couple meet in a flashback, when Naturelle was 18 and Monty was "old enough to have to ask" about her age. She's a kind and supportive soul, proud of her heritage where all three of the men try to bury theirs. Everyone -- detectives, the Russians, even Frank -- suggests to Monty that she sold him out to the cops, but any one scene with her convinces us that she would never have done such a thing. Perhaps that drains the tension, but Lee deftly adapts by centering the suspense on whom Monty thinks ratted.

Lee intertwines the maturation arcs of these characters with his 9/11 commentary at the end. Monty forces Frank to at last back up his empty promises with action, and the emotional fallout signals to the trader that he's not the superior creature he envisions himself. Jake must look after Doyle, the dog Monty rescued and that initial symbol of New York, and the responsibility of caring for the dog (and the avenue it provides for chatting to ladies of a more appropriate age) suggests healthy relationships in his future. On the way to prison

Responsibility is the entire crux of the film. Monty eats a final meal with his father -- in a hole-in-the-wall place with memorials to the firefighters who lost their lives on September 11, no less -- who blames himself for Monty's transgressions because of his alcoholism after Monty's mother died. He accepts responsibility for his son's failure, something that is not actually his fault (though Monty points out when James said that the boy could have been a lawyer that his criminal activities kept dad out of debt, revealing that some blame indeed does fall on James' shoulders). This scene leads to the most memorable part of the film, in which Monty heads into the restaurant's bathroom and launches into an impromptu rant, chewing out the various races and ethnicities of the city in a racist tirade to match the one in Do the Right Thing. Some of his attacks gain traction, such as the vicious tongue lashings he gives to Osama, Catholic pedophiles and CEOs who defraud investors and employees. After he insults everyone, including the other individual characters, he finally turns on himself: " No," he reprimands himself, "fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all, and you threw it away."

Naturally, New Yorkers hold no share of the blame for the terrorist attacks, but they, and all Americans, had a responsibility to respond to them in a certain manner. Monty's freewheeling rant directs his anger in all directions, not unlike the xenophobia felt in the wake of the attacks. He realizes that his hatred is misguided, though, when he finally turns his rage inward and sees that he's only really made at himself. Lee mirrors that scene at the end, when Monty, on his way to Otisville , passes a genteel, calmly edited version of the faces who flashed on the screen as targets of his earlier diatribe. They all smile and seem to wish him well, showing that we really are in all this together. Compare this image of beauty and unity, lacking any cynicism, to all the empty proclamations made by pundits and politicians nominally wishing to go back to that sense of togetherness in the wake of the attacks; Glenn Beck's 9/12 malarkey was nothing more than the first part of Monty's rant, a promotion of anarchic racism, not unity for the mutual benefit of members of society. Lee would later find much to hate about the resulting management of the attacks and the path the Bush administration took (for those who haven't seen his Katrina documentary When the Levees Broke, flip over to Amazon and order it. Then come back and thank me), but 25th Hour, made so soon after the attacks, is one of the most hopeful responses to the tragedy.*

That scene of Monty riding to prison brings the film's central theme of responsibility to a head. James offers to hang a left at the George Washington Bridge and ride his son to freedom. In an alternate vision that comes straight out of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, James speaks over his imagined rescue of his son, detailing how he'd drive Monty across this great land to start a new life, that maybe Naturelle could move out to wherever he goes after police attention lessens after a few years. Cox's monologue is beautiful and pained, almost pleading his son to agree to the plan, but when Lee cuts back to reality they've already passed the bridge. Monty, symbol of the average New Yorker and post-9/11 America in general, had two self-destructive options: lose himself in hatred, as he did in the bathroom scene, or run and hide from his problems, forced to live a life -- break out your plastic flags, everyone -- devoid of personal freedom or dignity. Instead, he chooses to face his future, without cowardice but also without hatred and a lack of contemplation. Even if the country did not follow in his footsteps, 25th Hour remains a hopeful, beautiful portrait of our potential to overcome personal and national tragedy, in no way invalidated by real-life responses.



*It's fitting that the other genuinely hopeful, non-manipulative response to the tragedy, Bruce Springsteen's The Rising, lends one of its tracks to the film.

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

Fans of Alex Garland's cult novel The Beach must have scratched their heads when Danny Boyle's adaptation essentially cut out the horrific last act when the beach community goes mad. Garland must have been confused as well, for he supplied the director with a script containing nothing but rage-filled, zombiesque creatures.

Now before I lose some people, let me address the zombie aspect of the film. I'm no horror expert, but the original George A. Romero Dead trilogy (why oh why couldn't he leave well enough alone?) and Max Brooks' recent, spellbinding novels The Zombie Survival Guide and the schlock masterpiece World War Z remain some of my favorite entries of either medium. I know the rules well: the zombie disease -- be it a virus, radiation, or some mystic curse -- spreads through blood and saliva. Those infected stand no hope of recovery. To kill a zombie, you must destroy the brain; decapitation will stop the body, but the head can still bite. Once a human has turned, he or she will never emit an emotional response, will never somehow remember a relative who begs for life by attempting to reach the loved one they once knew. Most importantly, zombies don't run.

28 Days Later follows several of these guidelines loosely, but it loses people in the running. I, for one, had no problem with it; what Garland and Boyle have created is a revisionist zombie flick, a Romero film for the post-9/11 era. Obviously, Romero eventually made his own "Romero films for the post-9/11 era," but Boyle's hyper-kinetic, gripping thriller vastly outstrips either of Romero's entries into his trademark franchise this decade.

Furthermore, not even Romero sticks to the "proper" formula: the zombies in Night of the Living Dead can run, and we all remember the humanized zombie Bub from Day of the Dead (as well as "Big Daddy" in Land). John A. Russo, co-writer of Night, eventually teamed up with Dark Star and Alien scribe Dan O'Bannon to create a more lightweight zombie franchise which broke damn near all the rules. Dismissing 28 Days Later, a film that doesn't even refer to its bloodthirsty mobs as "zombies," for not following a set of arbitrary rules established by fans of the genre when some of its most notable touchstones veer wildly as well strikes me as little more than fanboyish rage.

Shot mainly with grainy digital cameras, 28 Days Later has a docudrama feel that total first-person experiences such as Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead fail to communicate. Even with gorgeous, haunting establishing shots of a vacant London -- you have to admire and wonder how a film with a paltry £5,000,000 budget could co-ordinate cordoning off large blocks of the city for extreme long shots of total desolation, even if only for a few days of shooting -- breaking the personal feel of the action, Boyle invites us into this world, and a truly nightmarish one it is.

Following a prologue involving an outbreak of scientifically infected monkeys, the film shifts forward, well, guess how long, to focus on a young man waking up from a coma following a car accident. Jim (Cillian Murphy, in his breakout role) stumbles out of his hospital bed to find an abandoned building. The streets of London are likewise barren, until he walks into a church and finds a stack of dead bodies. Some of them stir at the noise he makes, and now the poor lad (still in a hospital gown, no less), must run from insane, fleet-footed killers who dart about as fast as humanly possible.

A group of survivors saves him, and they offer up some much-needed explainin': following the chimp outbreak, a mysterious virus known only as "Rage" swept through Britain, as infection spreads through even a drop of blood in an open wound, mouth or eyes, and any hapless victim covered in the red stuff turns in under 20 seconds. Once turned, they attack anything that moves with unrelenting ferocity. Jim joins the two survivors who rescue him -- what choice does he have? -- and soon finds himself in the sort of despair you'd expect from someone who woke up to the apocalypse. Eventually they run low on supplies and set out through London, searching for anything or anyone who might help them survive.

The real horror of 28 Days Later comes not from the infected but their after-effects. It is genuinely unsettling to see a handful of people move through a desolate metropolis. I suppose the city really should have teemed with infected, but I would hazard a guess that Boyle was doing good just to shut down parts of London for shooting, much less paying hundreds of extras (all of whom would need decent make-up) for every exterior shot. The infected are not interested in eating flesh, only attacking, and it's chilling to watch one of the few human survivors sprayed in the face with blood either vomited by the infected or (more disturbingly) spurted by wounds that the human inflicts to stop the rampaging beast.

Selena (Naomie Harris), a steely, kickass black woman ripped straight from The Omega Man, knows all too well what it means when an infected spills some blood on a person, and when she spots a gash on her comrade's arm created by one of the Ragers, she cuts him apart with a machete without a moment's hesitation. He's the first of the characters to fall prey to this fast-acting disease, but he sure isn't the last.

Of course, horror doesn't mean much if the characters afflicted by monsters/killers/insanity do not connect with the audience. Even if we're never meant to root for a character or get much of an insight into them (think Repulsion), we have to care on some level about the people on screen. Garland's script succeeds because he gives us people who have their own issues and personalities outside of dealing with the Rage threat. Selena and Jim happen upon Frank (Brendan Gleeson, stealing the show as ever), a kindly but strong single parent desperately trying to give his young daughter Hannah (Megan Burns) a shred of normalcy even as they are barricaded in their flat.

Of course, the raison d'être for most great zombie films is sociopolitical allegory, and 28 Days Later treads this path as well. After overhearing a radio transmission promising "the answer to infection," the foursome makes their way to a compound controlled by a small band of soldiers led by Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston). West's "answer" is to hole up until the infected die of starvation, then to rebuild civilization; one day, he takes Jim aside and tells the now-steeled survivor that he sent out the transmission to give his despondent squad hope and he "promised them women."

The readiness of the soldiers to rape Selena and the teenage Hannah is forced -- I figured they'd want at least some semblance of a human connection outside of sex -- but the martial law of West illustrates a point hammered home with amusing repetition in The Zombie Survival Guide: in most cases, surviving humans pose more of a threat to each other than the zombies. Eccleston puts in a fine performance as, in many ways, a foil for Frank: he's trying to keep his soldiers -- a surrogate family -- going and sees procreation as much an avenue to bring them back from the brink as it is "necessary" to keep humanity going. That only Great Britain suffers from this outbreak, at least according to the most sympathetic soldier, only reveals how mad West has become in his attempts to literally hold down the fort.

The insanity of West's compound sets up an inevitable confrontation between the soldiers and the civilians, but 28 Days Later hits a bit of a snag in the end. Basically, a royally pissed off Jim tears through the complex to save Selena and Hannah and generally acts in a manner just as terrifying as the infected who swarm about the place. There's an interesting theme there that Garland and Boyle, suddenly salivating over the violence like men possessed, do not explore. It especially looks bad in a coda that was re-written after an original, bleaker, and infinitely superior (because it actually works) ending drew negative response at test screenings, that most useless of industry tools. This new ending offers hope, but it directly contradicts the rest of the film and its lack of any organized government, military, religion or any other social institution. Again, that might have been a suitably dark and contemplative direction, showing that both the soldiers and civilians tore each other apart when help might have been on the way, but the poor filmmakers had to make a forced happy ending that rewards these characters for their bloodlust.

Nevertheless, even the final act contains enough full-tilt action to keep your pulse-pounding no matter how reactionary it is. Boyle's grainy, jumpy footage ratchets up the tension even as I found precious little that scared me (I have a strange tendency not to be scared by horror films I like, as I'm "too busy" admiring them). I also appreciate the dark humor of a group of animal rights activists unwittingly causing the outbreak in their attempts to free monkeys, rather than the carelessness of clinical scientists. Garland has a history with mocking the counterculture (i.e. The Beach), but I think that Boyle at least subconsciously wanted to demonstrate that well-meaning people can bring about massive destruction; after all, the scientists who always set something loose in these sorts of films are usually working toward something good and noble.

28 Days Later may divide zombie fans, but I for one delighted in all the nods to Romero's films: a Bub-like infected man under study, an attack in a decrepit gas station, the ruthless military vs. civilians. Boyle wears his influences on his sleeve, and he and Garland crafted a thoroughly enjoyable, somewhat thoughtful meditation on how man can lose himself in hysteria and anger, released in the wake of both September 11 and the SARS panic. It loses steam at the end, but 28 Days Later is more than a respectable entry into the horror genre, and its gritty look set off a wave of inferior imitators just as Romero's zombie satires did decades ago.