The Cameraman's Revenge

A documentary on a subject I’m not interested in that nonetheless manages to grab me must be doing something right, whatever it is. And I was intrigued by Senna cos it was the subject of a number of raves, particularly from people who were avowedly not fans of Formula One racing. And I am in their position: I’ve no especial interest in cars, not much more interest in sports, so sports involving cars don’t really stand a chance with me. Why yes, I am a failure as a man, why do you ask? Having said that, though, I’m not completely ignorant of at least some of the bigger names involved in the sport, so even I was at least dimly aware that Ayrton Senna’s death was a big deal when it happened… “dimly” being the admittedly operative word. Anyway, like I said, I was intrigued by the big ups the film was getting from non-F1 fans, so that drove me to finally check the thing out, and though I don’t know that I’d quite go along with some of the grander statements about its greatness, it is indeed pretty good viewing. The approach the film takes of sticking only to original visual material, rather than a mix of old footage and new talking head interviews (restricting the latter to additional voiceovers), and presenting events in historical order rather than jumping around in time is an interesting one, and the sheer range of visual material is fascinating too; in the DVD commentary, the director and producer may often be heard marvelling at some of the stuff they were able to turn up. Even if I don’t think it was quite as amazing as some, it’s still pretty impressive, and I can understand why people were angry that it was ineligible (some rule, apparently, disqualifying documentaries made completely from archive footage) for the best documentary category at the last Oscars…

Oh god/dess, that fucking dialogue. I think I’ve managed to establish myself as generally not being a Coen Brothers fan, and accordingly I didn’t really have great expectations of this one by them (one of those films I’ve seen mainly cos it was generally widely acclaimed, and it’s on an assortment of ICheckMovies lists). I’d say those low expectations were kind of met, although I was less appalled by the whole thing than Rex Reed seems to have been… I’ve actually never seen the 1969 version with John Wayne, so I’m not invested in it in the way other folk might be and had no particular beef with the idea of it being remade (whereas I did resent the Coens for remaking The Ladykillers). Anyway, I recall them insisting it wasn’t really a remake but a new adaptation of the novel, so whatever… brother Rex seems to find this part of the problem, preferring the earlier film’s “whittling” of the book (even though the new film is actually shorter), although I think what he says about not much going on isn’t far off the mark; the material seemed kind of thin when I was watching it, and a tighter 80-90 minute film could’ve been better. But we’d still have the dialogue to contend with. Mostly taken straight from Charles Portis’ novel, it is teeth-grinding shit that I literally couldn’t believe a word of. It has the feeling of being translated from another language entirely into the sort of formalised written English someone might learn at school as opposed to the sort of language people actually speak (the child Mattie gets some of the worst lines, although none of the characters are well served by the rubbish they have to say), and it presented a frankly insuperable barrier to my actually engaging with the film. Not that I normally feel engaged by the Coens, but this time I was even less swept up than usual…

I was (and am) a huge admirer of Mark Hartley’s Not Quite Hollywood, so the prospect of him taking on Filipino exploitation cinema struck me as a good thing; my own experience of the stuff is limited to a couple of Eddie Romero movies, Weng Weng (obviously) and Willie Milan’s remarkable W is War, so a primer on this sort of thing seemed like an excellent idea. There is a rather crucial distinction between the two films, though, in that NQH is about the Australian film industry but MMU is actually really about American exploitation cinema of the period that happened to use the Philippines as a filming location (especially those released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures) and not about the actual Filipino industry itself. Apparently there was a pragmatic reason for this, namely that, frankly, those films produced for US release still exist, whereas a lot of the films produced for the home market just don’t (the Philippines was the last country in the world to establish a film archive, as recently as last October). That said, there’s plenty of insight to be gained, and if the portrait of the local filmmaking style in the film and the DVD extras is accurate, then “cavalier” doesn’t begin to describe it. Indeed, in some respects the additional interview footage is where the really jaw-dropping stuff lies; there are astounding tales of insanely unsafe stuntwork, and a genuinely horrifying near-rape story involving performers who apparently thought they were being paid to really rape the actress. As if the country’s dodgy political situation wasn’t sufficiently troubling, you had situations like this that went beyond mere incompetence to something quite disturbing. Accordingly Machete Maidens Unleashed ends up (perhaps inadvertently) as a fairly unflattering portrait of the American producers like Corman who went to the Philippines to shoot films cos it was cheap, leaving a slightly bitter sense that these were indeed “exploitation films” in a darker way than usual…

Thought it was time I contemporised a bit; it’s been months since I last watched anything from this century, and this at least has the decency to have only been released about six months ago, making it the nearest thing to an actually new film I’ve reviewed since I started this blog… Anyway, isn’t it remarkable how a person can make a film that spends nearly three and a half hours on its subject and yet the end result still feels incomplete? I got that feeling from Scorsese’s bio of “the quiet Beatle”, who I think spent much of his life being overshadowed by his bandmates in the Beatles, both during the lifetime of that band and after it… just look at their discography, he starts out being given one of John or Paul’s songs to sing, finally given one or two spaces on each album for his own songs, gradually allowed to contribute a single B-side, then eventually an A-side (“Somewhere”, which Frank Sinatra said was the greatest love song ever written but ascribed to Lennon/McCartney), until finally he blossomed with his very own triple album and the Bangladesh thing… but then John and Paul carried on through the 70s while George seemed to fade somewhat. There was some recognition again by the late 80s, but then relative silence until his death… and he didn’t die as publicly as John, he never really had the success of another major band like Paul, he didn’t tour for nearly 20 years.  He seemed content to remain kind of obscure, and the film kind of leaves him that way, too. The overall impression I got was of an extended appendix to the Anthology, a useful look at the Fabs from George’s less-explored perspective, but only useful if you already had some familiarity with them and him, and on the whole it was hard not to feel it never really got that close to its subject. I suspect Harrison wouldn’t have been too unhappy with that, though it was frustrating for me the viewer…

And so we come screaming back into modernity… did I say modernity? Actually, Inception is built on one of the older plots, one we’ve seen a number of times in film noir especially, i.e. the One Last Job cliche, just gussied up with admittedly new and interesting clothing. Not actually knowing much about the plot before watching the film, I was slightly surprised to see it was so basically old-fashioned. It’s a heist film at heart; the difference between it and, say, The Killing, of course, is that in this film the thing being heisted (“extracted” in the film’s terminology) is information, stolen directly from the human mind. It’s not quite the same as stealing money from a racetrack. But not only can information be extracted, ideas can also be implanted. This is the One Last Job that Leonardo Di Caprio’s character takes on, hired by a corporate boss to “incept” an idea in the mind of a competitor. Along with the oddly old-fashioned plot outline, I was also a bit surprised to find the film was markedly less confusing than I’d expected it to be for some reason… I was thinking it’d be something like Primer with an actual budget, but it came over in pretty straightforward fashion to me; Nolan is careful enough with his storytelling and visuals to clearly delineate each layer of the dream world(s) in which the story unfolds. I can appreciate the argument that Nolan doesn’t go far enough in depicting his dreams, that they’re too literal and normal (I have some fucked up ones myself, including one the other night that David Lynch might’ve envied), but on the whole I must admit to being impressed by the extent to which Inception lived up to its hype for me; it’s the sort of big fucking blockbuster I can almost forgive Hollywood for. Hell, I didn’t even think it was too long at 148 minutes, and THAT’s a rare thing these days…