Steven Spielberg: Munich

An act of American obliviousness sets in motion the events of Munich. At the 1972 Olympics, a group of American athletes stumble across some Palestinian men attempting to get past a gate. Used to the sight of small bands of men from different countries roaming the area, the Americans jovially call out to them and ask what event they're in. Blind to the tense, apprehensive faces of the men, the athletes show them in and depart on friendly terms. But before the Americans are even out of range, the group is already pulling out new clothes and weapons to storm the hotel room holding the Israeli Olympic team. They do, and everything else plays out on the actual newscasts recorded over the next 18 hours. It ends, of course, with Jim McKay's infamous declaration, "They're all gone."

But despite the film's title, Munich does not end with the conclusion of its heinous massacre; it's only just begun. In fact, Munich may not even be about the aftermath of the killings in the titular city. Released in proximity with the 9/11-conjuring fever dream War of the Worlds, Munich serves as the more thoughtful, severe follow-up to the notion of a terrorist attack and society's response to it. Spielberg's reenactments of news crews frantically assembling outside the hotel, scrambling for any new updates as their presence only worsens the situation, is as indicative of Spielberg's true aims as the final shot showing the New York skyline with the World Trade Center still standing in the middle of the frame. Munich may be about a specific event and the fallout from it, but the director clearly wants us to apply the lessons the movie teaches to more current issues of terrorism and counterterrorism.

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

Haywire displays nearly all the traits of a modern Steven Soderbergh movie. It sports an A-list cast seemingly game for anything. It jet sets all over the world even though it hardly needs to, suggesting that the director A) insists on verisimilitude, B) loves studio-paid vacations, or C) both. Its shallow-focus digital cinematography creates paranoid, claustrophobic frames of doubt and suspicion; Haywire even opens with such abstracted, zoomed-in pixellation that the text telling the audience they're watching upstate New York simply must be a gag. And as with the cast of Bubble and Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Haywire features a non-professional actor anchoring the action, in this case retired MMA fighter Gina Carano.

The film also works as the latest in Soderbergh's never-ending line of genre deconstructions. Despite its lean running time of 93 minutes, Haywire leaves gulfs of space around its revenge plot, Lem Dobbs' script asymptotically approaching exposition, only to flatline in vagueness before reaching it. Dobbs, of course, wrote the screenplays for Soderbergh's Kafka and, somewhat infamously, The Limey. Given the amount of dialogue, it stands to reason more of Dobbs' words remain here than in Soderbergh's masterfully elliptical anti-thriller, but Haywire nevertheless shares many qualities with the director's best film. Both are action thrillers that dismantle the conventions of their niches within the genre, finding beauty and agony in the all-too-single-minded attitudes of so many of these films.

La Haine

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing charted racial tensions over a single day in a heat wave-stricken New York City neighborhood. His was a slow burner, a subtle but constant escalation that eventually bubbled over into a murder and a small-scale riot. Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (meaning "Hate") ups the ante; it opens with a riot. A visceral, incisive and, ultimately, disturbingly prescient look at how a bad situation can, somehow, always get worse, La Haine makes the idea-mongering of American History X look about as insightful as Paul Haggis' Crash.

The director takes us to an area of Paris so close and yet so far removed from the glamor or even the hip artistry of the city. He heads to the city's banlieues, run-down suburbs filled with high unemployment, drop-out rates and immigrant populations. The decrepit, sparse buildings look even worse in the riot's aftermath, inspiring only more hatred in the three protagonists. Vinz (Vincent Cassel), a Jew, rages against the police as Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) tries to calm him down. They visit Hubert (Hubert Koundé), an Afro-French boxer, at his gym, which has been ruined by fires. Compared to Vinz, Hubert accepts this with a certain sense of resignation, though he suspects that Vinz was so caught up in the action the previous night that he might have helped burn the place.

Kassovitz builds the story slowly, through seemingly arbitrary and disconnected threads: the three are concerned for their friend, Abdel, who was injured in the riot and lies in a coma. Other residents mumble rumors that a cop lost his gun in the riot, and whoever finds it can even the odds against the armed cops. As the riot destroyed so many of the denizens' meager possessions, many charge exorbitant sums for the most banal services, a laughable ploy as everyone else is just as poor. It puts people on edge, and the increased police scrutiny brought on by the riot only turns up the heat.

Naturally, each character reacts to these harsh circumstances in different ways. Vinz, who idolizes Travis Bickle and reenacts the "You talkin' to me" speech in a mirror to convince himself of his hardness, loses himself in anti-police hatred. He discovers the lost revolver and vows to use it if Abdel dies. Hubert, on the other hand, has a more measured acceptance of the hand fate dealt him. He regards Vinz's spiral into self-annihilation with sadness a wisdom beyond his years. He doesn't like ghetto life, but he knows that violence and antagonism will not break the cycle. An intermediary between the two, Saïd simply treads water, oblivious to (or consciously suppressing) larger issues facing him, he rants about cops but is far more concerned with getting laid than getting justice.

Kassovitz won the Best Director Prize at Cannes, and his work is indeed remarkable. His mise-en-scène is well-arranged but intentionally disorienting, as he leaps in and out of the characters heads change the POV briefly before leaping back out again as quickly as he shifted gears. For all the severity of the material, Kassovitz offers a wry gag here and there: in one of the first shots, he pans over a exaggerated line of cops monitoring the banlieue, only to finally reach the end to show Saïd tagging their vehicle with graffiti right under their noses. He also inserts random asides where wholly inconsequential people tell long-winded stories to the protagonists. These stories can involve a description of a Candid Camera episode or an old man's bizarre reminiscence of his time freighthopping, but they ultimately comment on the narrative, building tension through their lengths and reflecting on the mounting tension and doom of the story.

La Haine ends on a note about as shocking as anything else that came before it, with one of the trio dead by cop and another ready to shoot the officer who did it. The screen cuts to black, and a single gunshot is heard. Who fired it? It doesn't really matter; it's merely the action that will start the whole thing over again. If the cop died, the cops and the people outside the ghetto will condemn the residents as thugs. If it was the ghetto rat, the other residents will only stir further. Either way, it means more cops and more riots in the future.

Much ado has been made in other reviews of the multiracial cast, but the deep and distressing truth of Saïd, Vinz and Hubert is that, regardless of their families' backgrounds, are all 100% French. That fact makes it all the more shocking and depressing when the boys catch a train into Paris' city limits and step off looking as bewildered as tourists. Just as the majority of the audience looked upon this dark, unseen side of France, so too do these men feel lost and unsettled when exposed to a place they don't know. The tragedy is that the area that bemuses the protagonists is the entire world outside their own.

Amélie

It's rare to see true whimsy in cinema. People like to cite Wes Anderson as one of its purveyors, but I find his films too calculated to be truly whimsical. Be Kind Rewind had some whimsy, but squandered it in a narrative that never meshed and only clicked in short bursts here and there in the middle of plodding boredom. Perhaps that's the only way whimsy can really manifest itself on-screen: any full-length film employing flights of fancy will inevitably feel too planned to be carefree. If ever there was an exception though, Amélie would be it.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet structures the opening montage of the film as a New Wave homage at break-neck speed, a series of disorienting jump cuts that introduce our heroine: as a child her father, a doctor, never hugged nor kissed her, and only ever touched her during checkups. This caused her heart to beat rapidly in excitement, leading her father to diagnose her with a heart condition. Her mother home-schooled her as a result, until she was killed by a suicidal woman who leapt from Notre Dame and fell on her. This isolated childhood resulted in an heightened imagination.

We then cut to Amélie as a 23-year-old waitress who goes to the movies on Fridays and likes to "notice the little details no one else does." Her life changes, though, when she hears of Princess Diana's death on the news and subsequently finds a box of old memorabilia belonging to her apartment's former owner. She makes a vow: she will return the box to its owner, and if it makes him happy, she will dedicate herself to improving others. She tracks the man down and leaves the box in a phone booth. He discovers it, and a flood of memories come rushing back, bringing tears of longing and joy to the man's eyes as Amélie watches from a distance. The man enters the bar where she sits and talks to the barkeep of a "guardian angel" who just gave him back pieces of his childhood. Well, that seals the deal: Amélie resolves to changes people's lives for the better.

She's played by Audrey Tautou, and Jeunet couldn't have found a more perfect actress for the part if the vision he had in his head somehow manifested itself before him. To see her is to understand why someone would secret her away from the world. An adorable, doe-eyed waif, she walks through the film with a half-smile and a look on her face that says she wants to tell the people she's helping that she's responsible, not for credit or praise but so she can fully share the moment with them.

Amélie works because its heroine never changes the world; she hatches all these complex schemes normally reserved for arch-villains, but she uses them to make someone's life just a bit better. Those she helps are bettered by her assistance, but they'll never know it. On the way home one day, she helps a blind man across the street before dragging him along the marketplace describing everything around them, painting word pictures for a man cut off from the visual beauty around him. He laughs in delight and you can tell that he hasn't smiled in a long time; when they reach the train station Amélie takes off just as quickly as she appeared and the man just stands where she left him with a look of bliss on his face. Later, she plays match-maker with a couple and helps out the bag-boy at a local produce stand by pranking his overbearing boss into vexation.

Though helping these people brings them into her world, the person Amélie cares about most is a young man she spots frequently outside a photo booth in the metro station. Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz), an artist, collects all the unwanted photos discarded by customers and creates a sort of collage of failed poses. Amélie, who has never really had a steady boyfriend, is attracted to him but is too shy to show it, until she speaks with one of her neighbors. Dufayel is also an artist, but he stays in his apartment, continuously repatining Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party. He holes himself away in his room because he was born with bones so brittle that "a handshake could crush his fingers." When Amélie asks why he paints the same thing over and over again, he responds that he can't get the look of the girl drinking water right. Jeunet never calls attention to it, but the more they speak of this mysterious figure the more we come to realize that the girl stands for Amélie.

In the end, of course, we get a happy ending, but how could we not? The entire two hours play out like one great dream. Now, people tend to define whimsy on cinema in terms of "dancing" or "floating" cameras. Jeunet's camera does not so much float as it does careen; he runs breathlessly through the street of Paris, using smash cuts to whisk us away to some new location. He throws such much on the screen that I'm surprised he never tipped the scales into sensory overload, but instead it grabs you by the hand, not inviting you into its world but dragging you along like Amélie did with the blind fellow. It's not quite perfect, yet Jeunet did everything exactly right: the casting, the editing, the mise-en-scène. I have finally seen whimsy on cinema so gently guided as to seem self-sustaining. If you haven't seen Amélie, your life is incomplete.

'Babylon' A Failure of Biblical Proportions

Have you ever wondered what waterboarding feels like but didn’t want to get your good shirt wet? Might I then suggest this film, which certainly made me feel like I was drowning. More a lame pastiche of nearly every notable piece of cyberpunk and dystopic fiction than an actual film, Babylon A.D. takes every last good idea introduced in science fiction cinema since Blade Runner and grinds it into dust in the span of 90 minutes.

The plot, if it can be so called, centers on Toorop, a mercenary living out his days in Russia after being classified as a terrorist in the United States. His latest mission? Deliver a young teenager and the nun who cares for her to New York City. The catch? The girl, named Aurora, seems to have powers of some sort. So, right off the bat it’s Children of Men mixed with Firefly/Serenity.

Problems arise almost immediately, not least of which is the acting. Vin Diesel has starred in a grand total of two good films, one of which he played little more than a bit character in. He’s one of the worst actors to ever stubbornly cling to the A-list, and his moronic droning leads me to believe a large object fell on his head just before the director yelled “action”. Mélanie Thierry portrays Aurora as a mix between the insane psychic River Tam from Firefly and the shrill, whiny Dawn from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, only without any of the traits that made those characters interesting. Michelle Yeoh is the only one who puts in a decent performance, but her part is so ridiculous it hardly matters. For God’s sake, she’s a peaceful nun, but all of a sudden starts performing martial arts, presumably because the writers got sick of only ripping off science fiction and just happened to be watching Bulletproof Monk.

The greatest tragedy, though, is the film’s haphazard plagiarism of better movies. The near-magical plastic surgery calls to mind Terry Gilliam’s twisted masterpiece Brazil, which presaged the botox craze by decades, while the ability to instantly track anyone in the world is a staple of cyberpunk, with The Matrix and V For Vendetta in particular pushing the Big Brother tone to the max. Russia and Kazakhstan are depicted as crumbling ruins full of refugee camps, with only the odd placing of technological wonders to suggest that this is the future. Then the gang gets to New York, and suddenly it’s the ad-soaked color explosion of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles.

Look, I like Children of Men and Blade Runner too, but you can’t just combine them for the hell of it. They each represent an extreme of futuristic setting; one shows the gradual self-destruction of humanity as all the flashy gizmos prove unable to keep the species going while the other is itself a flashy gizmo. Are the writers seriously suggesting that, in the future, the rest of the world will be a squalid, backwards concentration camp while Americans will still live in booming metropolises? And we wonder why other countries hate us.

If there is a ray of sunshine in all this, it’s that the film will only waste 90 minutes of your life. The dialogue is a constant series of non-sequiturs that confuse and enrage when they should provide exposition. The acting, even from French über-actor Gérard Depardieu, is phoned-in, to the point that everyone sinks to Vin Diesel’s level. Director Mathieu Kassovitz cannot shoot action at all; some scenes look like the man dropped the camera and chased after it like a charmingly inept footballer. Kassovitz gained recognition for disowning this cut of the film, though I cannot imagine any version of this movie being great or even enjoyable.

If you like science fiction but have never seen a film, enjoy action shots where everybody looks the same and the camera jolts as if the director just got hit with a cattle prod, and don’t mind creepy sexual tension with what I assume is a minor, then you may be able to glean some entertainment from this film. Otherwise, stick to the films that this movie copied.