Scarlet Street

This month, the Cinématheque Pusan is having a retrospective of the films of Fritz Lang.

Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street (1945) is based on the same novel and play that inspired Jean Renoir's La Chienne (1931), but Lang pushes the material away from comedy towards existential tragedy. Renoir's film ends with laughter. Lang's ends with madness and despair.

Lang moves the story to New York's Greenwich Village. The hero, Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson), is a meek cashier and Sunday painter. At an office party, Christopher and his co-workers catch a glimpse of the boss getting into car with his young mistress. Christopher, who's in a loveless marriage, wonders what it would be like to be loved by a young woman. On his way home that night, Christopher sees a woman being attacked on the street and comes to her rescue.

In the Renoir film, the woman was a prostitute and the man who assaulted her was her pimp. Although Lang's film begins with the image of a street lamp behind the opening credits, Kitty (Joan Bennett) isn't a prostitute, even if she sometimes acts like one. We learn that she used to have a job, but after she started dating Johnny (Dan Duryea), a small time card player, she "could never get to work on time." Johnny calls her "Lazy Legs."

Johnny is a homme fatale. He needs money to enter a high stakes card game, and when Kitty doesn't have any to give him, he beats her up. To impress Kitty, Christopher tells her he's a painter, and Johnny leaps to the conclusion that he's got some money. (Eventually, Christopher steals some bonds left to his wife by her first husband in order to pay for a studio apartment for Kitty.) Johnny doesn't seem the least bit concerned when Kitty tells him how much she hates it when Christopher tries to kiss her.

Kitty tells Christopher she's an actress, and in a sense, she is. Christopher starts storing his paintings at Kitty's apartment when his wife, Adele (Rosalind Ivan), threatens to throw them out. Johnny takes two of them to a street vendor in Washington Square to sell them, and when the unsigned paintings are bought up by an art critic, Kitty plays the role of the artist, repeating the same flowery twaddle that Christopher fed her when he was pretending to be a painter.

Lang seldom uses non-diegetic music, preferring the ambient sound of an organ grinder on the street or a radio program coming from the apartment downstairs. In the latter part of the film, the audio is more subjective with Christopher haunted by the voices of those he wronged.

Although I liked the film on first viewing, seeing it again, I found myself growing impatient with it, and I'm not sure why. Either watching movies like Iron Man (2008) has obliterated my attention span, or the characters are too predictable to sustain interest for 103 minutes. La Chienne is a classic and a good 13 minutes shorter, so unless you're living in Busan right now, that's the one to see.

Iron Man

Jon Favreau's Iron Man (2008) begins in Afghanistan and ends with the resolution of its hero's daddy issues. In between, it spends a lot of time in the basement.

The film is based on an old comic book I've never read, and in all likelihood, I never will. Its hero, Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), is a bazillionaire playboy whose company makes weapons for the U.S. government. In Afghanistan, he's kidnapped by terrorists armed with his own merchandise, who want him to build a missle for them. Instead he builds himself an iron suit to escape in.

As if raised in a South Korean PC room, Stark is both light-sensitive and anti-social. After spending most of the film's first hour in a cave building an Iron Man suit, he spends most of the second hour in the basement of his Malibu mansion building an Iron Man suit. Although he could have his assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), if only he'd notice her, Stark has more meaningful conversations with his computer (voiced by Paul Bettany).

The movie is too ahistorical to qualify as a political statement, either liberal or conservative. There's no mention of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in which the U.S. backed the Taliban--possibly because the word "Taliban" doesn't appear in the screenplay. The six or so terrorists we see in the film have no connections to al-Qaeda and no discernable motives.

The real meat of the movie is the Oedipal struggle between Stark and Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), who was Stark's father's business partner. One word that does appear in the screenplay, frequently, is "legacy." Stark wants to protect his father's legacy by only selling weapons to the right people (i.e., America). Stane is more of a free market type.

The movie's super weakness is a lack of creativity. As a director, Favreau can cover a scene but he can't direct. We get too many close-ups and too much camera movement. Even the soundtrack is boring. The first thing we hear is the "quiet" of the desert followed by AC/DC's "Back in Black."

Even the in-jokes are lame. Are comic book fans really that excited to see a cameo by Stan Lee?

Iron Man is not, I suppose, a terrible movie, but I can't think of a single compelling reason to see it. Everything about it--from the use of terrorists as stock villains to the resolution of Oedipal conflicts--is terminally familiar, as if nobody involved could be bothered to do something creative. On every level, it's undistinguished hack work.

My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights (2007) is about late night diners where the broken-hearted arrive at closing time to eat the whole blueberry pie that no one ever orders--not necessarily because they like blueberry pie but as a sign of solidarity with it.

It's not unlike Wong's Chungking Express (1994), in which a broken-hearted cop (Takeshi Kaneshiro) eats can after can of expired pineapples, but sadder. Again there's a broken-hearted cop, this time a small town sheriff, but instead of pineapples he hits the sauce. If this isn't a detriment to his job performance, perhaps it's because he's the most dangerous person in the county.

The film opens in New York, where Jeremy (Jude Law), a lad from Manchester, runs a small diner. One night, Elizabeth (Norah Jones) walks through the door and leaves with Jeremy a set of keys belonging to her ex-boyfriend. Jeremy puts them in a jar with other keys that no one will ever claim. He could throw the keys away, but then those doors might never be opened again.

Like the cop in Chungking Express, Elizabeth over-identifies with food. When Jeremy explains that every night at closing time there's always one blueberry pie that no one's touched, she asks defensively, "What's wrong with blueberry pie?" "There's nothing wrong with blueberry pie. People just make other choices."

Many late nights and blueberry pies later, Elizabeth takes it on the road. In Tennessee, she works in a diner by day and a bar by night where she meets Arnie (David Stratharn), the alcoholic sheriff, and his ex-wife, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). In Reno, she gets a job in a casino where she meets Leslie (Natalie Portman), a gambler who's every bit as untrusting as Elizabeth is naive.

Wong's favorite effect is to use a slow shutter speed which results in smeary, impressionistic images. At one point, he even uses it to film an insert of Leslie placing chips on a poker table. When the characters speak, Wong shoots at normal speed because he wants us to listen to what's being said.

The film is very charming. Like Elizabeth, it drifts amiably across the United States with no particular destination in mind. If it's not one of the great Wong Kar-wai films, that's alright by me. I happen to like blueberry pie.

In the Valley of Elah

Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah (2007) is, for most of its length, such a seamless blend of character and action that one forgives the film its flaws. As a statement about the Iraq war, it's grossly inadequate even next to something as flawed as Brian De Palma's Redacted (also 2007), which did a better job of showing why some American soldiers are committing atrocities. On the other hand, Haggis' film works better as storytelling and Charlize Theron turns in the best performance I've seen from her.

The film alternates between crisp 35mm cinematography by Roger Deakins and nearly illegible video, and Haggis builds a dialectic between past- and present-tense, representation and abstraction, observation and identification. In the present-tense scenes, shot on 35mm, Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) recieves a phone call informing him that his son, Michael (Jonathan Tucker), has gone AWOL from a Texas military base, which comes as a shock to Hank who thought his son was still fighting in Iraq. It's not long before Michael's mutilated body is found, and as Hank unravels what happened, Haggis uses the form of a whodunnit to reveal Hank's character, and that of Emily (Theron), a detective who aids him in his investigation.

One indication of this is Haggis' willingness to stay with Hank and Emily in scenes which have little to do with the main plot. At one point, Emily, a single parent, invites Hank to her house for dinner, and afterwards, Hank attempts to read her son a bedtime story, C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia." Hank refuses to read it on the grounds that he can't understand a single word, and instead recounts the story of David and Goliath. Later he insists that the story is a literal truth, adding "It's even in the Qur'an."

In other words, while the present-tense scenes invite us to observe Hank and Emily in various situations, the past-tense scenes, which consist of Michael's video diary in Iraq, invite us to identify with Hank's point of view as he watches them. These scenes are stretched out across the film at regular intervals, and by the time Haggis gets around to revealing the identity of Hank's murderer, the past-tense narrative has completely overwhelmed the present-tense story, with Hank bearing silent witness to the killer's confession (significantly coupled with the film's only flashback in 35mm). And this is where Haggis really gets into trouble.

Haggis wants to show that soldiers can't do unspeakable things one day, and then come home and be normal the next. The first time we see Emily, she's speaking to a woman whose boyfriend, an Iraq war veteran, went crazy and drowned their pet dog. However, Hank served in Vietnam (another war in which some American soldiers committed atrocities) and Michael was in Bosnia, but neither seems to have been traumatized by these experiences. The film implies that this war is esspecially terrible, but shows no insight into what's motivating some American soldiers to commit the kind of atrocities shown in the film, or how they're different from those committed in previous wars.

In the Valley of Elah is still a vast improvement on Million Dollar Baby (2004) and Crash (2005). The gaps in credibility are less noticeable, and Haggis doesn't attempt to inject comic relief into an otherwise somber drama. His limitations are still apparent in spots, but they're less damaging in this context. For instance, Emily's co-workers are all familiar Haggis types--unredeemable sexists who think she got the job by sleeping her away to the lower middle--but their scenes work regardless because they tell us so much about Emily. It feels strange to say, but I'm curious to see what Haggis will do next.

The Tracey Fragments

After three films, I still haven't made up my mind about Ellen Page, and Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments (2007) only clouds the issue further. Page's character, Tracey Berkowitz, is such a bundle of angst that nearly every scene turns into a shouting match. In this context, what does it mean to give a bad performance?

In any event, the film is not boring. McDonald fills the screen with multiple images, often different perspectives of the same event with three or four Traceys on screen at the same time. This doesn't give the viewer any more freedom than a more traditional film would, as the eye is invariably drawn to motion and sound. During dialogue scenes, McDonald even gives us matching eye lines so we understand where the characters are standing in relation to one another.

Adapted from a novel by Maureen Medved (which I haven't read), who also wrote the screenplay, the film unfolds mainly in flashback. It opens with Tracey sitting on a bus, draped in a shower curtain, and then goes back and fourth through time to explain how she got there. An unpopular teen in a small Canadian town, her father (Ari Cohen) is an abusive tyrant (natch), and she's picked on at school (double natch) for not having big breasts. Tracey's in therapy (triple natch) I think over her guilt about losing her younger brother (in one scene, she thinks she glimpses him from a moving bus), but she's so hostile towards her therapist, Dr. Heker (Julian Richings, in drag), that they never discuss it. Dr. Heker's office is an all-white room, reminding one of those Gap ads from the late 90's.

The film has been compared to John Hughes and Peter Greenaway, although it falls short of either filmmaker at their best. Philosophically, Hughes was a humanist in his belief that people are basically decent, and if you put five kids from different cliques in the same room for a few hours, or John Candy and Steve Martin on a cross-country adventure, that they'll grow to understand each other. Tracey, on the other hand, doesn't grow; like Alex (Gabe Nevins), the protagonist of Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park (also 2007), she can only relive her life on instant replay in an attempt to master the past by narrativizing it.

As for Greenaway, although Tracey goes to Mean Girls High with boys who trip her in the hallway with their hockey sticks (one way to tell it's a Canadian film), it would be overrating the film's coherence to call it anti-humanist. Indeed, the film is so subjective it's hard to know whether Tracey's classmates are really that terrible or whether she just thinks they are.

For a movie about a girl tormented by her past--it's the Lola Montès (1955) of teen angst--The Tracey Fragments is, ironically, rather forgettable. As in Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991), McDonald's techniques are often striking on a moment-to-moment basis, but the film as a whole feels strangely disconnected. Scenes don't seem to flow inevitably from one to the next; it's a movie that unfolds in chunks. But where Greenaway simply seems uninterested in Shakespeare except as an opportunity to fiddle around with multiple images, McDonald (like Van Sant) invests all his creative powers in yet another story about hard it is to be a white suburban teenager. One can forgive Tracey for her narcissistic tunnel vision, but when a middle-aged man invites us to share in it for an hour and seventeen minutes, the bubble cries out to be popped. I'm not convinced this film is any more mature than Superbad (also 2007).

As for the strange case of Ellen Page, the overrated poster girl of Canadian cinema, if nothing else, her performance here is a lot less manered than her work in Juno (also 2007).