Jeffrey Nachmanoff is not a household name, and the only movie he worked on you might be familiar with is Day After Tomorrow (screenwriter) although the parts of that film that spring to memory are the special effects, not the script. As writer/director of Traitor Nachmanoff just jump started the wave of serious films that follow the summer blockbusters. The story is tightly constructed right down to major twists that jolt the middle and second to third act breaks. The plot will remind some of Syriana but that's due to the film's attitude about politics and terrorism. One person mentioned that Traitor reminded them of Body of Lies, a Ridley Scott flick nobody has seen, but again that has to do with the subterfuge of government agents and not any actual plot points. Taken on its own terms Traitor provides a serious story and a credible character that allows Don Cheadle to go to town. Cheadle owns this film but gains momentum by playing off the equally excellent Guy Pearce, Neal McDonough, Jeff Daniels and as a Jihadist, Saïd Taghmaoui. Cheadle's Roy Clayton is a cipher of a character and the audience will not be able to figure him out any more than the various agents chasing him. When we first meet Clayton he's selling explosives to the highest bidder. Before long we realize that every agency or group has some kind of mole feeding surreptitious info to their superiors. Traitor pays off with well timed explosions that balances the more intimate human drama that flows throughout. Locations revolve around the world with the climax culminating in a bombing mission meant to disrupt a typical American Thanksgiving holiday. Traitor has a sleek tone thats bolstered by accurate portrayals of its various international players. The terrorists are as human as the FBI agents, a point that makes Traitor more than just a good guy chases bad guy movie.
I became aware of this documentary after it played at The Bayou City Inspirational Film Festival. On the film's website they refer to that festival as The Bayou City International Film Festival. I've never heard of any of them, but likewise they've never heard of me so we're even. Drug Wars mines territory from which most investigative essays would steer clear. The specifics concern gangs and cartels that smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexican border. Interviews include people involved in the drug trade as well as officials trying to control same, in addition to people whose lives have been aversely affected by the violence this scene produces. Archival footage details efforts in smuggling for the last couple of generations. To its credit Drug Wars is never snide about government attempts to coral the problem, although it's also clear that such efforts are in themselves part of a cover-up. Where Drug Wars starts to become long in the tooth is the dramatic recreations that instantly remind the viewer of bad reality television programming. The film's more powerful scenes, like forensic footage of gang violence, are lessened by juxtaposing them next to these obvious recreations. Drug Wars covers areas as diverse as the battles between gangs in Laredo and grade school kids using an addictive knock-off called Cheese. When the film ends with what appears to be an actual mob murder recorded on videotape one gets the feeling that the producers were only interested in sensationalizing their subject to the point of offering the audience a snuff film rather than a balanced expose.
Hamlet 2 is the breath of fresh air after a stifling summer. This comedy works all the way through and the last act provides more laughs than what came for. That's not something that can be said for Tropic Thunder or Pineapple Express. Steve Coogan wants to put on a play with his Arizona high school students to both bolster his failed film actor ego and encourage his pupils to exceed their grasp. Coogan's wife (Catherine Keener) encourages him to write a play. The resulting drama solves the problem of a sequel to a play where all the characters die - a time machine. This also allows for a bevy of historical characters like Jesus. Remember the part of Rushmore where Max presents his theater piece and Kumar Pallana remarks "Best play ever?" The ending of Hamlet 2, where we get to see (a condensed version of) the play Coogan has penned may be the best play ever. It's little surprise Hamlet 2 comes from one of the writers (Pam Brady) who wrote the script and lyrics for the South Park movie and Team America: World Police. Brady co-wrote Hamlet 2 with Andrew Fleming, a writer/director who had a bit of momentum in the 90s with films like The Craft and Threesome, but has been paddling in circles in the current decade with stuff like Nancy Drew. Hamlet 2 just bough him a great deal of film cred. "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" a song from Coogan's play is a bona fide show stopper. Not only does the tune demand a nomination for Best Song, it works in the film as a device that at first shocks but then mollifies Coogan's critics. Up to this point every move Coogan's made has been met with derision by the administration. It's only the intervention of a perky ACLU lawyer (Amy Poehler well cast for once as Cricket Feldstein) that has allowed the show to go on. Albuquerque doubles for Arizona with the film taking advantage of the mountain light. The play within the movie show great technical prowess. Other cast members like Keener, David Arquette, Elizabeth Shue (playing herself), and Melonie Diaz (Be Kind Rewind) are funny enough to occasionally steal the light from Coogan.
Remember the Graham Nash song “Chicago” with the potent lyrics “So your brother’s bound and gagged and they’ve chained him to a chair?” Since this is the 40th anniversary of the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, a city Walter Cronkite described on the CBS News as “a police state,” it’s even more important that people don’t forget the mistakes of the past. The documentary Chicago 10 fleshes out this pivotal moment in history by focusing on the trial of the eight defendants accused of masterminding the Chicago riots. Although their convictions were overturned they were incarcerated, along with their two lawyers, and thus the Chicago 10. All the dialogue from the trial comes from court transcripts. Supplementing this is archival footage of the actual riots, bloody heads and all. Filmmaker Brett Morgan uses animation that evokes the Waking Life style of motion to re-enact the trial with scenes involving the defendants and witnesses and judge. Voice talent includes Roy Scheider, Nick Nolte, Hank Azaria, and Mark Ruffalo, and Jeffrey Wright among others. This footage is seamlessly mixed with news clips and documentary footage from August 1968 to give Chicago 10 a day-by-day account of the events structure. Morgan previously co-directed The Kid Stays in the Picture with Nannette Burnstein. Here’s what’s perplexing about that. Burnstein made a film called American Teen that absolutely sucks (although on a suckage scale it doesn’t suck as much as Death Race) and Teen’s gotten a significant theatrical release whereas Chicago 10 goes straight to DVD (August 26 street date) after making the film festival rounds. Teen studies plastic people living their fairy tale lives in a dry homage to reality television while 10 unreels history that’s so important to the present state of affairs it absolutely demands to be seen. You know which one is the easy lay. Here are some other DVDs that didn’t get the love they deserve the first time around, or maybe there was no first time around. • The Disinformation Company has some of the best agitprop around. Their most effective salvos come from Robert Greenwald whose Outfoxed has been redone as Fox Attacks Special Edition, and contains an hour of added material. Greenwald also assembled The Real McCain. Not so much a movie as a chapter-by-chapter (oil, war, jobs, Iran) talking points response to various McCain clips from speeches and newscasts. It’s not exactly fair and balanced but that’s kind of the point. • Hiya Kids! Contains over nine hours of 1950s Saturday morning children’s programming on four DVDs. Each disc unspools a typical three-hour’s worth of brain candy. How many times did you get up before your parents and sack out in front of the tube for hours? Pay special attention to shows like Rootie Kazootie and Winky Dink. Nothing you’ve seen in your life can prepare you for the surreal sight of puppets behaving badly. Other shows include Sky King, Lassie, Howdy Doody, and Captain Z-RO, many others. • Son of Rambow got a brief release in May and deserves cult status. British set 80s era comedy unites two young outcasts with father issues to make a camcorder version of Rambo. The endearing ending brings up images of Cinema Paridiso in its tribute to cinema while the rest evokes another recent comedy about guerilla filmmakers, Be Kind Rewind. • Southland Tales goes straight to DVD while unstable celluloid burns millions in ad revenue, think House Bunny. ST is the sophomore film from Donnie Darko helmer Richard Kelly. The film was made a few years ago, played at Cannes, got booed, got booted by the studio that made it and ended up with a distributor that released it in a handful of cities. Houston was not one of them. The cast includes Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar and a slew of others. Although there’s a post apocalyptic vibe the then future setting is 2008 L.A. I’m not putting ST in the same boat as Donnie Darko but there’s enough black humor and slick design to warrant attention. • Flakes completes an imaginary trilogy of unrelated films about cereal. I would include the unmade Cereal Heroes where Snap, Crackle and Pop take on Count Chockula, The Road to Wellville (Anthony Hopkins as John Harvey Kellogg), and now Flakes. Zooey Deschanel and Aaron Stanford topline as slackers in New Orleans who work at a breakfast cereal store. Think of a cool one-of-a-kind coffee shop and replace the caffeine with cereal flakes. There’s navel gazing, rock music songwriting, every cereal box you ever dreamt of having the munchies for, and a legal showdown when Flakes store owner Christopher Lloyd sues to protect his intellectual property against corporate malfeasance. This film deserves a queue on your Greencine list and it’s the best work by Michael Lehman since his debut with Heathers.
Some documentaries are easy going as well as informative, but really play better on the tube. A Man Named Pearl is such a docu. The bar has been set way to high after non-fiction films as engrossing as Taxi From the Darkside to Man on Wire literally blow us away with their story and their technique to be lulled into thinking Pearl is anything but a mild diversion. Topiary artist Pearl Fryar began his garden as a form of rebellion when he, a black man, moved into a racist neighborhood. What started as trimming a few bushed accelerated into full blown sculptures that rival anything you might remember from Edward Scissorhands. Nowadays his topiaries grace museums and his tolerance has outlived the animosity that originally greeted him. It's an inspirational story to be sure but the film is quite prosaic. Horticulturists might put A Man named Pearl at the top of their list though.
A possible sign of the impending apocalypse would be remaking a Roger Corman film but without soul, purpose or fluidity. Enter Death Race, a rocket fueled collision of idiotic proportions. The original film Death Race 2000, starring David Carradine and a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone, helmed by Paul Bartel and featuring 70s style gratuitous nudity, was far from a masterpiece yet it was a hoot. The story revolves around a car race that involves killing pedestrians for points. The whole shebang is watched on television. For the remake the story now revolves around a pay-per-view event where the drivers try to kill each other with as much bombast as possible. The radio station bitch from The Box, 97.1, kept offering the preview crowd a cap if they could name the release year of the original (1975) but she didn't even know herself. Actually she might be the perfect audience for this mindless grinding of metal. It would be kind to refer to Death Race as a paycheck movie, what with Joan Allen acting all butch as the prison warden in charge of broadcasting Death Race. "We have 50 million paid viewers," her guard tells her. One of her juicy lines is "Okay cocksucker, you want to fuck with me? We'll see who shits on the sidewalk." I don't even know what that means. Star Jason Statham, as Frankenstein, was just breaking free of this kind of genre filmmaking with his recent The Bank Job, a tasty excursion into caper films, but seems to be backsliding. The director Paul W. S. Anderson specializes in this kind of clash warfare filmmaking (see Mortal Kombat) that epitomizes the fast cutting, no continuity style of action on display. What irony that he shares the same name as one of America's best directors (Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia, Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood fame). Natalie Martine looks svelte but in no way exudes the kind of sexiness that Simone Griffeth bared in the original. Ian McShane and Tyrese Gibson add dumb one-liners and have no motivation other than it's what the script says they must be doing. Anderson bleaches the color so the screen looks even more pulpy than it feels. The other drivers are mere dots on the landscape to be squished. Why is the Russian baddie (Pachenko) named after a Japanese arcade game? With Death Race it's best not to ask.
Any film by Aleksandr Sokurov has my immediate attention. This is the Russian director who made Russian Arc, a film I consider one of the best ever. (Berg says check it out.) Aleksandra stars internationally renown opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya as the titular heroine of the film, a grandmother who visits and wanders through the army outpost of her grandson, himself stationed in Chechnya. Sokurov doesn't get every one of his films distributed, in fact a recent trio of features focused on feared leaders (Hitler, Lenin, Hirohito) has barely played anywhere in North America. Aleksandra might not be the film that instantly converts you to a Sokurov disciple. The anti-war message lacks subtlety. The film wanders like a documentary occasionally pausing to gaze at the faces of young soldiers. The lensing is clean, with sun bleached exteriors and monochromatic interiors (like inside a tank). The sight of the grumpy old lady pushing aside the guards as they try to search her purse mixed with friendly rapport from other troops who are happy to assist her on her journey lends the film a bitter realism. Aleksandra meets a Chechnyan woman her age in a street market and they soon bond, taking a break, going back to the woman's apartment, making tea. The movie isn't heavily scored but when the music creeps in it is heavily orchestrated. Maybe Aleksandra is too obvious by half, but as art house product it's definitive.
