Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and Willy (Édgar Flores) on the train.
Here is a dilemma for European cinephiles. Is Sin nombre, a Sundance awards winner, an example of a new kind of committed auteurist film from the Americas or just another slickly-packaged City of God look-alike? Both of those extreme options have been taken up by reviewers.
This is a film written and directed by a young (31) American filmmaker of mixed Japanese and Swedish descent, Cary Fukunaga. It’s a US/Mexico co-production with the involvement of Focus Features as distributors and the ‘dos amigos’, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna as executive producers. So, it has muscle behind it. On the other hand, it’s the product of extensive primary research in Central America by Fukunaga and it’s presented in Spanish with subtitles.
The narrative involves two separate strands which come together. ‘Casper’ is a member of the MS 13 gang (see the IMDB bulletin board for explanations of this infamous gang which now operates across Central America and the US). He recruits a 12 year-old, ‘Smiley’, into the gang, but also foolishly consorts with a girlfriend without telling his local gangleader. Meanwhile Sayra, a young woman in Honduras, is persuaded to join her estranged father, who has been deported from the US, and her young uncle in an attempt to get back into the US via a long train ride through Mexico. She hits the border between Guatemala and Mexico, just as Casper and Smiley are ordered to rob the train. We aren’t surprised that Casper (under his other name of ‘Willy’) and Sayra get together on the train – what will happen next?
This is a very professionally-mounted film. The ‘Scope cinematography looks great (on a good transfer from a 35 neg to a digital print) and I also enjoyed the music soundtrack (which probably means a lot more to those who know the tracks/artistes). The performances are very good and overall it is a solid genre film – a mixing of the social commentary migration film and the youth/gang picture. There is an obvious authenticity about many of the migration scenes and there is also pleasure on offer in a look at Mexico from the top of a freight car. Whether this is as exciting or as innovative a film as the hype suggests is more open to doubt. All I can say is that I was gripped for 96 minutes and never bored. On that basis it’s good to see American-based directors reaching out to embrace Central American stories.
As the critical response has suggested, this is an impressive war film about Iraq. Stylistically similar to the hyper-real visual style seen in Cloverfield (US, 2008), it uses extreme handheld shake to signify ‘thereness’. If you’re filming defusing an unexploded bomb the niceties of framing and composition are going out of the window. The cinematographer is Barry Ackroyd who shot United 93 (US, 2006) and The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ire-UK, 2006), both realist films. However, although documentary-style camerawork, that follows rather than leads the action, is evident in these films, they remain carefully composed; I felt mildly nauseous watching The Hurt Locker such is the camera shake on the big screen. Ironically, this effect makes it more of a ‘roller coaster’ than Hollywood blockbusters even though this is nothing like a mainstream movie.
The best review I’ve read is by the reliably excellent Philip French in The Observer and I agree with much of what he said. I’ve written about most of the Iraq movies and The Hurt Locker is certainly a fascinating addition. Its focus on the American viewpoint is slightly problematic for me as all Iraqis are filmed as potential terrorists; take the shot of the DVD vendor that suddenly makes him look sinister when he’s simply a guy trying to make a living. However, if we accept that this is a function of the film’s viewpoint, the protagonist and addicted risk-taker SSgt William James, then this is acceptable. Peter Bradshaw, in The Guardian, suggests this is a challenge to ‘political correctness’ as if there’s something wrong in questioning the representation of the antagonists.
The British do get to show their face but are so money-seeking and inept, once the shooting starts those that haven’t been shot yet don’t even fire a gun, that we descend into a gung-ho Hollywood movie despite the fact that the sequence is brilliant.
The sound design is spectacular, by Paul N.J. Ottosson, adding to the visceral discomfort of the experience. This is cinema that is about experience; experience that most of us, thankfully, won’t have. I don’t know any serving soldiers but met one on leave from Afghanistan on a train journey. The soldier obviously needed to talk about their experiences and now I know of someone in the front line each time I hear of casualties they won’t be in the abstract. Cinema can also do this, to an extent, allowing us to understand the experiences of others. If we learn nothing of the ridiculous politics fueling East-West conflict from The Hurt Locker, we do get a sense of what it might be like to be there.
Denzel Washington and Ray Allen as Jake and Jesus Shuttlesworth.
Spike Lee has often referred to his own obsession with the ‘Knicks’ basketball team in New York, so it isn’t a surprise that he decided to make a film about basketball. ‘Sports films’ constitute a familiar genre in Hollywood, but they are often concerned with American sports that relatively few people worldwide actually understand (i.e. baseball and American football). Basketball is played in most countries but not in a professional way like it is with the NBA in the US. Although we don’t really understand these American sports, Hollywood generally simplifies them enough to turn a sporting event into a familiar cinematic dramatic narrative. This usually means that the film has little credibility with sports fans since it lacks authenticity either in the storyline or the presentation of the action on screen. Fortunately He Got Game is not a Hollywood movie, so it does something else.
I suggest that it isn’t a Hollywood movie, even though it stars Denzel Washington, by the late 1990s an A List star, and was released by Touchstone, a Disney Brand. The-Numbers.com suggests that the production budget of the film was $25 million which signifies a medium budget picture. What this means to me is that this was one of those Spike Lee blags in which he persuades a studio to cough up money and then produces something different to what the studio expects – the film opened at No 1 on 1,300 screens but died fairly quickly for a $21 million US box office gross. It does, however, have a following of sorts.
Hollywood narratives are usually linear and goal-centred, so sports films tend to feature a number of games/performances culminating in winning a championship contest. He Got Game ends with a contest of sorts, but there are no conventional sports contests. Instead this is a film about the commercialisation and professionalisation of sport in the US, its place in African-American culture and specifically in the father-son relationship within the African-American family. The generic narrative is actually drawn from the prison movie. Denzel Washington plays Jake Shuttlesworth apparently in prison (Attica) for a long stretch. He practises his basketball technique in the prison yard in order to keep fit and one day he is called into the warden’s office to be made an astounding offer. He will be released on special leave for a short period in order to persuade his son, Jesus, to enrol at ‘Big State’. Jesus has been named as the No 1 high school basketball player in the country and his enrolment is being sought by all the big basketball schools. The warden is intent on pleasing the governor, who is backing Big State. When Jake agrees to the ‘mission’ (after assurance that success could shorten his sentence) we begin to learn, via series of flashbacks, why he is in prison and how Jesus came to be such a star player. The time limit is the date by which Jesus must make a decision – only a few days away. Will he make the right decision? I won’t reveal what happens, but needless to say, there must be dramatic tension, which I don’t think is released in the most conventional way.
One of the strengths of Spike Lee’s filmmaking is cinematography and visual design and another is music. The opening to He Got Game is stunning in every way. If you didn’t know already, you would quickly be convinced that Lee loves basketball and wishes to place it on a pedestal as the ultimate American game – to mythologise it as Richard Falcon in Sight and Sound suggests. (‘He Got Game’ appears to be a complimentary remark confirming that someone can really play the game.) The camerawork by Malik Hassan Sayeed, who worked on several Lee films in the 1990s, draws on documentary styles and allied to the use of Aaron Copland’s music on the soundtrack it presents a series of beautiful images of street and on court basketball across the US and in and around Coney Island. The film’s aesthetic is constructed around a seeming contradiction. Although all the basketball footage is highly stylised – the ball is often in slow motion – there is also a strong thread of cinematic realism. Coney Island is the Shuttlesworth home and the Abraham Lincoln High School is a real school – one of the best-known and most successful public schools in America. Not being a fan of classical music, I also wasn’t aware that Aaron Copland is in many ways an appropriate composer to use in scoring the film. Copland was another Brooklyn boy who ‘done good’ – an intriguing figure, Jewish, gay and a socialist according to the Wikipedia entry. On the soundtrack, the Copland pieces are mainly used for the basketball moments and contrasted with Public Enemy used for the home life of Jesus. I was also intrigued by Lee’s use of the unusual name Shuttlesworth for the central characters. Doing a bit of internet research I came up with one of the highly honoured leaders of the Civil Rights movement, Fred Shuttlesworth (born 1922). I’m sure that isn’t a coincidence. (The naming of ‘Jesus’ is explained in the narrative and has a similar resonance in terms of the treatment of Black sports stars – Lee’s original motivation to make a sports film was the story of the Black baseball player Jackie Robinson who ‘broke the colour barrier’.)
This symbolism/realism also carries through to the discourse about the commercialisation of basketball. Jesus watches himself on television and we are offered a range of TV clips featuring the various coaches who praise Jesus. Lee’s critique of TV journalism pre-figures his attacks in Bamboozled and he can’t resist pushing the jokes as far as possible, so that one of the funniest scenes in the movie sees another Spike Lee regular, John Turturro, as a coach welcoming Jesus into his enormous basketball stadium with a montage of Jesus images on the big screen monitors, many taken from Denys Arcand’s Jésus of Montréal (Canada/France 1989) – a film itself satirising media images of the crucifixion.
The problem for Lee is how to meld his paean to basketball and satire on commercial sports to a family melodrama involving a father in prison. This is where he has to use the powerful star image of Washington – which he does very well with Denzel turning in a great performance, even with an Afro that seems rather dated. I confess that I’m not an historian of hair styles and I can’t remember when this style disappeared, but I’m assuming that it signifies how ‘out of touch’ Jake is (though he seems very aware of the latest model of Air Jordans in the shoe shop – Lee has had several commissions from Nike). Washington is both zen-like, gentle and vulnerable, crumpled even, but also hard and vicious as the occasion demands. I think he also works well with Ray Allen, a ‘real’ basketball star without acting experience who plays Jesus.
There are good and bad reviews of the film. The ones that suggest Lee only deals in stereotypes really piss me off. On the contrary, Lee always picks out interesting Black families with characters who live in real places doing believable things. Jesus is not a stereotypical Hollywood Black youth. He is a basketball player (all the basketball plays are ‘real’ not simulated) and a boy who has, understandably turned against his father. His little sister is that rare thing in American cinema, a believable child torn between brother, a surrogate father and her real Dad.
The film is not without its flaws. As usual, unfortunately, Spike’s writing for women seems less developed than for the male characters and I can’t really see why the film needed its sex scenes to be presented in such detail. Presumably both Jake and Jesus had to be seen having sex with prostitutes to emphasise the father-son similarities and possible differences (i.e. in the circumstances in which they found themselves). One of the better reviews (from a fan) suggests that there are many matching shots of the son and the father doing similar things. The film is also too long at 134 minutes – but apart from trimming a few scenes, I don’t think I could see where to cut it significantly. Finally, there is the race question. From one line of dialogue and the brief appearance of Jesus’ mother in a flashback, I gathered that Spike wanted to say something about mixed marriages, but I couldn’t work out what.
The film is well worth watching if you haven’t seen it and worth watching again to savour the basketball scenes with the Copland music.
Here’s the trailer – quite good at suggesting rather than revealing the narrative, I think:
It’s twenty years since the release of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (it feels a lot longer, not sure why). The BFI is celebrating the occasion with a season on the Southbank in London and we are also going to get some screenings up here in Bradford. I’m also planning a course, so it seems a good idea to revisit the work of Spike Lee, one of the most controversial directors working today. I’ve seen most, but not all, of Lee’s features so I’ve got some catching up to do and some re-viewings. I’m not qualified to judge how well he represents African-American culture, though I feel like I’ve learned a lot from his films. Although race is a major topic for him, his films are also about gender, social class, the family and a host of other issues. Most of all though he is a stylist and I think that his films are distinctive because of their visual qualities, the use of music and great casting. Lee is a genuine auteur. There are few filmmakers whose work is instantly recognisable from their company’s name. But when you see the announcement that a film is from ‘40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks‘, you know that it is a Spike Lee Joint, sho’ nuff.
I’d have to say that I haven’t yet seen a bad Spike Lee film or perhaps more accurately, I haven’t yet seen a Spike Lee film that wasn’t interesting in terms of style, content and commitment. I know that there are commentators that I respect, such as Armond White, who are very down on Spike and accuse him of blocking out other more worthwhile filmmakers because of his vigorous self-promotion and propensity to ’say it like it is’ as loudly as possible – but even when I don’t necessarily agree with him, I think it is better that he is out there saying things than keeping schtumm.
Spike Lee was born in 1957 in Atlanta but grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. He went back to college in Atlanta at the famous Black school, Morehouse, before developing his filmmaking skills back in New York at the Tisch School a couple of years behind Jim Jarmusch. Lee’s father is a noted jazz musician and composer and his mother was a teacher. His father has worked on the music for several of Lee’s films and his family life has clearly influenced his filmmaking.
In 1986, Lee’s first ‘commercial’ feature She’s Gotta Have It, a low budget independent film, was one of the earliest successes of what became known as American Independent Cinema. Since then, Lee has been continuously working on fiction features, documentaries, TV dramas, music videos and commercials, all produced by his own company. As of August 2009, Lee had released 20 features (fiction and documentary) and another 20 TV/video/commercials etc. This is a staggering achievement given the conservative nature of the mainstream American film business and the forthright arguments put forward by producer/writer/director/actor Spike Lee. This hasn’t prevented major features like the last Spike Lee Joint, the Miracle at Santa Anna (2008) from failing to get a proper release outside North America. Personally, I find it difficult to imagine what the winning documentaries must have been like that prevented Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1997) and When the Levées Broke (2006) from claiming Oscar success. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised given the commercial failure of Bamboozled (2000), the biting satire on the racism in American television. In the same year, Lee had a big commercial success with a documentary/concert film featuring four African-American comedians, The Original Kings of Comedy. Lee is tough and sharp when it comes to surviving in the American film industry. It would be good to discuss what we think his films have contributed to global film culture over twenty years and more.
I would put Spike Lee into my Top 10 American filmmakers of the last twenty years without hesitation.
This was a riveting movie to watch, well-written and directed by Courtney Hunt (a first time feature filmmaker at 44). I found it also to be disturbing in several different ways.
Frozen River is a genuinely independent film made for less than a million dollars (raised from business acquaintances). Developed from an earlier short film, it was sold to Sony Classics before Sundance – where it won a major prize. The central character is Ray (Melissa Leo), a working-class woman living with her 5 and 15 year-old sons in a decrepit trailer. Her husband, a compulsive gambler, has just absconded with the money saved up for an upgrade to a superior home. Ray sets off to find him between shifts at the local discount store. The trail leads to a Bingo Hall on the Mohawk territory that spans the US-Canadian border. When she sees her husband’s car being driven away by a young Mohawk woman, she gives chase. The upshot is that Ray is sucked into the ‘people trafficking’ across the border which has replaced cigarette smuggling as an earner for some members of the Mohawk community.
As well as gambling and people trafficking, the narrative takes on issues of parental control and the deprivations of trailer park life. It certainly isn’t Hollywood, but still there is a kind of happy ending. In a way this was a relief after a couple of harrowing incidents in the story when I could hardly bear to look at the screen since tragedy seemed inevitable. I’m still trying to work out if this was a cop-out or whether I have read aspects of the film wrongly. As we’ve noted in other posts, it is rare to get contemporary American films that deal with working-class life. It’s even rarer to get films like this written and directed by a woman and with a central focus on two women from outside the norm of Hollywood leads. There has been lots of (justifiable) praise for Melissa Leo, but I would want to also praise Misty Upham as the Mohawk woman. I’m very supportive of the film in lots of ways, but . . .
The problem I have with the film and especially with the happy ending is really to do with the politics of American working class culture. I confess that as a middle-class European it’s sometimes hard to fathom. Let’s begin with the central family in the film. There is some interesting discussion on IMDB as to whether this is a middle-class family brought down in the world by the husband’s gambling. There is generally a view that a ‘poor’ family shouldn’t be watching a large rented TV and eating junk food. Against this, Ray is shown to be a mother who wants her children to go to school and do well (i.e. she isn’t ‘irresponsible’). I wasn’t sure about the actors (real cousins) who played the two sons – they seemed very articulate and ‘well-educated’. So, am I falling into a trap in expecting a stereotypical portrayal of kids who live in a trailer park? To be fair, the film offers believable, non-stereotypical police officers and other characters, so perhaps I ought to read the children as they are written. I can’t say too much about my major concern with the film without giving away the plot, so, SPOILERS ahead, I’m afraid.
Ray is driven by the need to find the money for the new house – in the couple of days before Christmas Eve. Driving illegal workers over the frozen river and across Mohawk land evades the immigration controls. She’s seemingly unconcerned by the Chinese in her boot (trunk) but freaks out when a Pakistani couple turn up, yelling that she doesn’t know what a ‘Paki’ is (the term used by the Mohawk woman) and then saying that she doesn’t know where Pakistan is and losing it completely because the couple might be carrying bombs or something. Is this what American working mothers are like? A woman who seems rational at other times can’t distinguish between frightened illegal immigrants and an Al Quaeda cell? Or is this just my false perspective?
Following this, Ray acts quite callously and only seems to care about her kids’ Christmas presents. Not so terrible perhaps, but we now have her classed as suspicious of other cultures – which goes against the believable portrayal of the two women, white and Native American who are slowly drawing together after beginning on a level of mutual animosity. Lila, the Mohawk woman is an interesting character, streetwise but not as assertive as Ray at first. She also has a small child who she has ‘lost’ to her mother-in-law after her husband’s death. In a possibly metaphorical move, she eventually buys some glasses to improve her poor short-range vision. The ending of the film sees Ray make a sacrifice which effectively ’saves’ Lila and her child. It was this volte-face by the woman who could treat illegals as terrorists that I found a bit hard to take. I’m mindful of Nick Broomfield’s film Ghosts in which Chinese illegals drown in Morecambe Bay when their gangmaster allows them to work in unsafe conditions. People smuggling is often a dangerous business that ends in tears – see our discussion of Farewell China. The film seems to focus on the white-Native American relationship, but to ignore the illegals who somehow seem less than human (they have no dialogue as such). I’m interested to hear what Americans think about this aspect of the film – and Canadians, who are also ‘absent’ apart from the Quebecois who organises the smuggling. Wouldn’t all these illegals be better off taking their chance in Canada?
Info on Courtney Hunt was gleaned from an interview on the Huffington Postand the film’s press kit available here.
It’s great that Melissa Leo should get all this attention. I’ve been a fan since Homicide – Life on the Street. In this movie she looks like a real person and not a movie star. Writer-director Hunt is adamant about her commitment to showing a working-class woman on screen. According to an interview in New York magazine, Hunt herself was brought up by a single mother and took her early inspiration from Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
I hope the film does well – and creates discussion about race and class in contemporary America.
I don’t think I’ve seen a Woody Allen film since the early 1990s and I wouldn’t have gone to this one if my partner hadn’t suggested it. I enjoyed aspects of the film but overall it was a bit of a mess. Trying to make sense of what Allen was trying to achieve, I could only think of 1930s/40s musicals and romantic comedies. I’m not sure why, but I thought of Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and Jesse Matthews in First A Girl. I also thought about something that might be directed by Max Ophuls, perhaps La Ronde? But all these references are to films with a sureness of touch that seems to have evaded poor Woody. He has four excellent actors, a beautiful city, one of Spain’s greatest cinematographers in Javier Aguirresarobe and some beautiful guitar music. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have done too much work on the script.
The voiceover narration has come in for a lot of stick. I have no problem with it as a device and it could work in this context, but not delivered by the rather ugly voice here (which I believe comes from someone best known for US cop shows). The narration is also ungrammatical and I spent a couple of scenes re-running the lines in my head. The plot is ridiculous in parts and insulting to the intelligence of the audience. I think that Bardem’s character is at some point referred to as a ‘Catalan artist’, yet he comes from Asturias. Vicky is supposed to be doing a Masters in ‘Catalan identity’ but she can’t speak Castillian very well and seems unaware that Catalans speak a different language (or rather the whole script seems to ignore this local peculiarity). OK, if this was a Hollywood romcom we wouldn’t worry about this, but it’s a Spanish co-production and the script insists on several scenes in which Javier Bardem has to keep telling Penelope Cruz to speak in English, so language is an issue.
So, it’s a mess, but there is still plenty to enjoy. Bardem and Cruz are wonderful (and make me want to watch Jamon, Jamon again) and Scarlett Johansson is perfectly fine. The revelation for me was Rebecca Hall. At first, I found the character irritating but as the narrative developed she got more and more interesting and I thought that there was a real sense of sexual tension in the way she tried to resist Bardem, but really wanted him very badly. I’ve not seen her before and now I’m looking forward to the UK TV plays set in Yorkshire in the 1970s (Red Riding 1974) and written by David Peace in which she has a role.
Woody Allen works in his own way, but I think if this had been written by someone else and Allen had directed it in a particular style suited to its genre, it could have been very successful.
I’m ambivalent about this film: Sean Penn is fabulous (but then he normally is) but I almost fell asleep at one point. It might have been Gus van Sant’s functional direction that made me soporific or it could be the constraints of the biopic genre. To portray a life in two hours you obviously have to focus on key moments. Anyone with knowledge of Milk’s life would know what should be included; this immediately limits scriptwriters: events must be included regardless of their dramatic potential or cohesiveness. For me the story wasn’t gripping until Milk took on the Religious Right.
That said, Milk’s is an important tale as he fought successfully against bigotry. He seemed the ideal politician in that he decided to get elected to San Francisco’s Board of Representatives for a reason (Gay rights) and not for power. But Gus van Sant can’t resist sentimentalising Milk’s death (I haven’t given that away, that’s obvious from the start) with a long drawn out scene that even Penn struggles to make convincing.
It’s great to see ‘pretty boy’ James Franco embracing the role as Milk’s lover. It wasn’t long ago that Will Smith was advised (for Six Degrees of Separation, 1993, I think) not to engage in a ‘gay kiss’ as it would ruin his career. Hollywood remains homophobic but progress has been made.
Rachel Evan Wood and Mickey Rourke on a New Jersey boardwalk in The Wrestler
The Wrestler is an enjoyable and well-made film. It is rather painful to watch in terms of the damage inflicted on the lead’s body, but the squeamish can always look away. I wouldn’t have chosen to see the film myself, but I was grateful that someone else chose it for me.
The issue here is how an excellent small-scale genre picture like this can receive so much hype over Mickey Rourke’s performance and the film overall. Before I went to see the film, two friends both made this point to me and I can only concur. Note that I’m not putting down the film if I argue that it is ‘just’ a genre picture and if it wins awards, all well and good. Rather I’m observing that during the last days of old-style Hollywood (i.e. in the 1970s) there were films like The Wrestler popping up in circuit cinemas on a fairly regular basis, helmed by directors such as Don Siegel, Robert Aldrich etc. – tough films with grizzled old stars, often set in the more blue-collar areas of the US. It occurred to me that if the current major studios were each to make/fund half a dozen small films like this each year, we could get back to the situation in which grown-ups could go to the cinema every week or so, watch a genre movie with intelligence and have a great night out.
As well as Rourke’s performance, the other standouts in the film are the supporting cast of wrestlers of every shape and size, the great Springsteen song over the closing credits and the revelation (sorry about the pun) that is Marisa Tomei’s performance as a lap dancer. My favourite scene in the film sees Rourke and Tomei singing together in a bar. I could happily have followed them into a road movie-type romance (not something that would have occurred to me as a possibility before the film started).
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