Repo Men

Quite often at the theater, I sit morosely during the trailers, made to watch simultaneously the most marketable aspects of a coming attraction and everything about it that might turn me off the film -- if I wasn't so lazy and unwilling to move from my spot once I find one in a theater, even during the previews, I might take after Gene Siskel and stand out in the lobby to avoid hearing the best jokes for upcoming comedies and the unwittingly revealed plot twists of thrillers. At every screening, I suppress a groan of pain at some (at the very least) of the previews, whose offensive banality is only made worse by the mutterings of the strangers around me and the occasional friend that the film being teased looks "great" and that "we've gotta see that." I found the tables turned, however, in recent weeks as trailers for some gonzo-looking sci-fi ride called Repo Men played in advance of the few films I've attended this year. In all cases, the audiences either laughed derisively or sat in silence, leaving me to wonder, "Am I the only person who thinks this actually looks kind of good?"

That was then. Repo Men boasts a ridiculous premise: in the future, a giant corporation known as The Union sells artificial organs to patients in need of transplants. The business charges exorbitant prices, and if (or when) people cannot pay, The Union sends officials to repossess the unpaid item. Absurd, isn't it? Imagine such a world, where a profit-driven intermediary stood between doctors and patients. How could such a business, which repossesses so much of its property, make any money? What money lender would ever agree to finance staggering loans that lessees cannot hope to pay? Madness, I tell you.

Jude Law plays Remy, one of the Union's titular repo men, a cold professional who cannot be moved by pleas or threats. He zaps an overdue client with a taser, opens the unfortunate sod and reclaims the organ, no matter how vital. As a company courtesy, he asks his victims if they require a trip to the hospital, usually while they're still unconscious. Along with his best friend, the more thuggish Jake (Forest Whitaker), Remy is one of The Union's finest employees. The bond between the two is so strong that when he gets word of Remy's job hunting, Jake rigs their defibrillator to backfire, thus damaging Remy's heart. He'll require a new one from The Union. To pay it off, Remy must remain at the firm, and with Jake.

With such a clever setup, covering both sociopolitical and personal basis, the eventual failure of Repo Men comes as a major disappointment. The dynamic between Remy and Jake, as well as Remy's change of heart regarding his occupation provides an identifiable character base to anchor the social implications, but director Miguel Sapochnik does not expand upon the rich possibilities of Eric Garcia's script.

Once the plot begins to roll, it snowballs away from contemporary relevance, eventually outpacing coherence as well. Remy's wife, who is somewhat creepily made into an unreasonable bitch almost immediately without any background into her character (a particular waste of the wonderful Dutch actress Carice van Houten), throws him out of the house when he awakens from his coma, and soon he flees his bosses, unable to do his job and therefore make his payments. He meets a singer, Beth (Alice Braga), who has an artificial "everything else" to go with Remy's fake heart. Sapochnik speeds through their vague recollection of each other into a romance to insert a requisite sex scene before they band together to tear down the evil corporation through over-kinetic action scenes that dispense of the black comedy of the film's start for facile sight gags and uninteresting stunts. Sapochnik's vision of the future is dull in that drably colored, dimly lit aesthetic that has become cheap shorthand for unwelcoming dystopias, fueling both good films -- Children of Men, The Road -- and bad (don't get me started).

"Vision" may be too generous a word. Repo Men's title proves quite apt, as Sapochnik appropriates design elements, plot devices and genre tropes from nearly every significant science fiction film that can be remotely tied to it. All of its shots of the city skyline of future Toronto resemble Blade Runner's Los Angeles, and the character of Remy resembles Deckard to a T, from his proficiency at his job to the overall irony of his involvement in his occupation (provided you pitch your tent in the "Deckard as replicant" camp). Its "fugitive on the run" scenes recall Logan's Run, and damn near everything -- the notion of a future run through heartless bureaucracy, the black comedy -- from Brazil except the visual ingenuity. It even shamelessly recreates the intense hallway fight from Oldboy, sapping all the fury and comedy out of the original and existing solely, one supposes, because the director thought Park Chan-wook's film was cool.

Repo Men has its moments. Both Law and Whitaker play their parts well, underwritten as they are. Liev Schreiber ported over his gruffness from the Wolverine movie into the role of Remy's boss and one of the public faces of The Union, and his imposing presence adds both weight and humor to his scenes, wherein he gently runs through the same damn speech to every potential client and forces their hand to choose lifelong debt (though that may not be quite so long) over death. Occasionally, the action becomes as goofy and intentionally laughable as its trying to be. But I couldn't help but focus on one scene, early in the film, when Remy, determined to pull off one last job before transferring, decides to reclaim the heart of a favorite musician. In his delusion, he justifies this sickening form of hero worship and god killing as doing the man a favor; "The guy who rips out his heart may as well as well be a fan of his music." It's such a brilliantly comedic and, when the musician resigns himself and asks only to finish one last song, oddly touching scene that it points to a much better film, and the problems begin to arise as soon as this sequence ends.

The first 20 minutes of Repo Men announce the most intelligent and incisive science fiction film in years, containing a brain and a heart. But, like the organs that make up its MacGuffins, they are artificial, merely rote setups to a mind-numbing display. Capped off by a final twist that not only completes the ripoff of one of its sources but adds only one final meaningless gesture. As with all the other artistic thefts in Repo Men, it carries over only the surface, capturing none of the depth beneath it. Perhaps the key to unlocking the film's ultimate ignorance lies in its usage of the example of Schrödinger's cat, at first potentially clever until we finally hear Remy's interpretation of it, which is about as stupid as you'd expect from a man who at one point boasts that he has a "small brain, big skull."

Where the Wild Things Are

There are so many places where Spike Jonze's third feature Where the Wild Things Are could go wrong. If I told you that the first ten minutes consisted of the director setting up its protagonist as a child in a broken home, neglected by a divorced mother trying to keep her job to continue to support her children, you'd probably -- Hey, come back! Let me finish. What on paper sounds like the beginnings of some half-assed Sundance feature becomes, under Jonze's wondrous direction and Dave Eggers' celebration of pre-pubescent angst, one of the finer films of the year and a technical marvel.

Jonze has a genuine find in Max Records, who plays the young hero Max. Imaginative but petulant, Max cannot connect with either his teenage sister nor his mom, and when mom invites a boyfriend over, an already cheesed Max acts out and ultimately runs away. Suddenly, he finds a sailboat that looks suspiciously like a small model he made for a miniature world in his bedroom, and sails until he reaches an island inhabited by huge monsters. Eggers and Jonze don't waste time in these first 15 minutes: as soon as he stumbles across the monsters, locked in the middle of some sort of argument, Max proudly strides in the middle of them and avoids being eaten by declaring himself their king.

Now that he's established the plot, Jonze slows the proceedings down and begins to explore this strange little world and its characters. Each of the monsters reflects a certain aspect of pre-teen moods: Alexander (voiced by Paul Dano), a goat-like beast, is timid and largely unheeded despite his keen observations; Judith (Catherine O'Hara) has the general snottiness and tactlessness of an impish child. Carol (James Gandolfini), the most prominent of the wild things, comes closest to Max's full range of emotions; Carol is the first to accept Max into the group, and he places all of his hopes on Max to keep the splintering wild things together.

Jonze has proven his visual acuity with his music videos as well as, to a more formal extent, his work directing his previous two features, both of which nicely juggled believable scenarios and set design with the skewed vision of Charlie Kaufman. Here, he at last unleashes the full range of his visual skill. The sharp, stripped branches jutting out from trees, and the houses and forts made from those sticks, reflect the characters' feelings of angst and loneliness, and one wonders how these large, hollow balls offer any sort of warmth or comfort to its residents. In one lovely segment, the wild things all pile on one another and Max, who is so dwarfed by this giant fur dome that he can wander freely in the middle of his new buddies.

I cannot honestly say, however, how well children might respond to this adaptation of a beloved children's book. Maurice Sendak's short story consisted of only 10 sentences and communicated the rest through illustrations, leaving a lot of space for Jonze and Eggers to fill. The script contains a number of fantastically funny moments -- many of them involving Alexander's quiet protests -- but for the most part the two focus on the sadder side of youth: their Max doesn't rebel because of unrestrained adolescent impudence but because he feels unloved and unwanted. Jonze keeps this idea grounded by presenting his mother's neglect without words and also inserting a number of shots that clearly demonstrate people caring for Max to prove that some of his feelings are hyperbolic and selfish. The mixture allows him to present Max both as a typical brat, but one with some pathos that never allows him to drift into the extremities of either unlikability or transparently sympathetic. The wild things also have their issues, and I found myself caring as much about whether this weird family stayed together as Max and his problems.

Interestingly, one segment of the film draws not from Sendak but Antoine de Sant-Exupéry and his classic Le Petit Prince: as Max and Carol wander through a desert (itself a clue to the scene's influence), Max relays something his science teacher told him earlier, that the sun would die one day. With only a moment's pause, Carol happily shuns such thoughts. "You're the king, and I'm big!" he says, "How could guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?" For all the film's dark themes of alienation and isolation, that one line is like a Beatles song in prose: I defy it not to bring a little cheer to people.

Most striking about the film, however, is the bizarre and magnificent design of the wild things. A combination of CGI and traditional puppetry and animatronics, the monsters can tread the line between purely fantastical (their heads are wider than their shoulders) and the realism that comes from an actual object being in the scene with the human actors. Often these creatures can be frightening, but I found myself strangely wishing to hug one of them, just one (probably not Judith).

Sadly, the film occasionally falters, such as its large storyline concerning a romance between the petulant and childlike Carol and the more reasonable KW (Lauren Ambrose), which drifts in and out of being interesting and grinds the picture to a halt when it isn't, as well as the ending, which to be fair couldn't really drawn upon Sendak's lack of resolution but fails to effectively conclude the story in its own way. These are minor quibbles, however, in the face of this charming but introspective young adult -- that's likely the area the film should be placed in, irrespective of the book -- feature that celebrates and contemplates the unrefined emotion of youth in equal measure. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go try to start up a dirt clod fight.

Bird

Clint Eastwood started directing his own films as far back as 1971's Play Misty With Me, but even his acclaimed films received their accolades more for Clint's on-screen performances and their stories than his direction. The common consensus is that he began to hint towards some skill with a camera starting with High Plains Drifter, but for my money his 1988 biopic of legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker is where he finally became a serious filmmaker in his own right rather than simply an actor who directed himself. Bird lays down a great deal of groundwork for the musician biography that became so popular in recent years while sidestepping a great deal of the clichés that came with the genre.

The first thing you'll notice about Bird is its structure. Most biopics arrange an artist's life in fairly linear fashion, filtering out the detritus to pinpoint the hubs that propelled the person forward from obscurity into fame, from fame into decline, from decline into redemption, etc. Then, of course, the filmmakers throw all the filtered-out stuff back in in an attempt to provide context to the big events, picking out the choicest bits of tabloid-fodder and using it ostensibly to give us a "deeper" look into the artist's life and creative process.

Eastwood, at least, does not lie to us. For 2-1/2 hours, he takes you deep into the heart of Parker's drug and alcohol addictions, focusing on them so unsparingly and for so long that finally we begin to understand the man, but not his art. No, the director is smart enough to know that drugs, creative beneficiary that they are so often called, may help create art at first but will ultimately destroy it. Bird is less a biopic of one of the greatest musicians in American history than a searing portrait of a junkie headed towards oblivion.

In that sense, we do not spend a great deal of time on Parker's extraordinary music, though of course we get many scenes of him in smoky jazz clubs, blistering ahead with equally vital jazzbos such as Dizzy Gillespie, the man who essentially made Parker. Eastwood went back to the old mono tapes of Parker's standards, had the sax solos separated out, then bolstered until the fill the screen with their power. Most credit Parker with "inventing" (no form of music is ever really just made from scratch) the bebop subgenre, in which smooth melody largely fell by the wayside in favor of fast tempos and harmonic improvisation, and these piercing, impossibly crafted solos show a true genius at work.

Most of the story takes place in the last few years of Parker's short life. The excellent Forest Whitaker portrays Parker as a fundamentally good man forever plagued by the terrible mood swings and bouts of depression brought on by his heroin problems. When we do flashback to his early life, it's chiefly brought on by the reminiscences of his peers. We hear the Robert Johnson-esque tale of Parker's early performances, where he was so bad that drummer Jo Jones threw one of his cymbals on the ground to stop Parker from making that dreadful racket. Humiliated, Parker retreats to the shadows for months to practice. When he emerged months later he was 'Bird.'

The rest, however, follows a the cycle of an addict: Parker gets hooked, winds up in rehab, cleans himself up, then someone offers just a little drink or just one hit, and it all starts over again. Each time Parker's loyal wife Chan (his last partner and the only one shown in the film) knows it won't last, but that can't suppress her happiness. She's smart enough to know that drugs are a part of Charlie as much as his saxophone, but she's too lovestruck to get herself out of the relationship.

Interspersed with this constant stream of brutal honesty, Eastwood throws some humor in there. Parker meets Red Rodney, a trumpeter who aspires to Parker's skill with the sax, and before long Rodney gets hooked on heroin with the implicit understanding that he did so to be like his idol. The two forge a friendship and Rodney joins Parker's quintet. The problem? They have to tour in the segregated South, so the band takes to calling Rodney "Albino Red" to avoid any problems. Later, the quintet winds up at a Jewish wedding of some of Red's friends, and somehow wind up the wedding band. The result is a hilarious sequence in which the quintet slowly turns Jewish standards into bop improv sessions, to the delight of the guests.

But those moments of joy are few and far between. Eastwood uses his stark camera style to bathe the world of nightclubs and dives in heavy shadow, always highlighting how grim Parker's future will be. As the film progresses, Parker's jaw-dropping solos slowly morph into a sort of jazz funeral for himself, upbeat with a hint of deep sadness and resignation. I suppose you could dismiss the film as a anti-drug message, as Gene Siskel did, but I think it's more than that. Eastwood simply films from the point of view of an addict; for him, the music went from being the focus of his life to a distant second to the drugs. That is the greatest tragedy of Parker's life, and putting that on-screen instead of a Hollywood-ized martyr is what makes Bird very close to a classic.

Johnny Handsome

Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome has so much going for it that I just can't fault it when it trips ten feet from the finish line and wretchedly crawls across the finish line. It's both his and Mickey Rourke's last film of the 80s, and a sort of last gasp for the both of them, though Rourke finally climbed back on top with Sin City and of course The Wrestler. Rourke alone should alert you to the necessity to watch this film regardless of its overall quality, as the man quite simply walked away with the 80s as far as I'm concerned.

Rourke stars as the titular character (née Johnny Sedley), a small-time career criminal who ends up on the bad side of a botched heist and spends the rest of the film plotting his revenge against the people who sold him out. He got his nickname due to the horrible facial disfigurement he's suffered since birth, scars that both swell his head and force him to speak with a lisp. Later in the film, Johnny recounts how, as a child, a young boy ripped off his jack-o-lantern mask on Halloween and said "Johnny don't need no mask," and Johnny responded by beating the poor kid senseless. Rourke brings all his tortured soul to the part, and only makes this creature even more wretched and pitiable.

An older man named Mikey looks after Johnny and includes him in his robberies. For a particularly big heist, Mikey recruits the help of two pieces of street trash, Sunny and Rafe (Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen, both of whom play just about the best scumbags you could ever hope to find) in order to pull things off successfully. The robbery goes bad, and Rafe ends up killing Mikey, while Johnny gets captured and sent to prison.

While there, a Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman) mocks him and his looks but, after an inmate stabbing leaves Johnny in the hospital, a doctor (Forest Whitaker) takes pity on the man. Believing that Johnny's life choices are the direct result of the shame he feels from his disfigurement, he offers to reconstruct Johnny's face and to hire a speech pathologist to rid him of his lisp in order to provide a fresh start. After a few weeks of painful surgeries, we see Mickey Rourke's beautiful face freed from all those prosthetics.

Soon Johnny gets paroled and finds a job and even starts going out with a girl who loves him (Elizabeth McGovern), but there's only one thing on his mind. Drones correctly guesses that Sunny and Rafe would never recognize the new Johnny, and sure enough he hatches a plan to win the couple's trust with another robbery that would get him close to his foes. He even toys with them at first to make sure they don't see it coming; "There's something familiar about him," wonders Sunny after Johnny tells the two that he knows them.

For such a short film, it plays out with a great deal of tension and suspense. Until the ending that is. I won't give it away, but some characters suddenly get smart while others don't think at all, and the short length suddenly becomes very, very apparent. The film runs barely over 90 minutes, and the final bit unfolds after an hour and a half has passed. I can't really say why the ending doesn't stick with me other than the fact that it seems to thoroughly clichéd as to be interchangeable with any number of "guys trying to break out of lives of crime" stories. Hell, Mickey Rourke himself built his career in the 80s on films that had endings too similar to this.

Nevertheless, the film remains a must-see on the basis of its fantastic opening heist sequence and the acting performances of Barkin, Henriksen and Rourke. Rourke in particular knocks it right out of the park; he puts so much pain into the role that it breaks through even the prosthetics and only magnifies on his actual face. I think the film was written with any actor in mind, but when Rourke took the part and made it his own suddenly the short running time became noticeable. For my money, his portrayal here is in his top five performances, and for that reason alone you should track this above-average piece of 80s noir down; I believe the DVD is being reissued soon anyway, so you're in luck.