Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”: Murder in four-part disharmony

“It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.”

So says a nameless commoner (Kichijiro Ueda). He has come upon a priest (Minoru Chiaki) and a woodcutter (Takashi Shimura) in a broken-down gatehouse identified by an overhead sign: Rashomon. It is Akira Kurosawa’s celebrated 1950 mystery, set in feudal Japan, about the rape of a woman (Machiko Kyô), the death of her samurai husband (Masayuki Mori), and the various conflicting accounts of the crime … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Star Trek”: To boldly go where several have gone before

Dir. J.J. Abrams
(2009, PG-13, 127 min)
★ ★ ½

I’m a Trekkie — er, Trekker — or whatever we’re calling ourselves these days. Trek-American? But as the series entered a fifth cycle on television in 2001 and a ninth sequel in theaters in 2002, it was clear that the franchise needed a significant reboot; there are only so many stories you can generate from following a captain and his crew through space on variations of the same ship, and I think the makeup department was running out of ideas for alien species. So I was excited when I learned that J.J. Abrams, geek-auteur of the television gems Alias and Lost, would take the reins. I’m no purist. When new ideas are needed, I’ll take them from all comers; imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels might have been if George Lucas had collaborated with Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, or Ronald D. Moore, who triumphantly re-imagined another beloved science fiction antiquity: Battlestar Galactica.

If only Abrams had written the screenplay — or Whedon or Moore. That job went instead to frequent Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who wrote the passable Mission: Impossible III for the director, as well as Michael Bay’s The Island and Transformers and the TV series Fringe, of which I am not a fan. Their Trek script, which brings the franchise back to its birthplace, onboard the original Enterprise with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and company, has met with critical acclaim and commercial success: a whopping score of 83 on Metacritic and an opening weekend gross that nearly doubled the entire domestic take of the previous Trek film, Nemesis. But I’m not sure what the fuss is about.

Orci and Kurtzman’s script is effective, frequently clever, gets the job done in a workmanlike sort of way, but it’s short on imagination — it doesn’t boldly go anywhere we haven’t been already. This new version of Kirk, played by Chris Pine, is even cockier and more flamboyant than William Shatner’s version, but he’s an archetype of devil-may-care heroism we’ve seen a thousand times before. There are action set pieces that owe no small credit to the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. And the principal villain is the evil Romulan Nero (Eric Bana), who is hellbent on a familiar brand of revenge.

The plot is founded on a time-travel premise, but it’s a clever one. I’ll describe precious little of it, lest I reveal crucial details, but it involves Nero, Spock (Zachary Quinto), and a black hole. Nero possesses something called “Red Matter,” which produces spontaneous black holes. It takes the form of a suspended red orb of liquid, which may be a nod to a similar object Abrams created for Alias; the previous orb produced zombies, not black holes, but I suppose in this economy floating red orbs need to diversify.

We meet the crew, though the film only leaves itself enough time to loosely sketch them and reference their former personas: Dr. McCoy says, “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a physicist!” and engineer Scotty repeats his catchphrase, “Ah’m givin’ her all she’s got, cap’n!” But we get a sense of the actors in their new roles. The wonderful comic actor Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is a joy as Scotty, while Karl Urban’s McCoy and Anton Yelchin’s Chekhov in their limited screen-time are restricted to gimmicky character quirks; their performances play more like impressions, though I’ll confess a laugh when the ship’s computer failed to recognize Chekhov’s Russian-accented English.

The production values are a mixed bag. The visual effects have been upgraded to 21st Century specs, but Abrams shoots in that irritating way where incessant edits and shaky cameras make the action all but unintelligible; why do filmmakers throw so much money at the screen only to make it impossible to appreciate? The production design by Scott Chambliss is a curious blend of the futuristic and the retro: Engineering, with its orange, man-sized hydro-tubes, looks like a water park designed by Willy Wonka. Michael Kaplan’s costume design is troubling: while Abrams was updating the franchise, he should have swapped out those undignified women’s uniforms for something with pants.

Every once and a while, the camera slows down enough to enchant us. When Kirk and McCoy approach the Enterprise on a transport vessel, they look through the window at a beautifully designed space dock: a spherical station branching out into satellites. I wanted to spend time on the station, find out how it runs. What is the day-to-day life of these 24th Century people as Abrams envisions them? I wanted more of the human detail that distinguished the director’s television work — and while we’re at it, a Steadicam wouldn’t hurt.

Moral Fixation: Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989)

Woody Allen is up-front about the themes of his 1989 comedy-drama Crimes and Misdemeanors, but so clear and insightful about them that we don’t mind the direct approach. It is an argument about God. Where is He? Does the world adhere to moral certitude according to His laws? Or is it chaos, a nihilist mash-up of mankind’s basest, most cynical impulses? … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Taking Chance” (HBO)

Dir. Ross Katz
(2009, Not Rated, 77 min)
★ ★ ★ ★

This is a great film, and not what I expected it to be. I had anticipated a character study of Lt. Col. Michael Strobl, the taciturn man played in a reserved but deeply expressed performance by Kevin Bacon. To some degree it is about him — his journey, why he undertakes it, how it moves him. In the same way, it is also about the fallen marine he escorts, Chance Phelps, who we learn more about the closer we get to his final resting place. But the main character of the film is the death rite itself.

It is a segment of the war experience that is seldom shown and is depicted with great insight by the autobiographical script by Strobl and the direction of Ross Katz (who also co-wrote the screenplay). We too are made Phelps’s escorts, from the processing of his remains and personal effects to his lowering into the ground at the site of his grave. Katz shows us what great care is taken with his body and possessions, shown in tender closeups. He observes military rituals — the careful folding of flags, the loading onto and off of planes — in shots composed with visual symmetry that conveys order and a reverence for the dead. We are shown the subtle and often wordless reactions of civilians whom Strobl encounters along the way; they are demonstrative in their gestures of condolence, or exhibit the uneasy solemnity of wanting to pay respects in some way but not sure what to say or how to say it. There are beautiful scenes in airports that are shot simply but have undercurrents that run deep.

At times, Katz speaks volumes without needing a word of dialogue. Perhaps the film’s most affecting sequence shows Strobl driving behind the hearse carrying Phelps to the funeral home. They drive slowly, and other cars are shown passing on their left. But then the scene cuts to a wide shot of the road and shows that the two-car procession has grown into a multi-car caravan. It is a spontaneous act of shared grief, of communal mourning — a nation of the bereaved on a lonely desert road to carry a soldier home.

Vengeance is Mine: Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” (1960)

Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 drama The Virgin Spring, whose story is retold in the contemporary 1972 horror film The Last House on the Left and its recent remake, is based on a 13th Century Swedish ballad that can be summarized in a sentence: a young girl is brutally raped and murdered, and the killers unwittingly seek refuge with her parents. I suppose because its setup is so simple it is ideal to be remade and reinterpreted; a filmmaker can make of it what he will … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

On DVD: Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” (1967)

Dir. Ingmar Bergman
(1967, Not Rated, 83 min)
★ ★

Sometimes you just have to say it: I didn’t get it.

I’ve written this review before. But then the movie was called Synecdoche, New York, or Inland Empire, or Eraserhead, or Brand Upon the Brain, or take your pick. It’s always the same review, because I always end up talking about myself. I can’t satisfactorily talk about the films, because I can’t engage them. I find myself on the outside while the filmmaker goes through his postmodern, existentialist, deconstructionist motions. I’m in my seat, and the film is up there on the screen, and there’s no bridging the gap.

In this review that I’ve written before, I talk about having an entry point, a means of becoming involved in the film while it contemplates its navel. If the filmmaker cannot make his navel interesting to me, why should I bother; the filmmaker could just as easily have the same discourse in a room by himself.

Persona is such a film. It’s a closed circuit, going round and round and round in a endless philosophical loop. There’s no room for me in it. Directed by Ingmar Bergman, it’s about — and do take the word “about” with a grain of salt — a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), and her patient, Elisabet (Liv Ullmann). Elisabet has lost her ability to speak, or refuses to. With Alma, she retreats to a secluded cottage where she hopes to recover from … I don’t know exactly.

Beautiful cinematography by Sven Nykvist accompanies their story, during which Alma and Elisabet’s personalities distort and merge. There’s a funny audio commentary on the DVD, by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais, who spends much of the film asking my questions for me: “What is happening here?” “Does this make sense?” “What is Bergman getting at?” It’s funny because when he asks the questions he’s enthralled, but when I ask them I’m aggravated. I observed the film’s mysteries, its self-references — the film opens with flashes of light and images of a film reel, and at times Elisabet seems to assume the role of director, training a still camera at us and at Alma — considered its themes of split personalities and doubles, which I think must have been a strong influence on David Lynch’s truly exhilarating Mulholland Drive, in which another pair of interconnected, vaguely Sapphic women have their identities overthrown midway through. But I reacted to them only as vague curiosities, and my eyes glazed over despite myself. I wasn’t involved emotionally, so the film’s intellectual puzzles left me rather cold.

Bergman reportedly wrote Persona while recovering in the hospital from a nervous breakdown and credited the film with saving his life. Indeed, it plays like the product of a nervous breakdown, so full of jagged edges, unanswered questions, angst, and despair. There’s a feeling of him working through contradictory ideas and impulses. For him, the end result was salvation. But as I watched it, there was just me, the movie, and the vast space between.

On DVD: “Maxed Out”

Dir. James Scurlock
(2006, Not Rated, 87 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

Maxed Out is not an astonishing film in and of itself — it’s a little unfocused at the start — but in conjunction with other recent films it opens my eyes to a hidden world I’m better for having seen, no matter how painful the glare. There is a growing 21st Century canon of documentary film that constitutes a required curriculum for modern American life.

I’m thinking of three films in particular, about money in America: Sicko, about the health care industry; I.O.U.S.A., about the national debt; and now 2006’s Maxed Out, about the credit card industry. Each film, in its own way, goes about explaining how the mass of Americans are at the mercy of money: those who have it, those who owe it, those who demand it, and those who wield it as a political weapon. The problem with our capitalist democracy is that pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps economics is rather an illusion, because if you’re wealthy enough, you can pay a Congressman to pass a law that not only provides your boots but also appoints someone to pull the straps for you. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Exorbitant health care costs that go unchecked. Deregulation of financial markets. All under the guise of capitalist progress. But this isn’t capitalism. It’s plutocracy.

And I haven’t even watched the Enron documentary yet.

According to Maxed Out, credit card companies and their subsidiaries are like bookies. They target the customers who are the most likely to make late payments and then charge obscene interest rates on the debt. It seems counterintuitive, which is probably why I frequently struggle to wrap my head around it. It seems to be a compound paradox; see if you can follow. Credit card companies make the most money from customers least likely to be able to pay. When those debts reach critical mass, they’re sold to other companies. What, you may ask, does a company do with the bad debt it buys? Take it for walks? Display it on the coffee table? Serve it with a white wine sauce? What could possibly compel a business to purchase the lack of money?

I’ve wondered. Maxed Out shows us, and I think I understand. Director James Scurlock takes us inside People First Recoveries, whose only service is to collect money on the bad debts they purchase using every tool at their disposal, and they are not wanting for tools. They leverage your secrets. They harass you, your friends, your family, your neighbors. They squeeze information out of police departments to use against you. As yet they don’t break knee-caps, but that’s only until their knee-cap reform bill passes Congress.

The young entrepreneurs who started People First are shocking, not in what they say so much as how casually they say it. They must not realize how they sound, or else they would have dropped out of the film and filed an injunction to have the footage burned. If they truly believe their message, they may qualify as sociopaths according to the DSM-IV.

MDNA, a bank holding company and George W. Bush’s greatest campaign contributor, wrote a bill that makes it more difficult to file for bankruptcy, which is a debt-holder’s last resort; Bush passed it. A director of Providian Financial, which paid $400 million in fraud settlements from 2001 to 2002, was appointed corporate crime czar by the same president. That’s kind of like hiring Clyde Barrow as head of bank security.

My favorite of the talking heads is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Professor and the author of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. When she explains the financial industry, she appears stricken, all at once mortified by what she’s describing as she’s describing it. During her interviews, I feel a kinship; the more I learn, the more I understand how she feels. Warren is currently the chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel to oversee the banking bailout; in an appearance on The Daily Show last month she looked occasionally like a deer in headlights, and while answering Jon Stewart’s questions she seemed about eight steps behind the curve. I was simultaneously angry and sympathetic; if she can barely keep up, what chance does the average consumer have?

Scurlock mixes the expert testimonials with personal horror stories that highlight the human cost of predatory lending. The smaller-scale stories distract from the facts in the early going; I wanted less emotional content and more hard-boiled information. But as they are woven through the film they build to a devastating emotional climax.

Consumers must also be accountable for themselves. There are those who are thrown into debt by a sudden death or illness or bureaucratic error, but others are also the victims of poor choices. Two heartbreaking stories describe the suicides of college students who dug themselves too far into credit card debt and saw no way out. There are two lessons here: (1) Credit card companies recklessly exploit the naivete of eighteen-year-olds who haven’t learned responsibility, and (2) eighteen-year-olds should be more responsible. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if a credit card company offers you one, the lunch may be the only thing they leave you with.