NOTES ON FILM

Beneath the ocean of society lurks a massive iceberg of raw chaos. The premise is eternal. An everyday person, an average Joe, stumbles into a hidden world of danger. It’s a cornerstone plot device that locks on to us, time and again—perhaps because we nurture an enduring appetite for vicarious adventure.

Usually, the very best action films contain a swamp of moral ambiguity where the hero walks a fine line between good and evil. This is captured with almost philosophical mastery in a unique scene where makeshift counter-terrorist John McClane has a chance encounter with his arch-nemesis, Hans Gruber.

The meat lies at the beginning of the scene, as Hans inexplicably goes to check the detonators that will destroy roof, without the benefit of an armed posse of thugs protecting him. It’s absurd. Why the hell would he do this? The only real reason is to stage a surreal meeting of opposites. The moral line becomes creepily palpable for a few brief minutes as McClane plays the helpful cop and Hans fakes an American accent. It is as if they were re-enacting the status quo world, where threats are submerged beneath an air of civility and every man knows his place.

But of course, no amount of play-acting will shut the lid again on the forces of chaos. It’s not the way of the action film. The forces of evil cannot resist, and the scene quickly unravels back into the madness of the Nakatomi takeover.  

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Lovers on the run, leaving behind a trail of murder and mayhem. It’s an ancient archetype, spanning from Lilith to the Surrealists, and which somehow manages to really jive with a very precious part of our morbid nature. Perhaps our infatuation comes from the titillating acknowledgement of a simple truth: love, taken fully without holding back an inch, without being in any shape or form reasonable, without an ounce of common sense, will result in a most destructive and insane passion.

Or at least we hope that this truth exists, somewhere out there, away from us yet close enough to watch it unfold from a safe distance.

THE HONEYMOON KILLERS feels much like an old love-affair, a moment of excess buried in our past that continues to smolder fondly in our hearts. It’s kinky, raw and all-American, but with a touch of class that is the sign of distinction of the good old days.

Living in the States, in a culture thoroughly infatuated with true crime stories, I often find that many of these are rendered without much style or depth. Yet the standard set by this film still holds, oft imitated and seldom replicated. 

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There is a moment towards the beginning of the film in which the beautiful young wife becomes transfixed by the sun. Almost as if through the summer, the dappled leaves, and the deep woods, she was discovering the sun for the very first time.

Truth, like the sun, is impossible to look at directly.

I have a special love for Rashomon. I must admit that I consider it the first art-film I ever saw. It was at some point in sophomore year in high school, at a movie-night for a student cultural club that I belonged to, on a 25 inch CRT television. The copy was in faded, low-contrast VHS, courtesy of the foreign section at a local blockbuster. It is likely that I choose the film based mostly on the ruggedness of Toshiro Mifune on the front cover. I distinctly remember that everyone fell asleep during the screening, including the teacher mentoring the club.  And yet I was fascinated. The film was seeping into my consciousness, sowing ideas that I had never considered were part of the film experience. And above all, it impressed me with terrifically violent, naked images.

Over the years I have watched many other Kurosawa films, discovered the variety of his creative periods, seen his ideas evolve into the epic apocalypse of his final jidaigeki in the 1980’s. Money, fame, power, there are many reasons for an artist to create. But Kurosawa is amongst the few filmmakers who are driven by ideas. Form follows function in his films, to the point that the riveting mastery of his images cannot be separated from his insight into the selfish and conflicted soul of human beings.

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Irreverence, not to be confused with contrariness, lies at the very bottom of the grimy soul of surrealism.

Land Without Bread: mockery of misery, morbid spectacle of hunger, theatre of pain—but most of all, a satire on pity. Our pity.

Made with money a friend won in a lottery and edited at the kitchen table, in so many ways, this short film anticipates much of what has become the bread and butter of classic documentary filmmaking: films with an agenda to move hearts and minds, to rally us all to a cause. Banking on our gullible nature, Buñuel shows us the innards of how images can be decidedly manipulated and placed on a platter of truth—regardless of the cause. And then he laughs right in our face for wanting to believe the farce; for our penchant for the morbid and melodramatic; for wanting to feel righteous and moral about an illusion of poverty.

At the core, Buñuel ridicules us, the sacred audience, for putting our trust in the hands of a filmmaker who doesn’t trust us. The only thing that could have possibly added to this masterpiece would have been a surrealist fundraising campaign.

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Why does Kit stack a pile of rocks when the law catches up to him?

He’s building a monument. To what? Perhaps to himself. To the unforgiving future. To a history that will find no glory nor keep a memory. To a love that was just as vulnerable as a stack of rocks.

This moment, seen years ago, has always stuck in my mind as a sort of mezzanine shared with several other moments in different works. Different yet of the same family: Mersault looking at the dead Arab on the sand in The Stranger, or Satan briefly adoring the beauty of Eve in Paradise Lost. Etcetera.

It’s a moment of frailty in the face of impending, perhaps inevitable, perhaps indifferent destiny. 

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Happy is the man who does battle without hatred

-- The Legend of Goumba--

War and conflict are many things, but at their heart lies a fundamental, radical distinction between us and them. It is the breaching, enforcement and execution of this separation that drives combat. To me, this is the basic problem about telling a war story. In other words, it’s easy to fall in line and follow heroes and villains, to never really ask why those people deserve to die. It’s no surprise to see that very few films are able to really capture the spirit of this separation. 

There’s a general perception that the first half of Full Metal Jacket is where the film shines, while the second half, although technically fantastic, is muddled and unfocused. But that’s not the case at all. It is an uncomfortable film because it is honest about moral ambiguity.

 Whereas the first half is balanced and rigid, the world of war is chaotic and unpredictable and the training does not answer all questions. When the marines are finally face to face with the sniper at the end of the film, Kubrick has taken all of us into the very naked heart of war. For the first time, the act of killing gains a personal moral dimension. Joker kills with his eyes open. He kills with mercy and dignity in a world full of shit. 

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The passing of Roger Ebert underscores how important film criticism is: it starts conversations; it helps us to think and engage with the most ubiquitous art-form of our age. I've been putting off writing about films due to a stubborn affection for procrastination. However, now that I have ventured into it, I do not pretend that it will become a full-fledged commitment. My writing will be driven by my fancy and I advise readers to treat it accordingly. 

In the classic days of noir thrillers, films often presented rigid moral codes that were seldom broken. Forced happy endings were our daily bread. Yet, the most memorable amongst these films are portraits of nightmares, those that pulled us close to the reality, close enough to smell the dark and rich intestines of our society.

If we were lucky, we would end up rooting for broken characters, those who are tortured by a world they could not live with. What in a lazy film would be a simple monster was transformed into a vulnerable and wounded antagonist, human like the rest of us. Just think of Peter Lorre’s pedophilic serial killer in M, Alan Ladd’s tender-hearted thug in This Gun For Hire, and the twisted obsessions of Arturo de Cordova in Buñuel’s This Strange Passion.

Visceral, naked, brutal and above all, surreal and honest—OLDBOY epitomizes the soul of the noir genre. And it does so by getting its hands filthy, with a style that truly deserves the adjetive badass, and an intimacy with violence and depravity that is whole-heartedly unapologetic. 

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