The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch is an original. As critics and audiences celebrate Inglourious Basterds, Limits of Control is the year 2009′s genuine swansong to film culture; most subversively, it is a fuck-you to blockbuster cinema and quirky American indies from a maverick independent filmmaker in complete command of his craft and technique. Limits of Control seeks to study the nature of existence through the eyes of a hero (that rarely speaks), but the film is not taxed with ponderous philosophizing. Although Jarmusch has always been interested in big ideas — ideas about love, sex, death, reality; it is his idiosyncratic approach to these themes that protects and improves him as a innovator of cool and the new in cinema.

Working off an anti-psychological base for the story’s protagonist, called only Lone Man, the film uses a series of aphorisms which serve both as jokes and little haikus. Lone Man’s job is to kill people and he is on an unspecified mission in Spain. He drinks two espressos in separate glasses, does not like mobile phones and, despite the torments of his naked and luscious temptress, he will not have sex while he is working. Lone Man is driven by habits, a personal code and unique understanding of the world; he is the perfection of control, the rational man. This is an archetype that Jarmusch has continually explored in other films, most evidently Ghost Day: Way of the Samurai.

But Limits of Control breaks new ground for Jarmusch because it accords his favorite archetypal hero a major benefit: power over fate. There is a scene in the film when Lone Man meets a beautiful Japanese informant in a train (homage: Hitchcock; look for several more) and she warns him that “there are those that are not among us;” he replies, “I am among no one.” Another crucial scene features Lone Man breaking into a highly secured facility that is being run by the villain, a Donald Rumsfeld-esque boss called American (Bill Murray): no shots are fired, no fights take place, there is no lock-picking…Lone Man just appears in the boss’ bunker. When the exasperated American asks him “how the fuck did you get in?” he is simply told “I used my imagination.” And if you are able to use yours, then the exquisitely crafted Limits of Control can reward you infinitely. Maybe.

This film should not be taken seriously. How could it be taken seriously when its director is Quentin Tarantino whose reputation as a post-modern filmmaker or ‘film DJ’ is now fully entrenched in the public consciousness? Inglourious Basterds is the sixth film from this American auteur and it is polarizing: some think it is his best film after Pulp Fiction, while others declare it to be his worst — the bestowing of such labels is normal routine when discussing Tarantino who, undoubtedly, relishes fervent debate in his name. And to define this filmmaker’s movies as self-reflexive and indulgent would also be missing the point because it is Tarantino’s intention to be self-reflexive and indulgent. He loves cinema but clearly loves the attention he gets even more. (See? After six sentences we have yet to talk about the movie itself — QT, you’re a fox, yo!)

Inglourious Basterds opens with the title card “Once Upon a Time,” signaling a fantasy (every Tarantino film can be said to be a fantasy, title card or none.) The story takes place in France in the early 40s, during WW2, as Hitler commissions Nazis to seek out Jews and inflict, what’s the word, genocide on them. The man in charge of the job is Gestapo Col. Hans Landa, played by Christopher Waltz who is extremely delightful. With Waltz playing the devil (or his minion, Hitler being the undisputable Satan personified), Tarantino is able to showcase his formidable talent at writing dialog, creating entire scenes out of mere conversations about milk, cheese, rats or Jews as rats. But remember, folks: Tarantino is a film DJ, so it only fair that Waltz’s Col. Landa is not an original creation — look at Inspecteur Jean Lavardin in Chabrol’s Cop Au Vin or the Superintendant in Melville’s Le Samourai to understand his origins. Tarantino has watched many movies and he has paid attention to them. The average movie viewer will be none the wiser; still, wasn’t it Jim Jarmusch who said “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere”?

Inglourious Basterds has structural problems, but it is a perfectly amusing little romp in visual eye-candy: Tarantino turns the wheels of mise-en-scene, effortlessly moving the camera to breathe life into what is essentially “chapters” of people talking each other to death. And this being a ‘Quentin Tarantino film,’ there is also an eclectic international celebrity cast which includes Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine, the hillbilly leader of a group of Jewish-American soldiers called the Basterds whose mission is to kill and scalp Nazis. Pitt, who is not a great actor, is actually surprisingly effective as a caricature and provides genuine laughs.

When all is said and done at the end of Inglourious Basterds, world history will be rewritten in the halls of a burning cinema, as Tarantino channels his inner voice into Pitt’s Lt. Aldo Raine who proudly proclaims to the audience, “This might just be my masterpiece.” After such shameless grandstanding, does our opinion of Mr. Tarantino or his new movie even matter?

Drag Me to Hell

Drag Me to Hell, the latest Sam Raimi offering, is a victorious return to form for a director who has been scaring cinemagoers for nearly three decades. The film opens with an intense prologue, set in the 60′s, then quickly jumps into the present where our protagonist, Christine Brown, (played to perfection by Alison Lohman), drives her car to work while listening to a dialect training tape. Those poor farm girls, the lengths to which they go to break free of their roots. It didn’t start with Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs and it sure won’t end with Christine. No matter how good they are at what they do or how hard working they might be, there will always be someone to pick on their accents or make them feel inferior, whether it’s Hannibal Lecter, or their boyfriend’s snobby mother.

So what would wide-eyed, beautiful Christine do to climb up the ladder in such a hostile world? Well, whatever it takes apparently. In a bid to get that promotion which she deserves anyway, she is willing to make some “tough decisions”; this involves taking away the house of a creepy old woman for non payment of loans, the woman who will eventually put a curse on her, and despite having a good job, great boyfriend, and a bright future ahead of her, Christine will go to hell in three days unless she can find a way to get rid of this curse.

The rest of the film is about Christine being haunted by the Lamia, that unseen creature from the Netherworld out to get her, trying everything she can to get out of her predicament. The poor girl gets more than she bargains for. I’ve read that the part was originally given to Ellen Page, who would probably have been very wrong for this. This is not a role that requires a snarky Juno type, Christine is very well played by Lohman, who gives the character a certain earnestness even though she is lying to everyone around her and perhaps even to herself when she doesn’t admit that it was her own decision that brought the wrath of the evil vindictive witch, not her boss’s. She even goes against her very beliefs, for she thinks that might save her; suddenly she’s not really all that nice a girl. The scene with the kitty is a proof of this – you’ll know what I mean when you see the film.

You’d be surprised what you’ll do, when the Lamia comes for you.

The film deserves to be seen on the big screen. It will probably succeed in scaring you regardless of how tough you are or how big of a horror buff you’ve been, yet it is also campy enough to make you laugh at your jitteriness. Raimi attempts to target the same anxiety that audiences felt when first spooked by his Evil Dead series, though this film is nowhere near as gory as that. By now, viewers are so used to the torture porn of slasher movies that they’ve forgotten about the frightful imagery that directors such as Raimi, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter are capable of delivering, with a fraction of the blood and gore. There was a time where good horror meant setting the mood, keeping you alert, having you clutch the arm rest of your seat. Drag Me to Hell in many ways is therefore a trip down memory lane that is so refreshing that it turns the film into something very memorable. Your desensitized attitude to horror won’t matter for it will be impossible not to be frightened by what you see. Had Sam Raimi managed to sneak in a Bruce Campbell cameo, the film would be been perfect; but even without, its one of the best horror films of recent years.

Yet another British movie dealing with young, British people, and making English people seem like the sort of people whom I don’t want to have any contacts with. I had this same feeling with two movies about English football hooligans and no amount of male bonding and close friendships portrayed in their groups will change that.

In This is England, we zip back to the 80s, and Shaun is a young 14-year old kid (I think I read somewhere he is supposed to be 14, but he looks 12, so I don’t know) who gets teased at school and is feeling lonely. But soon he gets befriended by a bunch of older skinhead kids. Although, I don’t know why a group of older teenagers wants a random 14- (or 12) year old kid to hang out with them. But this group does, and Shaun is excited, because these are nice kids, they trash an abandoned house, drink, smoke pot, and hug each other a lot and claim to be BFF.

Enter Combo. He is much older and has just come out of prison, and he is a true skinhead, the racist ones. There is a split in the previous group and some, including young Shaun, joins with Combo. These guys turn to a more violent lifestyle, bullying Pakistani kids, calling out ethnic slurs, stealing from a shop, but hey, it’s not that bad, they still hug a lot.

If This is England, then fuck England.

War and sci-fi movies are generally studio products while independent movies tend to be smaller personal dramas. So when you have an independent movie that deals with a global war, alien invasion and retro science-fiction, it can be an oddity — but also one that stands to be examined. The Mutant Chronicles is such an oddity: it  takes a bleak past and throws it into a grim dystopian future. It’s part orthodox, part crazy and part artsy; but most importantly, very independent.

In the year 2707 (a future that seems more probable than one would like to believe), Earth has been stripped of its resources. The world itself has been divided into three corporations that wage wars (using their private armies) and battle for the remaining resources. Lack of oil and a polluted skyline pushes machines back to the steam engine. Amidst this — as humanity faces extinction due to the appearance of a multitude of deathless mutants — a rag-tag team of unified soldiers attempts to eliminate the common enemy. Deprived of humor and hope, the soldiers resign themselves to a fate they may accept but are willing to fight against.

The Mutant Chronicles, in its lack of color and faith in humanity, is bleak to the extent that the surviving humans do not even hope for Earth to be saved and abandon it easily, moving on to other planets to possibly scourge more worlds. The movie does defy logic, and consciously so, and so the outcome is quite predictable. But it’s a dirty, bleak and sordid story of a morbid Earth, with scenes of pure bliss — scenes that make it a significant departure from the heroic movies that Hollywood churns out.

Faith is woven into the movie’s storyline as an important theme, but serves an ancillary purpose: to add subjectivity to the motives of some of the characters, and to form an interesting parallel to many of today’s belief patterns. Eventually though, what really makes The Mutant Chronicles an astounding movie is the same reason why it will have detractors, and that is its incongruous mix of the traditional and the eccentric.

Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes

The dangers, paradoxes and complication of time travel are deftly explored in this numbing, engaging, thrilling and occasionally creepy low-budget film from Spain. Timecrimes is an elaboration of the themes first made apparent in the independent film Primer, but both films have different aims. Primer was generally and genuinely confounding, telling a more intimate story blending the thrill of a discovery with the confusion of the effects of that discovery. Timecrimes has a more conventional purpose — to provide heart-pounding suspense and entertainment, and it does both with great aplomb.

The film understands the few basic things about the generally known and accepted conventions of time travel films, that going back in time is dangerous, that it can cause a rift in continuity, that it can result in a change for which we act as catalyst but have no way of controlling. The film has all of these moments, but it also encapsulates the time-loop syndrome, where an important scene occurs again and again with different outcomes, and in this it becomes an amalgam of both the sensation of anxiety felt while watching Memento and the humour of Groundhog Day. The story is very simple – a man moves into a new house and while setting things up with his wife, spots a woman on his binoculars in the nearby forest. His curiosity drives him to explore the shenanigans taking place and he bumps into a bloodied stranger who starts to stalk him until he loses his way and ends up at a peculiar house. The rest of the film cannot be explained because not only would that take away the joy of discovering it, but also because this is not an easy film to explain and harder still to write about, though in all honesty, if watched intently, it is never difficult to understand.

Many may point to the movies inconsistency of character action, what some of the people do and why — these are treated as plot devices (just like the time travel theme) to advance the story and this works admirably well in the service of the film. As serious and mind numbing as all of it is, there are also moments of frightening dark comedy and one character who appears bandaged and bloody may be setting his sights on dethroning Jason from the Friday the 13^thseries as a masked killer. In truth, the film is such a mixture of many familiar devices, ultimately including the notion of crime and trying to prevent it, and while these ideas may not be new to films in isolation, this movies collective execution of those themes certainly is. The use of an economical budget is built into the script – there are only a handful of characters, one location and recurring scenes. This is yet another low-budget film that does with its ingenious script what many films cannot do with expensive special effects; cause wonder and amazement.

A couple goes to a small island in Spain for vacation. They don’t want to go to a location full of tourists, so they choose a small island with only one hotel and barely any foreigners. The woman is pregnant and the man has an ugly 70s mustache. Once they get there, the island seems eerily quiet — the restaurant is empty, the supermarket is empty, and the hotel reception is empty too. They do see few children playing about but no adults. Hmm.  The first real shock comes when they finally see an old man except being beaten to death with a cane by a small child. Hmm. Something is wrong here.

The husband scouts the area and peeks through a door and sees an upside down adult body hanging in the air and children cheering and trying to cut him. More hmm. I think by now we should realize that the island is fucked up, and probably vanish.

With more scouting and investigating, the husband eventually figures out that something has happened that caused all the children to become murderous and kill all the adults and soon it will be their turn. Movie has a few creepy scenes and one particular which was really creepy, and killing children is always a very difficult decision for a filmmaker so great job on not shying away from that, but it is slightly unevenly paced. A movie like this needs to start off slow, build tension, but after things are exposed, it should not slow down. Unfortunately, the movie builds up steam and then keeps slowing down again, and this kills the panic the movie tries to portray.

Also, the movie somehow makes some kind of weird justification for the children being evil. It starts of the movie by showing actual footages of children being killed and starving due to wars. As in, we have been treating the children badly all this time and now its time for revenge. Or something. Doesn’t really make sense, since children are not exactly a different species.