Man Watches Violent Films, Weekly Reel #30
In another week of no films to pass on—though I thought “The Rings of Power” was a complete bore and confirmed my ban on new TV shows—here are some solid recs.
News of the Week: I’ve been slow at writing non-film recommendation articles recently because of an impulsive decision to write a very long article on all the Bond films. Hopefully that will clear up soon since I’m done with part one. I will also be focusing more on non-film subjects—books, media companies and the industry, cultural and the arts, and maybe even a play or poem. Stay tuned.
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Man Bites Dog (1992, Rémy Belvaux/André Bonzel/Benoît Poelvoorde, Belgium) is a dark and violent mockumentary that came out eight years after This is Spinal Tap and nine years before The Office (UK). In that time, the mockumentary dipped into the late eighties and early nineties indie film production, which a young group of Belgian students exploited in the best possible way. The co-directors and -writers play a small low-budget documentary film crew following the town’s charismatic local serial killer. They shoot on black and white 16mm film, like Clerks two years later, and use enough blood and gun effects to take up the entire budget. At first the film crew is filming from a typical documentary distance, but over time they become more involved than they legally should have. Because the film is so graphically violent, it received the coveted NC-17 rating and was banned in a couple of countries.
When the mockumentary is done right, it exposes the cracks in the filmmaking process itself and the subject under review, which can leave one’s art-mind agape. Sacha Baron Cohen and the two Anglo-American office series have been doing the heavy lifting in this department for the last twenty years as traditional sitcoms became stale in the early aughts. But with films, mockumentaries were around since the late seventies, which was when American cinema started becoming stale. Christopher Guest (This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and Best in Show) did the heavy lifting there. With the rise of indie filmmaking and a new generation of filmmakers in the early nineties, films became more creative—mainly due to low budgets—in interpreting and commenting on genres.
With Man Bites Dog, they look at ultra-violence, in a comparable manner to Tarantino with Reservoir Dogs, as a means to a storytelling end. But Man Bites Dog goes further in mocking the act of violence itself for the direct pleasure of the viewers. An accidental misfire into the head of a birthday party guest is filmed dead-pan as if Dwight found his stapler in a pool of jelly. The filmmakers try to film every possible comical configuration of how violent murder and the dumping of bodies, like when the killer talks about the ballast ratio needed for a dead body to sink—three times the body weight for an average adult, four for kids, midgets have denser bones and only need two, and old people need five because they have porous bones. Then in a long shot, the killer clumsily dumps the body into a shallow river with the wrapped body exposed.
The killer, played by Benoît Poelvoorde, is eclectically charismatic yet awkward when the camera is on him in the same way as David Brent or Michael Scott. The crew that documents him begin to indulge the killer as time passes, first by eating lunch with him but then aiding in the murders, which introduces the meta-commentary on how film crews, especially for documentaries, become accomplices at some moment, no matter how fly-on-the-wall they appear. That although they claim to be documenting reality, their actions create an inherent confusion between reality and fiction—why are they filming some moments and editing out others? Most of us, hopefully, gather this unconsciously from reality TV. The camera crew can’t just watch and interview a man as he’s killing people. And by mocking the act of murder itself, it invites the audience to become complicit as well. At what point does watching enough violence lead to its internalization, acceptance, and proliferation? Seems relevant today in mass-shooting USA. I highly recommend you watch this film, which is available on HBO Max. ♦
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A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick, USA/UK) is a choodessny cine filled with gromky guff and molody nadsats. It nachinats with Alex’s (Malcolm McDowell) droogs shlaga a poor dedoochka, then dratsing with the rival shaika giving a devotchka the old in and out and ends the nochy with their own cracking and crasting. Alex slooshes to Beethoven in his pee and ma’s and spatchkas past skolliwoll before going back for more Moloko plus. He’s keenly interessovat in ultraviolence in combination with Ludwig van, pol, and bratty dratsing. But his baddiwad lands him in barry place after a nochy where his droogs ookadeet after he's oobivat the soomka. From there, the bruiseboys get their forceful appy polly loggies and a controversial treatment pits the poor orange against competing clockworks.
Of Kubrick’s thirteen films, six are war films. He covers a range of violence from antiquity to Vietnam, but A Clockwork Orange, the only dystopian crime film, is his most violent. That violence comes from multiple directions—the droogs against others, the droogs against one another, the authorities against the droogs, the intelligentsia against the droogs, and the authorities against the intelligentsia. It gives no easy ins and outs; sympathy is splattered like a Pollock. Alex is both pawn and perpetrator, who’s without remorse and mechanically inclined towards any chosen direction. Both nature and nurture fucked him. Like most Kubrick films, this one is easily rewatchable and relevant. Being extremely online humans is turning us all into a clockwork orange. You can find it streaming on both Netflix and HBO Max. ♦
For a Few Dollars More (1965, Sergio Leone, Italy/Spain/West Germany) is the second in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, known today more as Clint Eastwood in the Man with No Name Trilogy. It stars Eastwood as Manco, a bounty hunter—semi-unrelated to his characters in the other films—who competes with another bounty hunter, Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), to collect the bounty, dead or alive, on a vicious bank robber, El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté). Whereas Eastwood’s “no name” character in the first film, A Fistful of Dollars, is a cunningly lone gunslinger playing the baddies off one another, he’s met his bounty hunting superior in Mortimer, the finest long-shot this side of the Rio. Also, Mortimer, unlike Manco, is fighting for personal reasons that adds a level of revenge Leone would start using in each of his films thereafter—one finds its absolute zenith in the final act of Once Upon a Time in the West. They both learn of Indio’s plan to rob the impenetrable El Paso bank, which has a concealed safe behind massive security bars and a small crew of armed men posted inside and out. The two bounty hunters must decide, work together and split the profits, or become another number in the enemies needing to be killed.
This film is a fitting example of peak international co-productions, which continues today in the form of Cultural Ministry grants. The spaghetti westerns was the most popular co-production; generally, an Italian director would shoot in Spain using a mix of European extras and rely on a famous Hollywood actor or two to star. West Germany was able to finesse its way into For a Few Dollars More and get the legendary Klaus Kinski a supporting role. The main point of co-productions, which are done mostly outside of the USA, is to reduce risk. Most countries, especially in postwar Europe, didn’t have financially fluent film industries, which left much of the productions up to government funds. Co-production allowed countries to share subsidies, shooting locations, actors, production crews, market access, and cultures. This paid off big in the case of For a Few Dollars More, which earned more than twenty-five million at the international box office from a six hundred thousand dollar budget—adjusted to inflation for 2022, that would be two hundred and forty million dollars made from a five and a half million dollar budget.
Although this film isn’t remembered as well as the third in the trilogy, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I prefer the intensity of Gian Maria Volonté’s villain more than Eli Wallach’s. Also, the story is tighter—forty-five minutes shorter—with more sustained tension throughout. But these details better describe why it’s better than Fistful. Leone learned from the first two how to create the perfect epic, which peaked in The Good and lasted until his final film, Once Upon a Time in America. The biggest trouble For a Few Dollars More and the sophomore film in the second trilogy, Duck, You Sucker!, is being sandwiched between the entry masterpiece and epic finale. Unless one has seven to nine hours to sit through the trilogies, the middle film is usually the first left out. But one doesn’t need to watch the first or second to understand one another or the third, so watch For a Few Dollars More on the Roku Channel and A Fistful of Dollars, which is also available there. ♦
Dheepan (2015, Jacques Audiard, France) unexpectedly and controversially—but when is it not?—won the Palme d’Or in 2015 by a Coen brothers’ led jury. The film is about an arranged family, not in the way you’re expecting, fleeing from Sri Lanka during the civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Sri Lankan government. It begins with Dheepan (played by Antonythasan Jesuthasan, who was a former member of the LTTE in the eighties as a teen-ager and said that fifty percent of this film is autobiographical) as a Tamil Tiger during the final days of the civil war helping his unit burn the bodies of combatants. Then it switches to a refugee camp, where he finds a random woman, along with a nine-year old orphan, to assume the identities of victims whose passports were left behind. At first, they settle in Paris with Dheepan selling trinkets on the streets—the kind of job Jesuthasan had as a refugee in Paris twenty years prior. Then with the help of a Sri Lankan visa consultant, they receive a residence permit for a small commune in one of the sprawling Paris modernist apartment-complex suburbs. Dheepan works as the building maintenance worker, which sits next to a housing complex openly selling drugs. His “wife,” Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) is the slowest at learning French, which hinders her adaptation progress—she originally wanted to live with her cousin in England. Their “daughter,” Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), is young enough to pick up French the fastest, who attends the local école. Unfortunately, they will have to adapt to a community of violence not unlike the one from which they fled.
It's wild that this is only Jesuthasan’s second film. The intensity he brings, no doubt provided by personal experience, is more than most sophomore efforts. Through him we experience the refugee experience in a non-judgmental, non-patronizing perspective aided by cinematographer Eponine Momenceau. There were no oscarbait moments, no glorifications of their experiences, and didn’t turn their unhappy life into misery porn. They’re just trying to survive, not be heroes—more The Pianist than Schindler’s List. The last five minutes veers off temporarily in this glory-filled direction, which hinders the slow buildup of acts one and two quite a lot but is brief enough to not throw the whole story out. Nonetheless, I recommend you keep this in your watchlist for when you’re in the mood for a French film about Sri Lankan refugees. You can find it for free on Kanopy, or if you’re subbed to AMC+, Criterion Channel, or DirecTV. ♦
Pass
Nothing this week my droogs!
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