This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of VIZ Cinema. Admittedly, I've only begun attending screenings there in the last few months; but, it has rapidly become one of my favorite venues for its comfortable seating, its café serving vegan doughnuts and Blue Bottle coffee (hands down, the best coffee in San Francisco), and—most importantly—its eclectic programming that focuses on the latest and hottest films from Japan, as well as an incredible legacy of classics, favorites, documentaries and anime—making it the only venue of its kind in the United States. They've also just started distributing their own Blu-Ray DVD titles, kicking off with their Death Note Collection.
Their August series "Winding Road to Peace" commemorates the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as chronicled through the Japanese American experience of WWII, and continues with two documentaries by local filmmaker Junichi Suzuki: Tôyô's Camera (2008) and 442—Live with honor, Die with dignity (2010), both screening in HD digital through August 19. Both films are key introductions to the internment of Japanese Americans at California's Manzanar Relocation Center during WWII and the celebrated heroics of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, respectively.
With Tôyô's Camera, filmmaker Suzuki crafts a documentary portrait of Tôyô Miyatake, a Japanese American photographer who smuggled his camera into Manzanar to capture black and white images that chronicled the plight of his people during this shameful episode of American history. Without question, Miyatake is a fascinating subject and his photographs are beautiful. The story of his internment and his lifelong friendships with Edward Weston and Ansel Adams are of significant interest and—had Suzuki kept his focus on Miyatake instead of mistakeningly attempting to chronicle the entire Japanese American experience of WWII—he would have achieved a poignant and elegant portrait of this important but relatively unknown photographer.
In her review for the L.A. Times, Sheri Linden praised the selection of Miyatake photographs which makes up the heart of the documentary, but complained: "The film is far more static than any of those pictures. Their cumulative effect is, nonetheless, a sweeping introductory portrait of life in an internment camp." Linden concludes: "Director Junichi Suzuki's film offers compelling insights into a long-shrouded chapter of history, yet Tôyô's Camera lacks the subtlety of its subject's work." I'm afraid I must concur, even as I strongly admire the information I gleaned from Suzuki's flawed effort.
The more I watch documentaries, the more I become convinced that they should rarely exceed 80 minutes. I imagine it's a considerable hardship for documentarians earnest to relay information to honor the adage that less is more. At 100 minutes, Tôyô's Camera becomes hazardously desultory. Eschewing any kind of narrative voiceover until late in the film when actor George Takei offers brief (and compelling) commentary, the visual enjoyment of the film is muddied by text in two languages slapped on top of the images. The images, which I felt should be predominant, were forced into the background.
Suzuki remedied this problem in his subsequent documentary 442—Live with honor, Die with dignity, effectively employing narrative voiceover and resituating the Japanese subtitles vertically to the edge of the frame. This documentary profiles the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team of WWII and explores the regiment's intrinsic paradox. With many of the regiment's soldiers coming from the Japanese American internment camps, the 442 emancipated the Jewish prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. The irony is painful. Though these soldiers were first looked at as a problem because of their race, they were later appreciated as problem solvers because of their splendid achievement in the battle field. They fought not only America's enemy but also America's prejudice. Suzuki has gathered remarkable oral histories from veterans of 442 still living today and insures that their courage against insurmountable odds will never be forgotten. Curiously, if Suzuki had held off on his desire to include information about the 442 in his earlier documentary Tôyô's Camera, it would have made that earlier effort a tighter one. One gets the sense that Suzuki was already distracted by 442—Live with honor, Die with dignity while filming Tôyô's Camera; an unfortunate enthusiasm.
Notwithstanding my reservations, I recommend both documentaries as valuable oral histories that provide significant information.
Cross-published on Twitch.
As part of their 2010 Speaker Series (made possible, in part, through a grant from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences), 3rd i offers a presentation—"Battle of the Bollywood Maestros"—illustrated with film clips, by Robin Sukhadia who will emcee an evening of music and mayhem, pitting two Bollywood giants, R.D. Burman (of Sholay fame) and A.R. Rahman (of Slumdog Millionaire fame), against each other in a musical face-off!
As synopsized at 3rd i's website, "R.D. Burman revolutionized the sound of Bollywood in the '60s and '70s, bringing a world of influences to Hindi film music. The trifecta of R.D. Burman, Asha Bhonsle (playback singer) and Helen (dancer/actress) churned out hit after hit with songs like "O Haseena Zulfonwali" from Teesri Manzil (1966), "Piya Tu Ab To Aaja" from Caravan (1971), and "Mehbooba" from Sholay (1975), which captured the simmering sexuality of the times.
A.R. Rahman began his career in the Tamil film industry with Mani Ratnam's Roja (1992), and quickly rose to become the leading music composer in Bollywood in the 90s. With training in multiple classical music traditions (Carnatic, Hindustani and Western), Rahman has brought Bollywood music to the world stage, and composed music for Bombay Dreams, an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won him an Academy Award®."
Each composer will be represented by five songs from their vast catalog for the musical showdown. This is where 3rd i seeks audience participation! Audience members will get to vote on each song (ballots will be provided), and a running tally of votes will be maintained throughout the evening. The Maestro with the most number of votes at the end of the evening will ascend to the status of Bollywood Legend!
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Recently completing a Master in Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts, Robin Sukhadia has been studying tabla under Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri at the California Institute of the Arts and the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California for the past eight years. His special focus on the musical traditions and rhythms of south Asia informs his approach to musical arrangement and composition on a wide range of concert, film, and album productions. For the past seven years, Robin has traveled internationally on behalf of Project Ahimsa, an organization committed to empowering impoverished youth through music education. He performs and teaches extensively, in both classical and contemporary contexts, and has developed innovative music education programs at the Weill Institute at Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Machine Project in Los Angeles and the Sangati Center in San Francisco. In 2010, Robin was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Award to expand his work with music education in India.
When: Sunday, August 15, 2010 @ 5:00pm
Where: Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia St, SF; Tickets: $8-$10
08/15/10 UPDATE: I've just come home from this thoroughly enjoyable event where R.D. Burman won out over A.R. Rahman by a vote of 22 to 21. Robin Sukhadia guided his audience on an informative and entertaining musical journey and—in an admirable twist on life imitating art—Sukhadia's "Battle of the Bollywood Maestros" was a striking example of life imitating social networking. Using commentary from the event's Facebook page within his power point presentation, the audience was peppered with individuals who had commented on Facebook and were allowed to expand their thoughts with those present. Such interactivity is how 3rd i is successfully building its audience/community and Sukhadia is to be commended for being unafraid to share the stage. Let alone that the Facebook commentary includes choice YouTube music clips.
Myself, I was bowled over by the unexpected appearance of Helen (aka Anuj Vaidya in drag) dancing to "Piya Tu Ab To Aaja" from Caravan, one of her most popular songs! Vaidya's impersonations of Helen are becoming the stuff of San Francisco legend!
Cross-published on Twitch.
Situated midway through VIZ Cinema's ongoing series "Winding Road to Peace"—their commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in WWII as chronicled through the Japanese American experience of the war—comes a film made late in Nagisa Oshima's career: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (Senjo no meri Kurisumasu, 1983). As synopsized by VIZ: "In this captivating, exhilaratingly skewed World War II drama from Nagisa Oshima, David Bowie regally embodies the character Celliers, a high-ranking British officer interned by the Japanese as a POW. Music star Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also composed this film's hypnotic score) plays the camp commander, who becomes obsessed with the mysterious blond major, while Tom Conti is British lieutenant colonel Mr. Lawrence, who tries to bridge the emotional and language divides between his captors and fellow prisoners. Also featuring actor-director Takeshi Kitano in his first dramatic role, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a multilayered, brutal, at times erotic tale of culture clash that was one of Oshima's greatest successes."
I missed Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence when it screened as part of the PFA "In the Realm of Oshima" retrospective that ran May-July, 2009 so I welcome the opportunity VIZ Cinema provides in programming a 35mm screening of Oshima's film. As Jason Sanders synopsized in his program notes for PFA: "After retreating from cinema during the 1970s (when he fashioned a new career as a talk-show host), Oshima returned in 1983 in typically idiosyncratic fashion, with an international coproduction starring David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, both plopped into a Jean Genet–like narrative of male lust and punishment in a World War II Japanese POW camp. Commander Yonai (Sakamoto) runs his camp with well-heeled precision, keeping his hands soft by letting the brutish Hara (Takeshi Kitano, in his film debut) knock everyone into shape. The arrival of the regal Celliers (Bowie), whose blond locks and chiseled cheekbones shine even when he's in chains, gives Yonai a simmering new challenge, not only to his rule but to his sense of superiority, his national pride, and possibly something more. 'A thinking man's Bridge on the River Kwai' (Cinematheque Ontario), this erotic tropical opera finds Oshima mellowed, but still questioning nationalism and contemplating the subversive power of sexuality." "Twitic" Brian Darr notes that Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence "merges Oshima's longstanding pop and intellectual impulses so that they feel (almost) harmonious."
At the time of the PFA retrospective, I had the great fortune to interview curator and Oshima scholar James Quandt to enquire after the homoerotic themes in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which I replicate here for ready reference:
* * *
Michael Guillén: I'm wondering if you would be willing to address Oshima's usage of homoerotics in such films as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Gohatto?
Quandt: Something that's always fascinated me about Oshima's work is that—from very early on—he treats homosexuality openly. It's a motif all throughout his work and, of course, becomes explicit towards the end of his career with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and Gohatto especially. Part of my passion for Oshima came out of the retrospective I did of his work 20+ years ago at Toronto's Harbourfront when I was still programming there. There's a thing that happens when you invite a director. You get advice from your colleagues. In Oshima's case, it was unanimous: "Don't invite Oshima. Don't have him. Save yourself the grief. He's a bastard. He's incredibly difficult. He's not generous with the audience. There's no reason to have him." I won't name those colleagues—they're still around—but, because he was coming to North America to receive an award and had agreed to attend my retrospective, I felt I couldn't bypass the chance to have him in Toronto. As often happens in these cases, it turned out to be the opposite. Oshima was the funniest, sweetest, generous guest imaginable. Again, his generosity with his audiences inspired Q&As that went on and on and on. I remember that he loved his scotch. I worried at times about getting him from the fourth scotch across the parking lot into the cinema to do the Q&A; but, it always happened and he was always completely and wonderfully cogent.
I asked him about his open treatment of homosexuality one night during one of our long discussions about art and cinema. At the time we both deified Theo Angelopoulos. Now when I look back on it, it's ironic because Oshima was holding up Angelopoulos as a god; but—when I look at Angelopoulos' work—I start to imagine that he probably took some things from Oshima? Of course, Angelopoulos denies any formative influences—he didn't take anything from Jancsó; he didn't take anything from Mizoguchi—and I'm not too sure he took anything from Oshima; but, boy, when you look at some of the early Oshimas and how he treats choral structuring, using groups of people as friezes (like in Night and Fog in Japan), it really does feel like Days of 36 and some of the Angelopoulos films. Anyway, I did ask Oshima about this motif of homosexuality because then—when he was at Harborfront—Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence was still relatively new. He hadn't made Gohatto yet—that was still a long way off—and all he said was, "It's very interesting, isn't it?" Then he passed on to some other topic.
Guillén: Oshima's usage of homosexuality strikes me as a purposeful representation of marginalized minorities as a romanticized outlaw position. I'm aware that Oshima was quite fond of Jean Genet's romantic criminals and that—as a television host—he had quite a flamboyant persona. Other than for that passing comment, he never offered anything more on the subject?
Quandt: No, absolutely not. He just had this bewitching laugh. Then when he went to make Gohatto, again I thought it intriguing—aware that this might be his last project because of his debilitating stroke—that this is the story he chose. How do you explain that? He's been married for decades and has many children. I'm not saying there was anything there in his personal life; but, it fits with his fascination with all kinds of minorities, all kinds of rebellions, all kinds of refusals of the Japanese way. As much as it can be pointed out that the bishōnen, this figure of the beautiful youth—who you also get in Shiro Amakusa, The Christian Rebel from the '60s—has been very much a part of Japanese popular culture for a long time. Gay samurai, in fact, have been a part of popular culture for a long time. As much as you can make that argument, the expression of it in Oshima is something singular. It fits with all these various minorities that he's explored.
* * *
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence screens Wednesday, August 11, at 4:30PM and Thursday, August 12 at 7:00PM at the VIZ, 1746 Post Street, San Francisco. $10 general admission. Advance tickets available at the box office (415-525-8600) or at their website.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Back in the mid to late '70s, long before I began writing on film, I had recently arrived in San Francisco and was already enjoying its thriving movie culture, which at the time included the key titles in what was being dubbed the "Australian New Wave" (a resurgence of Australian filmmaking ranging from the mid-'70s into the '80s). I was hypnotized by the mysticism of such early Peter Weir films as Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1977), by Judy Davis's career-launching performance in My Brilliant Career (1979), and the ANZAC spirit of military epics like Breaker Morant (1980) and Gallipoli (1981).
With Gallipoli, Peter Weir scored his third box office success in a row and secured his credentials as one of Australia's leading auteurs. Gallipoli capitalized upon excerpts from Jean Michel Jarre's electronic masterpiece Oxygène (acknowledged by Thomas H. Green as the album that "led the synthesizer revolution of the Seventies") and catapulted the bracing good looks and cynical intensity of a young Mel Gibson into the international spotlight. Gibson had already staged his celebrity with the ozploitation classic Mad Max (1979), and followed that film's popularity with The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).
The Australian New Wave was an incredible season of films whose impact has been recalled by the recent efforts of Blue-Tongue Films, a loose collective of inspired talents—namely the brother team Joel and Nash Edgerton, writer/director David Michôd, writer/director Spencer Susser and writer/director Luke Doolan. Their collaborative films have taken the festival award circuit by storm and satisfied American appetites with such offerings as The Square (a 2008 neo-noir thriller released in the U.S. in 2010), Miracle Fish (a 2009 short film nominated for Best Live Action Short at the 82nd Academy Awards®) and Animal Kingdom (2010), which won the world cinema jury prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Animal Kingdom opens stateside on August 13.
Earlier this summer I had the chance to sit down with writer/director David Michôd to discuss his savage tale of Melbourne's criminal underbelly. Complaining at first that we were seated at a large table too far across from each other, Michôd said he felt he was at a job interview. Well, I joked, answer my questions correctly and you might get the job. Michôd chuckled and promised to do his best.
[This conversation is not for the spoiler-wary!]
* * *
Michael Guillén: First of all, congratulations on your jury win at Sundance earlier this year and Animal Kingdom's critical success; it's actually doing quite well.
David Michôd: Thank you.
Guillén: I've been looking forward to talking with you—it feels fun for me—because earlier this year Joel and Nash Edgerton were in San Francisco with The Square, which premiered in the Bay Area at the Mostly British Film Festival and then, later, Joel came through town on The Square's press junket. I got to interview him at that time and he spoke quite kindly of you. What especially pleased me with the festival screening of The Square was that it was preceded by the short film Spider (2007), which I understand you wrote?
Michôd: Ah, yeah, yeah.
Guillén: I loved Spider; it's a great short.
Michôd: It's pretty effective.
Guillén: Absolutely. So that's where I wanted to start today. Your career has been built upon a set of celebrated short films and I was wondering if you could speak to the value of a young filmmaker or first-time filmmaker starting out with short films before chancing a first feature?
Michôd: I kind of think there's no other way to start; I mean, practically speaking. When I wrote the first draft of Animal Kingdom, I thought I was writing it for someone else to direct because I couldn't imagine a world in which anyone would give me millions of dollars to make a movie. In those years when I was developing the script, I made a few shorts. I got so emotionally attached to the script of Animal Kingdom that I couldn't bear the idea of giving it to someone else to screw it up. I decided to make some shorts because people were responding to the screenplay but no one had any faith in me as a director and for obvious reasons: I had nothing to show. So I made a couple of shorts.
The first one I made—years after film school—was Ezra White [2006], who was a minor character from Animal Kingdom. I gave him his own little world in which to play. I screwed it up. Principally, because it felt like I was testing things; it didn't feel like a short film. It had no point. The couple of shorts that I directed after that—Crossbow [2007] and Netherland Dwarf [2008]—were ones that I put all of my attention and energy into and they worked. They worked really well. On the back of Crossbow especially, Animal Kingdom went from feeling like a delusional pipe dream to something that didn't just feel doable; it felt inevitable. That was entirely because of the shorts I had made.
Guillén: In terms of timing, then, were the short films made after your stint as editor for Inside Film magazine?
Michôd: The first one and Crossbow came right at the cusp of my leaving Inside Film. I knew that I wasn't going to stay. I'd never had any journalistic ambitions in the first place. It was just a job that I had stumbled into. I was incredibly glad that I did it because I learned so much about how the business works and met a lot of great people.
Guillén: That's what I was going to ask: similar to François Truffaut who started out as a film journalist and then moved into film directing, I was wondering if you found a value in having done the journalism first? Clearly you did?
Michôd: Yeah; but, it was funny. I had been to film school in Melbourne before I got that job at the magazine. So that job at the magazine felt very much like something I was doing in the meantime but—over the course of doing it—I got very involved in it. I was there all up for about six years but by the end I knew that I needed to leave.
But those were just a couple of shorts that I wrote and directed myself. The ones that I wrote, like Spider and I Love Sarah Jane [2008] with Spencer Susser, for filmmakers starting out they were incredibly useful because they were all about experimentation. Even though I didn't direct those shorts, it was really useful for me to see how something translated from the page to the screen, to see where mistakes were made, and to see where things that I had written that I thought were necessary were actually redundant when they got to the screen. It's through that experimentation that you get a sense of the language of cinema, such that I can't imagine what it would be like to try to direct a feature without having made shorts first.
Guillén: One thing that has frequently come across in much of the commentary that has been written about you and Animal Kingdom is your command of the medium as registered by your preparation. Of course, as I understand it, you had been sitting with the script of Animal Kingdom for nine years. One thing Joel mentioned when we were talking that I found interesting was that you make video storyboards; that you set up how you want a sequence to go by filming it first on video. Can you talk about your process of video storyboarding?
Michôd: It's funny, I've actually heard Joel say that too and he did help me do a little bit of that on Animal Kingdom; but, I didn't do very much of that on Animal Kingdom. I know that's how Nash likes to work, and Luke Doolan too, who cut both of their films.
Guillén: Did you already have Animal Kingdom visualized in your head so much that you didn't feel a need to video storyboard?
Michôd: It's in part that, but it's also that—even just shooting something on video and then editing it as a video storyboard—is in itself a labor-intensive, onerous thing to do.
Guillén: That's what struck me when Joel mentioned that. It seemed like video storyboarding would, in effect, be making a movie twice.
Michôd: One of the principle differences between me and Luke Doolan and Nash and Spencer is that those guys are all editors as well as filmmakers and I'm not. I learned how to edit at film school; but, back then, becoming an editor meant buying a $2,000 machine and I thought, "I've never going to do that so I don't need to hone these skills." In the few years since film school, suddenly there was Final Cut Pro and Avid for laptops and those guys all capitalized on that; but, I never did.
Guillén: Do you storyboard at all?
Michôd: No, I don't storyboard either; but, I shot list and I love drawing maps. I love—I can't think what they're called—mud maps, or something. I do that. I agonize over that. In a way the whole purpose of storyboards or video storyboards is just to work out your coverage and coverage is what causes me the most anxiety.
Guillén: By "coverage" you mean your camera placement with regard to your actors; that sort of thing?
Michôd: Yeah. It's entirely about what shots do I need to tell the story in the scene. That's anxiety-inducing. For me, it's easier and freer to do it on paper with my DP and I like the mystery of it as well. I like the adrenalin of turning up on the set with a plan but not knowing exactly whether or not it's going to work until you piece it all together. There's something about shooting it all on video first that takes the mystery out of it.
Guillén: One of the things I appreciated about Animal Kingdom was the interiority of J's voiceover. Admittedly, I've only seen Spider and Animal Kingdom, so I'm not sure if such voiceovers are a cinematic device you like to use?
Michôd: I do like to use voiceovers. Crossbow, the short that I mentioned before, is told almost entirely in voiceover. I really enjoy the opportunity for poetry that voiceover allows. You should have a look at Crossbow. Animal Kingdom, strangely enough, was never written with voiceover. The voiceover was added in post—in part to deal with that always difficult thing of first acts in movies, clarifying worlds and making people feel comfortable knowing where they are and who the characters are and that kind of stuff—but, also because it was very important to me, given the strangely sprawling nature of Animal Kingdom, that the very beginning be grounded with J [ newcomer James Frecheville]. While he's present in all the scenes at the beginning of the movie, without the voiceover he's strangely in the background. Having that voiceover allowed me to just cement the world in a way but also to put him very much at the center of it.
Guillén: The voiceover granted J agency. You got the sense that—even though you were seeing this seemingly passive kid—he's actually smarter than appearances allow.
Michôd: That was very important to me too because he is an emotionally damaged kid and emotionally damaged kids often aren't very expressive. It was important to me that you get a sense that there is quite an interesting and complex life there that will come to the surface at some point.
Guillén: In his Sundance review of Animal Kingdom, Movie/Line critic S.T. Van Airsdale stated that Animal Kingdom has rebooted the American crime saga, referencing such filmmakers as Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola among select others. I found his to be an intriguing assessment for being precisely what an American film critic might say, in the sense that I'm aware that Animal Kingdom is actually inspired by true-life events in Melbourne's criminal history. So it's actually an Australian crime saga, distinct from its American counterparts. How do you feel about that? Does it concern you that an American film critic appropriates an Australian venture into its cinematic lineage? Or does this speak to the universality of the film's criminal themes?
Michôd: I have no objection to his comment. First, it's very flattering. What I had always wanted was—at least on some level—for Animal Kingdom to have something to do with those filmmakers and that is to make a crime film that's quite grand and that takes itself seriously, which is certainly what I love about the great crime films of Mann, Scorsese or Coppola. They do take themselves seriously. I also love Quentin Tarantino's films; but, they do seem to exist in a slightly different universe, a heightened universe, and a fun universe. I wanted to make something that was quite austere and serious.
But I imagine that his comment would also have to do with the fact that Animal Kingdom is in English, which makes it easier to parallel with American cinema than maybe films from non-English speaking cultures.
Guillén: American criticism aside, the pieces on Animal Kingdom that I've most enjoyed have actually come from Australian critics at the Sydney Morning Herald—Gary Maddox, Kylie Northover, George Palathingal, Philippa Hawker and Paul Byrnes—who published a suite of essays on the film. I found their write-ups particularly insightful because they situated Animal Kingdom within its Australian context, both historically and in reference to other Australian films and television shows (such as the mini-series Underbelly), several of which I'd never heard of here in the States.
Michôd: I do wonder about that sometimes, about the relationship of American film criticism and Australian film criticism to Australian film. There is a peculiar relationship Australians have with Australian cinema. In fact, Australians—generally speaking—don't like Australian films. One of the things that has been most gratifying for me these last couple of weeks now that the film's opened back home is that people are actually going to see it, which is great. I anticipated that a lot of the criticism in Australia would not be talking about the film as cinema but where it sits in the much-maligned recent history of Australian film. I almost expect a backlash after all that incredible press we got out of Sundance. I was almost expecting to go home and be cut down, as is the wont of Australians.
Guillén: A prophet knows no honor in his own country? Animal Kingdom—or at least certain scenes in Animal Kingdom—were directly inspired by the Walsh Street police shootings that took place in Melbourne in 1988. How old were you in 1988?
Michôd: I was 15.
Guillén: Were you aware of these events at the time or were you struck by this information later?
Michôd: It hit me later because I actually wasn't living in Melbourne at the time; I was living in Sydney. I moved to Melbourne about two years after these events. Melbourne back then, especially in the '80s, was a pretty dark place. For everyone else in the country, Melbourne was known as the place where bad things happen. There were a number of high-profile massacres; crazy people with guns going in the street and killing 12 people, that kind of stuff. But there was also a well-known antagonism between police and criminals in Melbourne, such that people generally were being shot dead by the police at a rate way beyond anywhere else in the country. I had this image of Melbourne as quite a big, dangerous city.
When I first moved there, I started reading these books that fleshed out and put a personality to these streets and neighborhoods. One of the books I stumbled across was Walsh Street by Tom Noble who used to be the chief police reporter at the newspapers in Melbourne. There was something about that central crime in essence—that one that sits at the center of Animal Kingdom—the brutal and random revenge killing of two very young uniformed cops that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. From way back then I knew at some point I wanted to make a film that was about a world of dangerous cops and criminals surrounding that event.
Guillén: Is Tom Noble still alive? Did you interact with him at all in the making of Animal Kingdom?
Michôd: Yeah, yeah, he was great. He came on board very early as a script/research consultant. I spent many many days sitting in his living room because he had boxes and boxes of videotapes, photographs, and police interviews; an enormous wealth of material. I would sit on the floor of his living room searching through this stuff.
Guillén: One of the Sydney Morning Herald journalists that I mentioned before, Philippa Hawker, wrote that Animal Kingdom "never for a moment feels like a true-crime narrative ripped from the headlines" and that it was "a coolly made, riveting exploration of choices." This pretty much tracked with how I first reacted to the film. I was fascinated with the decisions your characters were making throughout this strong character-driven narrative. I was wondering if you would play a little game with me?
Michôd: [Chuckles] Yeah?
Guillén: As the writer and director of Animal Kingdom, you know these characters probably better than anyone else. I was wondering if we could go through your core ensemble of characters and have you discern what was the best decision they've made and the worst decision they've made? So, let's say, starting with Darren Cody (Luke Ford)?
Michôd: Best decision and the worst decision? I would say the best decision that Darren makes is—despite his weakness—to sympathize with and on some level protect J. The fact that he does that seems to work out for him in the long run. Despite his almost paralyzed weakness and ineptitude, he does clearly look out for J on some level and, therefore, doesn't suffer in the same way his brothers do. On a grand scale, I think the worst decision that he makes is not acting on what are clearly his impulses to begin with, which are to move away from his family on some level. He's not necessarily going to be a straight kid or a clean kid; but, he can sense that the people that he's associating so closely with are incredibly dangerous.
Guillén: The scene where he does nothing to prevent his brother Pope from harming J's girlfriend Nicky....
Michôd: That was going to be my specific example.
Guillén: ...is an absolutely shocking scene. I've got to tell you. That scene exemplified the animality of this kingdom and how swiftly and ferociously evil can take over, let alone how fear can make one complicit.
Michôd: In talking to people about that scene, I've frequently been asked why Darren doesn't act. I feel like we did quite a lot of good work getting up to that scene to demonstrate that this kid is so completely under the thumb of his older brother that—as much as you can tell that he wants to do something about it—he's just completely incapable. It surprises me when people react so strongly to that scene. I think it's just that people want him to do something and he doesn't.
Guillén: How about Craig Cody (Sullivan Stapleton)?
Michôd: I'm not sure what his best decision would be. He's a guy who makes quite crazy decisions and I don't know that he'd necessarily argue that any of them are good, other than that he's quite loving of J and the other people around him and, therefore, hopefully by osmosis he would instill in J a sense of a strange kind of generosity.
Guillén: He's a thrillingly charismatic and virile character. I wasn't familiar with Sullivan's work at all; but, out of your ensemble, he's the actor whose work I want to pursue. You've introduced me to him.
Michôd: I remember first seeing him when he was about 17, back when I was at film school and he was just a kid who was around doing stuff. There was something quite raw and great about him back then and he's just been effectively languishing in Australian television for more than 10 years. He came in to test for a much smaller cop role and I was knocked off my feet by how charismatic and manly he is now. Everyone went nuts for him at Sundance. It was like, "Where did this guy come from?"
The worst decision Craig made was not just quietly playing the game after the cops had been killed and panicking and running away.
Guillén: How about Barry Brown (Joel Edgerton)?
Michôd: The best decision Barry made was setting up a family and endeavoring on some level to live a good life. The worst decision he made was not leaving his old life sooner.
Guillén: Pope (Ben Mendelsohn)? Can he make any "good" decisions?
Michôd: This is a man who makes only bad decisions. He's a man who's genuinely confused and so emotionally damaged that—as soon as the pillars of his otherwise seemingly functional life fall away—the only thing left for him is to lash out.
Guillén: Andrew "Pope" Cody is one of the most nuanced villains I've ever seen. He's fascinating for being so morally bankrupt. How about Smurf (Jacki Weaver)? Another excellently-written character, by the way.
Michôd: I would say that her worst decisions are choosing to have children with the men that she presumably hooked up with—who would almost always have been abusive flakes—and her best decision is also her worst decision, which is her cloying nurture of her relationship with her kids, such that some of the decisions she makes in the film to many people seem evil; but, are in other respects, to me anyways, coldly pragmatic.
Guillén: She comes across as a true lioness in this pride. How about Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce)?
Michôd: The best decision he makes is to find a way to engage directly with J on a level that no one else in the movie ever really does. The worst decision would be the fact that ... Leckie's an unsual character in that he's a good man and a straight cop and a strangely odd guy in a way; but, he's also very manipulative. He engineers a number of scenarios very deliberately that put J in a sense of tension between him and his family in the hope that J will someday realize that he has nowhere else to go but to the police.
Guillén: Guy Pearce was perfectly suited for this role. I just watched him last night, in fact, in a film called Ravenous.
Michôd: I haven't seen that.
Guillén: In his roles Pearce is often passive, almost vacuous, something of an empty vessel, who is nonetheless incredibly instrumental to the narrative traction of the films he's in. This is a distinct and fascinating quality I note in him as an actor.
Finally, how about the film's young protagonist J (James Frecheville)?
Michôd: This is on a very simple, practical level. The worst decision he makes is to steal that car for his uncle. The best decision he makes is to kill Pope, which is the moral universe of the film: this is a kid forming a moral compass for himself in a totally morally corrupt world. To do something like that, as he does at the end of the film, is both the wrongest thing a person can do and yet, in his universe, the only thing he can do.
Guillén: Thank you so much. I loved your film and look forward to your future work. I imagine you're quite the popular guy right now having to field off offers?
Michôd: It's weird the pressure that you feel. I couldn't have asked for things to have panned out any better; but, it just brings with it a world of pressure.
Cross-published on Twitch.
In 1949, a Parisian ciné-club named Objectif 49 held a festival in Biarritz dedicated to "Film Maudit", or "Accursed Cinema". A jury headed by Jean Cocteau led the proceedings with the express mission to reevaluate and redefine what was of value in cinematic art. A slate of ignored, unfairly maligned, and/or transgressive works were held up as representative of a new filmic vanguard. Films now long accepted as major works of world cinema such as Vigo's Zéro de conduite and L'Atalante, Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and Visconti's Ossessione were for the first time given their due. Cinematic and sexual radicalism were endorsed by Cocteau awarding the Poetic Film Prize to Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, the first serious acknowledgment of a budding genius.
Many of the great works of cinema spent their early years languishing in this uncherished category: Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil, Hawks's Bringing Up Baby, and Ophuls's Lola Montes were greeted with scorn in their respective countries of origin upon release. Cimino's Heaven's Gate and Antonioni's Zabriskie Point are examples of films whose reputations have undergone radical revision in recent years. Film Maudit/Accursed Films is a new series presented by the Film on Film Foundation to revive the anti-conformist approach initiated by Objectif 49's Festival du Film Maudit, and propose for your reconsideration works we believe to be unfairly maligned and/or forgotten, such as Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love.
A production centered around the sudden stardom of the fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields, and geared to the sensibilities of teenage girls, older women, and gay men, Endless Love is firmly poised on the terrain of the Melodrama sub-genre, the "women's picture". Martin Hewitt plays David, a high-school senior semi-abandoned by politicized parents, who falls in love both with younger teen-Goddess Jade (Shields), and her seductive, tight-knit, seemingly libertine family. Jade's parents (Don Murray and Shirley Knight) and brother (James Spader in one of his first roles) provide the familial intimacy for which David's always longed, but the intensity of Jade and David's blatant passion forces a network of incestuous tensions to the surface, and David is banned from the family. Cut to the quick, the still-immature David is inspired to foolhardy faux-heroics: while Jade's folks throw one of their wild, teen-centric parties, David starts a small fire on the porch of their ramshackle house. Thinking it'll be easy to put out, and that he'll save the day and be taken back into the fold, the ensuing conflagration pushes David into a realm of criminality, mental distress, and outsider-status beyond his wildest nightmares. Through it all, past any point of rational perspective, David will not give up his all-consuming love for Jade—a self-defining love on the grand scale, authentically Endless.
A protege of the greatest of operatic film directors, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli had spent as much of his career involved in theater and opera production as filmmaking. Famous for his previous assay in the territory of beautiful young-love gone-awry, the International hit adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1968), Zeffirelli rarely found sympathy with serious critics, who found his work too soft, sentimentalized, and pop. Endless Love proved no exception, its modest box-office success only confirming him as an artistic lightweight. A tiny minority of genre-sympathetic auteurist critics disagreed, however, believing that for once Zeffirelli's flamboyant, operatic stylizations had struck pay-dirt in being melded with the florid emotionalism of the American "women's picture". In their view, Zeffirelli's Queer, Italianate sensibilities brought a startlingly fresh and deep perspective to unhinged Family Romance and teenage American love, and provided a transgressively sympathetic portrait of male heterosexual passion pursued into the jaws of despair and madness. For this minority it was a major work of that despised and dying genre, the unrepentant Melodrama. Zeffirelli's collaborators were also noticed—his cast was a mix of fresh faces (including Tom Cruise in his first screen appearance), and a superb roster of stage and screen veterans. Endless Love's lush, glowing cinematography was arguably the best in the career of the brilliant, future Academy Award-winner David Watkin.
After almost 30 years, Endless Love has all but been forgotten. In the interim, the film Melodrama has been reassessed by critics, and come to be seen as a key cinema genre, most famously displayed by the celebration of the 50's films of Douglas Sirk. Could enough time have passed for Melodramas of the 70's and 80's to receive their due? Is Endless Love the last major work of the classical Hollywood cycle? On August 22nd, YOU have the chance to participate in the rediscovery and reevaluation of an important work of cinema! 1981 35mm Color 116 min. Not on DVD!
Based on Scott Spencer's National Book Award-nominated novel!
Sunday, August 22, 4:00PM
PFA Theater
2575 Bancroft Way
Berkeley
Admission: $8
08/18/10 UPDATE: Brecht Andersch has expanded on these initial thoughts in a two-piece essay (one and two) for SFMOMA's Open Space.
Cross-published on Twitch.
Cinematic Titanic returns to the glorious Castro Theatre this evening to provide hilarious riffing to 1968's War of the Insects (aka Genocide), a feature-length Japanese B-movie, never before performed live in the Bay Area. Tonight only! Sponsored by SF Sketchfest.
Cinematic Titanic is the new feature-length movie riffing show from the creator and original cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Like MST3K, the show was created by Joel Hodgson and features the same team that first brought the Peabody award winning cult-classic series to life: Trace Beaulieu (Crow, Dr. Forrester), J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo, Dr. Erhardt), Frank Conniff (TV's Frank), and Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester). Cinematic Titanic continues the tradition of riffing on "the unfathomable", "the horribly great", and the just plain "cheesy" movies from the past.
Founded in late 2007, Cinematic Titanic is an artist-funded, and artist-owned and operated venture. With seven feature-length DVDs (available in their on-line store) and an ever-growing schedule of live shows, the CT crew is reconnecting with MSTies around the world as well as bringing new fans to the comedy art form first introduced by this group 20 years ago on television.
About War of the Insects: In this dreadful atomic age sci-fi "thriller" from Japan, a deranged scientist hell bent on taking over the world genetically engineers deadly killer bees to do his bidding. But is his plan worse than the movie's dubbing? Seldom seen since 1968, and it's apparent why.
General admission is $25 and tickets can be purchased online through TicketWeb or by phone (1-866-468-3399).
Cross-published on Twitch.
This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of VIZ Cinema. Admittedly, I've only begun attending screenings there in the last few months; but, it has rapidly become one of my favorite venues for its comfortable seating, its café serving vegan doughnuts and Blue Bottle coffee (hands down, the best coffee in San Francisco), and—most importantly—its eclectic programming that focuses on the latest and hottest films from Japan, as well as an incredible legacy of classics, favorites, documentaries and anime—making it the only venue of its kind in the United States. They've also just started distributing their own Blu-Ray DVD titles, kicking off with their Death Note Collection.
Their August series "Winding Road to Peace" commemorates the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as chronicled through the Japanese American experience of WWII, and continues with two documentaries by local filmmaker Junichi Suzuki: Tôyô's Camera (2008) and 442—Live with honor, Die with dignity (2010), both screening in HD digital through August 19. Both films are key introductions to the internment of Japanese Americans at California's Manzanar Relocation Center during WWII and the celebrated heroics of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, respectively.
With Tôyô's Camera, filmmaker Suzuki crafts a documentary portrait of Tôyô Miyatake, a Japanese American photographer who smuggled his camera into Manzanar to capture black and white images that chronicled the plight of his people during this shameful episode of American history. Without question, Miyatake is a fascinating subject and his photographs are beautiful. The story of his internment and his lifelong friendships with Edward Weston and Ansel Adams are of significant interest and—had Suzuki kept his focus on Miyatake instead of mistakeningly attempting to chronicle the entire Japanese American experience of WWII—he would have achieved a poignant and elegant portrait of this important but relatively unknown photographer.
In her review for the L.A. Times, Sheri Linden praised the selection of Miyatake photographs which makes up the heart of the documentary, but complained: "The film is far more static than any of those pictures. Their cumulative effect is, nonetheless, a sweeping introductory portrait of life in an internment camp." Linden concludes: "Director Junichi Suzuki's film offers compelling insights into a long-shrouded chapter of history, yet Tôyô's Camera lacks the subtlety of its subject's work." I'm afraid I must concur, even as I strongly admire the information I gleaned from Suzuki's flawed effort.
The more I watch documentaries, the more I become convinced that they should rarely exceed 80 minutes. I imagine it's a considerable hardship for documentarians earnest to relay information to honor the adage that less is more. At 100 minutes, Tôyô's Camera becomes hazardously desultory. Eschewing any kind of narrative voiceover until late in the film when actor George Takei offers brief (and compelling) commentary, the visual enjoyment of the film is muddied by text in two languages slapped on top of the images. The images, which I felt should be predominant, were forced into the background.
Suzuki remedied this problem in his subsequent documentary 442—Live with honor, Die with dignity, effectively employing narrative voiceover and resituating the Japanese subtitles vertically to the edge of the frame. This documentary profiles the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team of WWII and explores the regiment's intrinsic paradox. With many of the regiment's soldiers coming from the Japanese American internment camps, the 442 emancipated the Jewish prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps. The irony is painful. Though these soldiers were first looked at as a problem because of their race, they were later appreciated as problem solvers because of their splendid achievement in the battle field. They fought not only America's enemy but also America's prejudice. Suzuki has gathered remarkable oral histories from veterans of 442 still living today and insures that their courage against insurmountable odds will never be forgotten. Curiously, if Suzuki had held off on his desire to include information about the 442 in his earlier documentary Tôyô's Camera, it would have made that earlier effort a tighter one. One gets the sense that Suzuki was already distracted by 442—Live with honor, Die with dignity while filming Tôyô's Camera; an unfortunate enthusiasm.
