Choke
On a rainy Sunday afternoon in November you can’t do much worse than a comedy to stir the spirit and dispel any emerging SAD symptoms. I will be checking out ‘Blindness‘ this week so keep an eye out for my review of that (sigh), until then due to the cold snap I was lazy and wondered over to my local cinema for a quick ninety minutes of US indie distraction.
‘Choke‘ is the story of Victor, a New Jersey based sex addict who works as a historical re-enactment performer with a nifty sideline in performing fake choking scenes in restaurants, preying on naive strangers who ‘save’ him with heroic Heimlich manoeuvres whom Victor subsequently taps for financial aid now that they’ve saved his life – kind of an exploitation of that Chinese proverb that if you save someones life then you are responsible for it. Victors motives aren’t entirely selfish however, after dropping out of medical school he is struggling to keep his mentally deranged mother (the always wonderful Angelica Huston) comfortable in an expensive care home as he tries to prise from her deteriorating memory the real history of his absent father and his confused childhood. Victor swiftly hits on one of his mothers nurses, the equally always wonderful Kelly McDonald and their swiftly developing unorthodox relationship leads our hero down a darkly comic path of abuse and revelation.
From that synopsis you may have worked out that this isn’t your standard issue American comedy, unsurprising given that it’s an adaption of literary sicko Chuck Palahniuk’s 2001 novel. Like his other books Palahniuk likes to explore some of the darker sides to our natures from his (deliberately) confused, conflicted Generation X perspective so I guess I can hesitantly compare “Choke’ being to sex what ‘Fight Club‘ is to violence and male machismo – intentionally shocking, nervous and unconventional. Sam Rockwell is pretty good as the shabby Victor, stumbling from one desperate, unsatisfying sexual misadventure to another – depending on your demeanour you may need a shower after seeing this film.
As a comedy I guess this just about works, passing the five out loud laughs quotient with one memorable sequence that I won’t spoil here – suffice to say if the phrase ‘pre-agreed rape fantasy sexual encounter’ makes you uncomfortable then you should probably give this a miss. It builds – if you’ll excuse the expression – to an agreeable climax (heh) with something of another eccentric resolution for our hero in a manner akin to the classic finale of ‘Fight Club’. Nice final track over the end credits as well.
Being a miserable, cynical sort I find it difficult to muster many favourite comedy films that I can happily watch again and again. There’s the three Pythons of course, a certain cold war laff riot, this cult classic, the original and still the best National Lampoon film and Matt Damon’s finest turn. After that I have to move into hybrid comedy/genre films such as ‘Dazed & Confused‘ and of course some of the older classics. Oh, and of course this and this and this. And this. And this. And this (etc).
The Baader Meinhof Complex
So then, more politics – no wait, WAIT, don’t go away – this is exciting politics with explosions and guns and kidnappings and car chases and everything. Continuing a strong run of recent German films that have stormed foreign markets, ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex‘ is a relatively brave film, portraying terrorists in something of an ambivalent light, certainly not sympathetic to their struggle and methods but not simplistically damning them as motiveless psychopaths either. As such the film has stirred up something of a controversy in Germany with the relatives of some of their victims complaining of the films action orientated ‘terrorist chic’ approach that allegedly celebrates the factions extreme methods, a criticism that I don’t think holds water in the final analysis.
The film charts the story of the Red Army Faction, a left wing terrorist group who plagued West Germany throughout the seventies with a murderous rampage of bombings and assassinations designed to bring down the ‘man’. Against the volatile background of the civil rights struggle and Vietnam war with student uprisings being brutally crushed in the US, France and Germany a cadre of left wing agitators gain a new impetuous when a student is killed during protests against the human rights record of the Shah of Iran during a state visit to West Germany. The factions methods accelerate in tune with the governments efforts to suppress and eliminate their movement, the firebombing of empty department stores descending into murders and bombings as the state closes in on the movements leaders and acolytes.
This is a curious film which like Spielberg’s ‘Munich‘ doesn’t quite work. On the one hand it does present a compelling era of recent European history and deftly takes the viewers through the key events of the groups evolution and fate of the cells individual leaders. On the other hand the irony and incongruity of using violent, terrorist methods to combat a perceived re-emerging fascist state are not explored, all we get are a series of barely indistinguishable leaders barking slogans to one another in-between operations before degenerating into the inevitable partisan sniping and paranoia. A little perspective on their motivations would have been useful. The film pays lip service to the guilt that this generation of young West Germans must have felt, realising that their parents must have at the very least turned a blind eye to the Nazi atrocities a mere twenty years earlier. I was quite shocked at the audacity of some of their operations which I had not read about, nor the final fate of the movements core leaders which held my interest despite its inevitability.
In some ways the film reminded me of the superior ‘Patty Hearst‘ but lacked that films psychological dimensions. You never really get a handle on exactly what is compelling these people to go to such lengths to achieve their aims but then again just to contradict myself (for a change) that is probably a conscious decision of the film-makers in order not to humanise the terrorists and thus elicit some form of empathy with them. Worth a look although it’s a little gruelling at two and a half hours. For a more rewarding experience I’ll offer the classic ‘Battle of Algiers‘ and a little known film called ‘Exposed‘ which has a outstanding performance by Harvey Keitel as a truly hypnotic and frightening terrorist leader.
W
Too early or too late? Is it possible to make a good film about a story that still has roughly 70 days to run? Well, judging from Oliver Stone’s latest movie ‘W‘ I’m afraid the answer is a resounding ‘NO’ as this biopic on the life and times of the current inhabitant of the White House is a failure on almost every level. The reviews I’d already heard and read had already painted the picture of an unimpressive piece of work so my anticipation levels were low, quite how far off the mark this film is was really quite disappointing.
The film is of course the life story of George W Bush, taking us from his early hazing days at Yale through to his twenties boozing and brawling period in Texas, his initial attempts at political office and final achievement of the position of most powerful man in the world. The film flits around this history whilst also covering his period in office, concentrating mostly on the run up and invasion of Iraq, all of this conducted under the shadow of his father and his constant need for validation and attempts to impress the old man. In this Stone has framed the film as a sort of modern day Shakespeare play and this I think is the critical factor that deflates and undermines the whole films’ premise and delivery.
In the interests of full disclosure let me be clear on where I stand on Bush and the whole Neo-Conservative project. They are poisonous, traitorous evil fucking scum who have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands. They are the chief architects of the majority of the worlds most cataclysmic events over the past decade and are the authors of the next decades most pressing problems. They are torturers. They are war-profiteers. They sneer at and violate international law. They have lied, they have cheated, they are thieves and they are murderers. Yes, I guess you could say I’m a little to the left on the political spectrum on this one. This however does not mean I was expecting nor wanted a simple hatchet job on the man, the facts are well established on what happened and what occurred over the past eight years so I welcomed the news that Stone and Brolin wanted to ‘humanise’ GWB, an approach far more interesting and possibly rewarding since all we’ve really seen of Bush is either right wing ‘Starship Troopers‘ style right-wing support on the likes of Fox News or crude caricatures of his stupidity and ineptness. I don’t think anyone who manages to reach such public office can ever be that stupid – not even I’m that cynical – thus the major problem with this film is that it can’t decide what it wants to be, either a broad satire (it does have a few laughs in it) or serious reportage. Being neither it falls into a limbo of timidity that fails to either humanise or understand the man apart from leaving you with Stone’s bludgeoned message that all he wanted was to be admired by and gain the respect of his father. It doesn’t wash.
The other major problem is what it doesn’t cover, a complete absence of some of the most defining moments of his Presidency from the vote rigging controversy in 2000, 9/11 is mentioned only in retrospect during the Iraq discussions which is just an unbelievable omission given that it was essentially the catalyst of everything that followed and not one single, solitary mention is made of Katrina. It’s like a bio-pic of Churchill without the Second World War, Castro without the Cuban missile crisis or Regan without covering the making of ‘Bedtime For Bonzo‘. One thing it does have is a fine impression from Josh Brolin which almost makes it worth two hours of your time. He submerges himself in the role unlike the others (Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney, Thandie Newton as Rice, Jeffery Wright as Powell, Scott Glen as Rumsfeld and Toby McGuire as Rove amongst others) whom you look at and just think ‘that’s Dreyfuss doing a Cheney impression’. Thandie Newton I’m sorry to say in particular looks like she’s escaped from a Rory Bremner sketch. Stone only nails the real story here in one scene when Bush visits gruesomely injured soldiers from Iraq and ineptly attempts to communicate his gratitude of their terrible sacrifices. Uncomfortable and uncertain, he desperately tries to raise their spirits with his usual folksy charm and their attempts to rise and salute their president – that is to say the President as a concept not the man himself – is a great scene that speaks volumes. Pure conjecture here but I think Stone didn’t really go for the jugular as he thought it may back-fire on the election with the usual absurd ‘liberal media elite’ claims zeroing in on the film. That’s quite an arrogant approach I think, there’s a great film waiting to be made about Bush’s life and Presidency but this sure as hell ain’t it. It’s a shame, as I’ve mentioned before I’m an Oliver Stone fan and very much enjoyed his earlier presidential movie ‘Nixon‘ which like ‘W’ followed a humanizing approach and wasn’t the anticipation evisceration of the myth yet that worked as a film, as a examination of the man behind the myth and public persona.
When it comes to political films I find myself struggling to think of many I really like apart from this and this and of course this (unless you count the likes of ‘Kane‘ or ‘Reds‘ as political film) so I’ll just close this post with a link to some incredible and revealing behind the scenes photos from Tuesday night and a lengthy series of articles covering the entire 2008 campaign from behind the scenes of both campaigns, if you’re in any way a fan of ‘The West Wing’ it’s essential and fascinating reading. It was all embargoed until after the election so its exceptionally revealing on how Palin and McCain loathed each other, exactly how the Obama campaign outfoxed Clinton and exactly how a modern political campaign is conducted in the era of twitter, blogging and 24 hour saturation global news. Here’s to the future.
President Obama
That is quite a speech.
So it’s finally over. History in the making – sometime it’s a privilege to see such epoch shattering events firsthand. You’ll not be surprised to hear I’m a bit of a politics nerd on both sides of the water and I’ve been following this race for the White House with a growing sense of incredulity, disgust, bafflement and excitement. You may have detected that I am a deeply cynical person but sometimes, just sometimes you must luxuriate in the moment and give succor to any spark of optimism. Nonwithstanding the poisoned chalice that Obama has inherited with Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, Iran, climate change, Russia – I think, hope and ‘pray’ that we’ve turned a corner. If I was American I’d probably have voted for Lando, that dude was misunderstood and made amends didn’t he?
Ahem. Anyway, I was going to rant on about the challenges and problems to come but fear not, I’ve come to my senses and instead I’ll just collate some links from some of my favourite US films that I think can be considered quintessentially American, exploring that great experiment which has culminated in this uplifting and historic moment. Fucking awesome.
Nuff Said….
More later…..been difficult enough to get on WordPress (switched to Firefox which rules) to post anything as the internet has died….can’t wait for the acceptance speech.
EDIT- It’s 5:42 and who’d have thought, my faith in humanity is almost restored. Fucking hell. Fucking hell. He actually did it with a great speech to boot. Fucking hell.….
Minty's Menagerie 
Recent Comments