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Jan. 07, 2009 - Issue #690: The Play About The Baby

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Beyond HollyEastwood 

Brian Gibson / brian@vueweekly.com
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Somehow in the past twenty years, Clint Eastwood pulled a kind of reverse John McCain, moving from mainstream star to respected maverick director. But was he ever such a renegade, do-it-himself visionary? Unforgiven didn’t take the Western into such wild new territory, Mystic River got muddy with clichés and Million Dollar Baby jabbed out some hokum and sucker-punched Hilary Swank’s character. As Gran Torino opens and Eastwood, playing the American-individualist to the end, echoes his “Make my day” with a rasping “Get off my lawn,” here’s my nine-point wish-list for 2009 and beyond in cinema, looking for a New World populated by more than just veteran stars’ faux-indie projects.

  1. Daring films from directors teetering between mainstream and cutting-edge. Rather than falling back on formula or the usual persona (see Eastwood in Gran Torino), maybe an established name could just go out on a limb? The Coen brothers have been struggling with their own scripts (at least A Serious Man, due later in the year, sounds more personal, as it’s based loosely on their Minnesota Jewish childhoods). Terry Gilliam went intriguingly dark in the Saskatchewan-shot Tideland, but his Faustian fable The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Heath Ledger’s final film, though it was finished with a revolving cast after his death) is likely to pale next to his earlier phantasmagorias. Scorsese’s Ashecliffe, based on Mystic River author Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island, will likely be another bloated, late-career epic.

    Will Wes Anderson and Spike will err on the side of caution or go for it all with their kids’ book adaptations, Dahl’s The Fantastic Mr Fox and Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are? Maybe it’s up to the always off-kilter Werner Herzog (whose war picture Rescue Dawn was strangely safe) to take us off the rails, with Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the seemingly unnecessary sequel to Abel Ferrara’s scuzzy film.
     
  2. Poor people. Gran Torino’s at least presciently set in donut-hollowed, Rust-Belt Detroit, Ground Zero for the auto bailout. Now’s the depressed time for seeing actual working-class folk in mainstream movies. Downturns past, people may have preferred escapist fluff and high-class fantasies, but that’s also what they got sold, and what’s been sold even in good times (from Disney dogs with bling to sets out of Martha Stewart), so who knows what’ll get our box-office engines and political consciences revving until we actually see some two-job-working, repo-battling, debt-swamped friends and neighbours on the big screen, no larger than life?
     
  3. Racism. Not the sort-of, kinda, Falling Down, woe-is-whitey, “reverse” stuff, like in Lakeview Terrace or Gran Turino. Real racism. You know, the bigotry that’s still around—and not just against black people in these post-9/11 times—even though Obama’s finally made it the non-White House. Or do we all want to believe that abuse against Arabs only happens in documentaries about overseas prisons?
     
  4. Actress comebacks. A shrivel of critics (yes, that’s the name for a group of us) will blather on about actor comebacks—Eastwood’s or, more obviously, Mickey Rourke’s triumphant return in The Wrestler (out next week in Edmonton)—but what about the praise of older women (not just Meryl Streep), or simply returning women? Marisa Tomei makes it back in The Wrestler (on a stripper’s pole). But what about out-of-type, complex, fully-dressed comebacks for, let’s see, Linda Fiorentino, Debra Winger, Bridget Fonda, Winona Ryder, Gina Gershon, Meg Tilly, Rosanna Arquette, Juliette Lewis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Theresa Russell, Ally Sheedy, Melanie Griffith, Molly Ringwald ...
     
  5. Less focus on individual actors. Now, once we get past talking about individual comebacks, can we get past the focus on actors? Even The New Yorker builds up the cult of personality, waxing articulate about this idol’s smolder or that starlet’s expression. There are lots of people who put together a movie, not least the writer and director, before the cast comes in and tries to do more than just speak lines.
     
  6. Better distribution/availability of films. In February, Metro’s thankfully showing Lukas Moodysson’s astonishing, gut-wrenching Lilya 4-Ever, which never reached Edmonton back in 2002 and still hasn’t been released on Region 1 DVD. But the list of films that don’t make it to screen anywhere or shelves in small-market cities is ridiculously long. Why are we subjected to C-movies in multiplexes or hack sequels in discount racks when Hana Makhmalbaf’s deft Afghanistan allegory Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame still hasn’t been seen over here, or Sang-soo Hong’s Woman on the Beach, number one on an indieWire poll of homeless films, was finally picked up in the US but not here? At least the DVD of the latter can be ordered online now, but the same can’t be said for the Dardenne brothers’ masterpiece Rosetta, which came out way back in 1999. If there isn’t better distribution for the cream of the foreign and festival crop, why not at least take a webpage from iTunes and offer a top-quality site or online system that lets you pay $4 or $5 for an uncopy-able download?

    Meanwhile, here are some others to keep a surfing pirate’s eye out for: Jiayin Liu’s strange documentary and only film to date, Oxhide (China, 2005); Nick Broomfield’s first docudrama Ghosts (England, 2006), about Chinese illegal immigrants; Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s addiction drama Mainline (Iran, 2006); Bahman Ghobadi’s Kurdish musician tale Half Moon (Iran, 2006); Roy Andersson’s surreal You, The Living (Sweden, 2007); Andrei Zvyagintsev’s brooding rural tale The Banishment (Russia, 2007).

    And we can only hope that Korean Chang-dong Lee’s Secret Sunshine, Brazilian Walter Salles’ slum-soccer story Linha de Passe, Chilean Pablo Larrain’s serially murderous twist on the disco-days, Tony Manero, Argentineans Daniel Burman’s Empty Nest and Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman and Chinese Jia Zhang-ke’s Useless and 24 City get some sort of distribution over here, or they may not even leak onto the small screen.
     
  7. A damn good Canadian movie from a director other than Cronenberg, Egoyan, or Maddin. Someone? Anyone? Who wants to step up here? Or do we have to hope Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is awesome and then temporarily adopt the French director as one of our own just to make this wish come true?
     
  8. More strong films from more female directors. Not Twilight, setting the sun on Catherine Hardwicke’s once-promising career, but Ratcatcher- and Red Road-calibre stuff (courtesy of sadly non-prolific Scottish directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold). There’s The Hurt Locker, a war movie coming from Kathryn Bigelow, Nicole Holofcener’s latest, set in a New York City apartment building and Sally Potter’s fashion-satire Rage. But male-dominated cinema desperately needs far more up-and-coming women helming impressive projects—like Kelly Reichardt with Wendy and Lucy—and the media needs to pay far more attention to them when they screen.
     
  9. The thriving of film criticism in the new media age. As newspapers fold and bylines go online, I hope that film criticism doesn’t just go thumbs-down but somehow goes even further beyond chatty, everyman-snark blogs and gets more rampantly erudite, in-depth, even political. If we want powerful, daring new films to change even a little bit of the world, one or two viewers at a time, critics must add their spotlight to the projector’s flash. V 

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