"This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a tweet..."

Your Friends Close (2012)
Directed by Jocelyn Kelvin
Written by Brock Wilbur
Starring Jocelyn Kelvin, Brock Wilbur, Kovar McClure, Heather Wood, Laura Nicole Harrison, Blake Silver, Rob Ondarza, Ricky House, Michael Eliopolous, Lisa Renee Foiles, Ramsay Robinson and Yahtzee Croshaw [as well as many others]

[Disclaimer: I know Brock, Jocelyn and some of the other cast members from college. I also read an early draft of the script and served as an extra in a scene or two. That being said, I do not profit from this film, except the sense of pride someone gets from knowing about an awesome thing before other people and knowing the people involved in it]

Video game movies are pretty common at this point. Good video game movies are very very rare. Even rarer are movies that eschew adapting a video game to focusing on the people that make and play video games. Your Friends Close is not Super Mario Brothers or House of the Dead or Tomb Raider. It's not even Tron. It's more like The Bad and the Beautiful or Contempt. It's about awful, backstabbing people who somehow create something, for better or worse. As always, the question is whether that something is worth it.

Becca (Jocelyn Kelvin) and Jason (Brock Wilbur) are two up-and-coming game designers who happen to be married. They've just created a revolutionary new video game called "Your Friends Close" that basically turns the Turing Test into a multi-player strategy game. Users are put into a chatroom and must discover who is a real person and who is a computer. The winner could win anything from a rain forest named for them to a night with a porn star, depending on who the sponsor of the competition is.

Thing is, the game still needs to be developed and tested and Becca and Jason are about to fly to France to work on it. They're throwing a going away party the night before they leave, and they've invited their  best friends (a mix of family, friends, professional rivals, exes, current lovers and colleagues).

And the normal tension, regret and bitterness that crop up at any party are exacerbated by the fact that, just after the party starts, Randall Sconce (Michael Eliopolous), owner of the video game company developing YFC, wants Jason to stay in San Francisco to develop a tie-in TV show for YFC. Which means there's now a slot open for someone to fly to Paris with Becca and develop the game. It's the chance of a life-time, and Jason announces that the attendees are contestants who must convince him to give them the job.

Needless to say, this night will prove to be the end of relationships, maybe even Becca and Jason's.

The first thing to note is that Your Friends Close really understands that what makes a movie (or any story) interesting are interesting and complex characters. The script balances exposition and video game theory with the establishing of relationships and characterization while never breaking a sweat. This movie is extraordinarily quotable (there's a joke about Miles Davis and Secret of Monkey Island that cracks me up each time I think of it), but all the cleverness is in service of the characters and the story. The characters are mostly overly-intellectual nerds who delight in showing off their knowledge and their verbiage, and as the night drags on, it becomes apparent that even they cannot fend off disappointment, fear and despair with clever quips.

The direction by Jocelyn Kelvin (aided by DP Chad Nagel) is lively and restless, following the party from one corner of the house to another in extended Steadicam shots that impart a video game quality to the action. However, Kelvin knows when to pause on a moment, allowing us a tension-filled long take worthy of Rohmer when the story calls for it. Two long conversations between Becca and Kaylee (Jenni Melear), Jason's assistant and possibly his lover, unwind slowly and hypnotically, teasing us with violent resolution of the rivalry at any moment.

Of course, all of the technical skill would be for naught if the actors in front of the camera weren't equally skilled. Brock and Jocelyn each prove a match for their parts, with Brock slowly drawing out the childishness and fear underlying his manipulative ways and Jocelyn possessing a enigmatic and intelligent quality that reminds me of Lena Headey or Anna Karina. The rest of the cast is just as talented, with Blake Silver drawing out the nuances of a beta male trying to will himself into alpha male status, and Heather Anne Wood, as Jason's sister, slowly stripping away the disguise of a good girl with a secret life.  Finally, Yahtzee Croshaw deserves special notice for his voice acting on the titular video game, crafting a mix of charm and malevolence that is utterly entertaining and chilling.

At one point in the movie, Jason talks about how big a jump movies made between the 1920s and the 1930s, from chase scenes and pie fights to meaning and romance, before saying that video games are about to make a similar jump. I can't speak to video games, but I can say that Your Friends Close shows that movies can still develop and advance even in the video game age.

Why I hate MEN WHO HATE WOMEN

I've been blogging a lot more at the Tumblr. I just posted a pretty in-depth thing about David Fincher's THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

I should say, I think David Fincher is a talented director. But not only does this movie have an awful attitude about sex and feminism (while pretending to be progressive), it's a long and rather boring movie.

Because Eve Tushnet always has such interesting posts...

Eve challenged her readers to think of Christian films and atheist films for hypothetical film festivals. Apparently, it's been easier for her readers to think of atheist films than Christian ones.

For the purpose of this post, she's talking about films that represent those worldviews, not necessarily films made by Christians or atheists.

Christian films

The Trial of Joan of Arc (d. Robert Bresson) - Not just because the subject is Joan, but because Bresson is focused on the suffering and humility of Joan, even her very human weaknesses, and her faith enables her to endure and transfigure those elements of her life. That transfiguration is the miracle we see in the film, not some fantastic magic trick (which is how film usually defines them).

Love Exposure (d. Shion Sono) - Actually, this film can probably be interpreted multiple ways. And while there is a fair amount anti-religious material here, it's notable that the worst behavior is of people who turn religion to their purposes. The hypocrites and those without humility are those that cause the most suffering, and it is love (both secular & religious) that gives the male protagonist the strength to struggle on against a world that is turned against him. It's also about the way that outcasts can find fellowship & express Christian brotherhood for each other. I'd love to see Eve's reaction to all the complex & weird ideas about religion, love, gender & sexual orientation that overflow this film.

Terri (d. Azazel Jacobs) - This film, focusing on an intelligent, perceptive but troubled boy & his attempts to reach out to the world, deals with the injustice and pain of engaging with a flawed world and the broken, foolish people who inhabit it. Despite all the heartache and pain that engagement brings, the movie shows us the need to reach out to our fellow sufferers and sinners, since only that outreach can shape our suffering and pain into something better.

That's all that I can think of, off the top of my head, at the moment. But there are two relatively recent films and one older film that promote a Christian humanist worldview, to balance out all those despairing films Tushnet & her readers have thought of so far.

The best crime film to involve Beethoven's birthplace...

DEAD PIGEON ON BEETHOVEN STREET (1973)
d. Samuel Fuller
Starring Glenn Corbett, Christa Lang Fuller, Anton Diffring, Eric P Caspar & Stephane Audran

I had a chance to check this out thanks to a friend in UCLA's film archives graduate program who had it screened with Christa Fuller (the star and Fuller's wife) talking about it afterwards. This hard-to-find Fuller film was actually shot for German television in the 70s as a TV movie version of a German policier TV show. The effect is rather like finding out that von Trier directed an episode of Law and Order, with all the attendant weirdness.

Furthermore, Fuller, who had little familiarity with 70s West Germany, decided to that he'd throw the street-level "realism" of the TV series out the window and just have some fun.

To be fair, the people involved with this lark of a movie had great pedigrees. Jerzy Lipman, a Polish cinematographer who'd worked with Polanski on Knife in the Water, was Fuller's cinematographer, and art-rock band Can did the score.

The plot, about a call girl (Christa Lang Fuller) and a gang of extortionists taking incriminating photos of politicians and the American private eye (Glenn Corbett) who decides to take them down when they kill his partner, is fairly standard stuff.  But Fuller displays a great deal of wit in the execution.

There's a fair number of meta-film jokes that liven up the film, like a brief detour where Corbett's character follows Lang into a movie theatre showing a German-dubbed version of Rio Bravo, so we can luxuriate both in the awesomeness of that film and the strangeness of a German-speaking Dean Martin imitator. For that matter, Claude Chabrol's wife Stephane Audran pops up in a small role as a former extortionist named Dr. Bogdanovich. Lang's own appearance in Godard's Alphaville is even excerpted as evidence of her character's failed film career!

Beyond the in-jokes, Fuller plays around with the conventions of movies and the policier/noir genre. A shootout takes place in the nursery of a hospital's maternity ward, images of the gunfight intercut with images of sleeping babies, mocking any pretensions of realism the viewer might approach the film with. As one blackmail victim examines his photo, the expected ominous sound cue appears, but the next shot reveals that the sound cue is coming from a band in the same room as the character.

In some moments, the absurdity of Fuller's approach to the story circles around and becomes ominously threatening. As the streets of Cologne fill with Carnival celebrations in the film, the events of the film become seriocomic like an Elizabethan mystery play. Eric P Caspar, as a clown-suited henchman, runs through the streets, confetti covering his lips, muttering drugged-out nonsense as he closes in on Corbett and Lang, and everything resolves into eerie surrealism. Much like in Losey's Modesty Blaise, where Amsterdam's Carnival offers a site where the funny becomes dangerous, Fuller's film develops an unresolved tension from the impossibility of predicting which mode (comedy or thriller) it will end in. As a result, the ending, which brings us back to the beginning and the title, has the gut punch of a particularly well-told sick joke.

One last thing about 55 DAYS AT PEKING...

During one sequence set in the Forbidden City, the camera pans past to take in all the exotic ornamentation... and shows a statue of a white elephant.

Manny Farber would be proud.

An epic problem's not a problem for me: 55 DAYS AT PEKING (1963)

Directed by Nicholas Ray (and Andrew Marton and Guy Green)
Starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, David Niven, John Ireland and a bunch of white people in yellowface make-up (including poor Robert Helpmann)

I better start off by admitting I've never seen King of Kings. I know Nicholas Ray as the guy who made Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause (among others). And they're big films, epic emotionally and physically, but still personal.

55 Days at Peking doesn't feel personal. It feels like a Samuel Bronston production. Mr. Cairns, whose Late Show Blog-a-thon I'm piggy-backing on, has already gone into Samuel Bronston's gift for Spanish tax shelters and destroying talented auteurs from the '50s (poor Anthony Mann). (At least Uwe Boll's main artistic victim is himself.)

And we're back in Spain (here playing Peking), with star Charlton Heston, and now it's poor Nicholas Ray having a heart attack trying to dramatize an epic historical event.

And it certainly feels like the kind of film that would give someone a heart attack. In most of the crowd scenes, the details are way too busy, overwhelming the eye and the attention, to the detriment of the story and shot composition. Eventually the story itself overwhelms any attempt at characterization by about an hour and a half in (about the time the intermission ends), and characters disappear for long stretches of time, to be replaced by explosions and extras. Spectacle qua spectacle just drains you, weakening previous effective scenes with repetition.

There are some nice grace notes, especially in the first part of the film. When Ray (or whoever is behind the camera) is shooting a couple of people together, it can be very effective. There are two scenes practically back-to-back about an hour and fifteen minutes in which first Heston's character and then Niven's character are put through the wringer as they risk losing someone they love to combat. Heston actually emotes in a subtle way, battling back a mix of prejudice, anger and despair as he tries to tell a half-Chinese girl her American father is dead. And it's framed in a half-ruined church, with a priest checking in from over an altar, in half-light.

On the acting front, Ava Gardner is flirty and beautiful, Charlton Heston is comfortably being Charlton Heston and Robert Helpmann, so wonderful in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman, decides to try out for a role as Republic serial villain.

Robert Helpmann will finally crush Flash Gordon!

David Niven's the one who comes out of this film smelling like roses. It helps that his character is the most complex. He's a good husband, a loving father, and a talented diplomat; he's charming and friendly even to someone as frustrating as Heston's Major Lewis. But in the name of peace he's willing to risk the lives of everyone in the foreign sector, including innocent civilians, and we already know his larger goal of preventing large-spread violence is going to fail.

An interesting sidebar: I wonder if this film could have been released any time other than 1963. Earlier than that and too many people might been bitter about the Korean War to want to see a movie about China's first fight against the West. Make it so much as a year later, and too many people would have seen uncomfortable parallels with what was going on in Vietnam. The muddled politics would have probably made it too hard for either side, left or right, to cheer it on (unlike, say, The Ballad of the Green Berets). As it is, when Heston's Marine says something like, "I'm just a soldier patrolling rice paddies in the back country" before demanding more soldiers, I get an uncomfortable shudder knowing what is coming down the pike for '60s America.

Anyway, the Boxer Rebellion ought to be a dramatically interesting subject for a movie. The problem is that this film is wedded to a "oh no, these white people are in danger" story-line that really limits it. Perhaps the problem is that, after a certain point, all the initiative and maneuvering is taking place in other military camps or in the Forbidden City, so that we only see our heroes reacting to things. The plot itself becomes a war of attrition on our attention, which is thematically appropriate but rather boring when it happens unintentionally.

I'm pretty sure they stole this shot for Ghostbusters.

Maybe part of it is just that I keep thinking a movie about the Peking embassies trying to maintain their Western way of life in the face of logistical and political impossibilities on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion would have been a fascinating film. But it's not one that would have starred Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, let's be honest.

So we get a happy ending where a multi-national force marches in to strip China of its autonomy and Charlton Heston reaches out his hand from astride a horse to a little half-Chinese girl (who is really us, we all suddenly realize in the audience as the horns toot and strings swell and a supporting character gives an approving glance) and offers to give her a ride back to America.

But then again, there's a strain of cynical irony deep down in the grain of the film as we hear Russian aristocrats and Austro-Hungarian diplomats talking about imposing their will on China, not realizing they'll be in the dustbin of history in less than two decades. Or when Heston and Gardner flirt and waltz in an ancient temple, as an austere, ageless, uncaring Buddha stares down at them, knowing that this too shall pass. People come and go, but they won't stay. Nations come and go. Trends come and go.

And an exhausted Charlton Heston, worn out from a day of subduing natives, will collapse on his bed, a cross between the pieta and the dying Marat, and that little half-Chinese girl will look out from behind the rubble, afraid to approach. And she waits.

"Dialogue dub/ now here's the rub/she's acting her reaction"

You know, most people who are blogging/have blogged about the Oscars have more to say about most of the subjects. The three things that got me are:
1. Seriously, a John Hughes retrospective? In a year where we lost Eric Rohmer, we spend 10 minutes on John Hughes?
2. I hope a zombie Lon Chaney Jr. kicks Taylor Lautner's ass and proves who is the most popular werewolf of all time (I mean, Lon Chaney Jr. was a limited actor, but unless you measure acting talent by abs, he was still a better actor than Taylor Lautner has proven himself to be).
3. Also, thank you, Academy Awards, for recognizing horror films how many years after completely ignoring them. It must suck for the rest of the world to realize that they've made nothing that could beat Saw and/or Twilight in the last eighty-two years.

Quote of the day: Movies and ideas

I can't find the original source, but D Cairns at Shadowplay is the immediate source:

"Lots of American movies start out with interesting ideas, but they usually wind up with a fight in a warehouse." - Olivier Assayas

Man, I've been riding a tide of snark and annoyance for too long

I know I haven't been the sunniest person lately on this blog, when I post. So let me say something good for once.

The Ghost Writer, the new Roman Polanksi film? It's actually pretty good.*

It's no Chinatown, obviously. But it's not pretending to be anything bigger than it is, which is: a well-done psychological thriller. It has characters with believable motivations, a refreshing lack of explosions, and builds suspense out of the inability to know what other people think or feel.

I have no idea how wide a release this'll get, for several reasons. But it's got some great performances by everyone involved, including Kim Cattrall (I know!). Oh, Olivia Williams has a bigger part than the posters & press might suggest, which is always great. Someone give her another lead role, please. The production design & cinematography is well-done without screaming "this is a set!" or "look at what great geniuses we are!"

I don't want to oversell it. But the film is just so unassuming and competently put-together that it surprises you.

*And as regards Roman Polanski's proclivities: he's in jail, he certainly deserves to be. But it's not like going to see it is going to get him released. And he's a talented film-maker.

Thoughts brought on by "Antonio Margheriti" rubbing shoulders with G.W. Pabst in "Inglourious Basterds"

Howard Vernon, a mainstay of Spanish schlockmeister Jesus Franco and Jean Rollins, got his start with Fritz Lang on the 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and appeared as Dr. Leonard Nosferatu von Braun in Godard's Alphaville.

Jesus Franco was a 2nd unit director for Orson Welles on Chimes at Midnight and Don Quixote. It was his Count Dracula that forms the basis of Pere Portabella's Cuadecuc, vampir.

Ruggero Deodato, director of Cannibal Holocaust, got his start as second unit director on Rosselini's Il Generale della Rovere.*

This is on top of Roger Corman's record for starting such luminaries as Monte Hellman, John Sayles, and Robert Towne, on top of Coppola and Scorcese, of course.

The cross-pollination between auteurist sensibility in the approved and the shadow auteurs that exist in the netherworld of exploitation film deserves greater examination.

Jesus Franco is no Orson Welles, it's true. But just as Cahiers du Cinema rehabilitated Samuel Fuller, Edgar Ulmer and Howard Hawks for the art-house, our generation has to grapple with the disconnect between exploitation/genre and art-house. Some art-house filmmakers are breaking down the boundaries of their own accord. But we don't have any kind of discussion between these two worlds except in the practical terms.

In addition to the economic reasons, Hollywood and whatever metonymy would represent the independent film-world need to face the artistic legacy of these overlapping, cross-breeding worlds just because of the artistic options they suggest. This examination offers something beyond blockbusters and middle-brow.

*Cannibal Holocaust might deserve some sort of comparison to the goals and practices of neo-realism. It is grappling with the social systems that hold together society, looking at media's methods of manipulation of reality. The hypocrisy or effectiveness of the approach also deserve discussion, but blanket dismissal is way too easy.

Magnificent Odd Obsessions

I just found an amazing video/dvd rental place that carries the obscure stuff that Netflix doesn't.

Up next: reviews of Lucio Fulci's Beatrice Cenci (and yes, that is the Cenci that was the subject of Keats' closet drama), which will probably also touch on my feelings on Fulci as horror auteur, and Welles' Magnificent Ambersons.

This is going to be an amazing week.