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The Industry Is Us

Fast Food Nation opens with a zoom into a sketchy-looking fast-food burger patty. The shot rhymes with one from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which penetrated into the green grass of small-town America to find all kinds of creepy, crawly activity. But if Blue Velvet suggested there was a dark heart pulsing beneath a happy facade, Fast Food Nation has a much more basic point to make: “There’s shit in the meat.”

Director Richard Linklater and co-writer Eric Schlosser (who wrote the exposé on which the film is based) convert Schlosser’s panorama into a fictional film by creating a cosmos of characters  who allow different entry points into the fast-food industry. After the president of barely fictional corporate chain Mickey’s receives a report that there’s high fecal-bacteria content in his burgers, he sends a marketing executive (Greg Kinnear) to a meat-packing plant in Cody, Colorado, to investigate. Among the employees at the plant are a couple of illegal immigrants (Wilder Valderrama, Catalina Sandino Moreno) dealing with unsafe, unsanitary working conditions. While in town, the exec chats up a teenager (Ashley Johnson) working the counter at the local Mickey’s franchise, who is later inspired to eco-activism.

Fast Food Nation climaxes by sneaking onto the “killing floor” of a real slaughterhouse, where the film captures the whole process of killing, disemboweling, skinning, and carving up cattle. It’s gruesome, but whether or not you’re outraged or inspired to action may be ultimately about the attitude you bring to the movie.

And Fast Food Nation is less of a tract than you might imagine (or maybe than it should be), with Linklater tweaking liberal naiveté when a group of collegiate activists try to “free” a herd of perfectly disinterested cattle and including a ferocious cameo from Bruce Willis as a Mickey’s middle-manager who provides the voice of cynical realism.

This is Linklater’s second feature this year and second unconventional adaptation, following his animated take on the Philip K. Dick novel A Scanner Darkly. The narrative mode of Fast Food Nation is similar to such heavyweight process movies as Traffic (about drugs) and Syriana (global oil addiction), but Linklater and Schlosser’s movie seems oddly anemic by comparison. For all of his strengths — and I think Linklater is one of the very best contemporary filmmakers, with a couple of masterpieces to his credit (Dazed & Confused, Beyond Sunset) — Linklater might be too rambling and genial a director for this material. Fast Food Nation is still highly watchable and highly relevant, but the movie doesn’t quite live up to its material.

At its best, Fast Food Nation — like Schlosser’s book — is about more than just fast food, using the subject as a metaphor for the raging corporatism of American life generally. (One of the most memorable passages in Schlosser’s book had nothing to do with the food industry — it was about how car companies bought up mass-transit systems around the country and shut them down to build more of a demand for automobiles.)

In this sense, the counterpoint to Willis’ free-market proselytizing comes in the form of pissed-off rancher Kris Kristofferson, whose cameo provides the movie’s conscience. He dresses down Kinnear’s corporate enabler, but in a gracious way. No matter how well you sell it, the rancher says, it doesn’t change the fact that there’s still shit in the meat.

Fast Food Nation

Opens Friday, November 17th

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

Borat’s satirical tour finds hatred in America’s heart.

Tracking oafish, earnest Kazakh TV reporter Borat Sagdiyev on a road-trip tour of America, British comedian/provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat is part Don Quixote, part Alexis de Tocqueville, part The Daily Show, part Yakov Smirnoff, part Jackass. The inventive, hilarious 84-minute movie melds pure, uproarious slapstick and boffo sight gags with a vicious, unblinking satire of American lunacy.

Cohen is Borat, an enthusiastic and sincerely anti-Semitic media personality from the “glorious” Eastern European nation of Kazakhstan who has been sent, with producer Azamat (Ken Davitian) and an unseen camera operator, to study American culture for Kazakh state television. He lands in New York, tries to kiss strange men on the subway, and lets a chicken loose. Once settled into a hotel room more luxurious than his Kazakh home, he sees Baywatch on television and decides he must travel to California to meet the lovely creature from the show.

But Borat won’t fly “in case the Jews repeated their attack of 9-11,” and, thus, a road trip is born. The visual humor here — running wild on the streets of New York, washing his underwear in Central Park, taking a dump outside the Trump building, frolicking in a gay-pride parade, swimming in a pool with a bear — is universally funny and compelling. Nothing is as unforgettable as a gonzo nude hotel fight between Borat and Azamat that starts in their room and continues through the halls, down an elevator, and into a ballroom packed with bankers.

But the film’s social critique is most compelling. Some of this is just funny in a very gentle way, as when Borat assumes a neighborhood yard sale is the work of gypsys who have taken over the home and are selling its belongings. There’s a priceless visit to a car dealership where the salesman is so intent on moving product that he’s not flustered by anything his potential customer says. “I want to have a car that will attract a woman who is shaved down below,” Borat says. Without missing a beat, the salesman responds, “Well, that would be a Corvette.”

But at its best and most unnerving, Borat uncovers hatred in the heart of America. By playing the innocent, Cohen coaxes ideas and beliefs out of some subjects in front of the camera that are usually kept safely hidden: Monstrous, women-hating South Carolina frat boys who get drunk and pine for slavery; a rodeo organizer who’s happy to volunteer that homosexuality should be a capital offense.

Somehow allowed to address a rodeo crowd, Borat gets a huge applause when he pledges his support for the U.S. “war of terror” and only a slightly lessened response when he follows that with “May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child of Iraq.”

Ultimately, Borat rhymes strongly with another Movie of the Year candidate, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Both are guided tours of America, alternative State of the Union addresses. Block Party illuminates a generosity of spirit too dormant in recent years; Borat is a comic attack on our heart of darkness, with occasional rays of sunshine peeking through. I prefer the former but think both are valid and definitely demand to be seen.

Borat

Now playing

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Communication Breakdown

The would-be Oscar contender Babel weaves four interconnected stories taking place at three different points on the globe. In Morocco, a goat herder gives his sons a newly acquired rifle to shoot jackals, while an American tourist couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) is traveling by bus down a dusty, rural road when a bullet pierces the window and wounds the woman. Back in San Diego, the couple’s children are taken by their Mexican nanny, an illegal immigrant, across the border to Tijuana to attend her son’s wedding. And in Japan, a deaf-mute teenager — the daughter of the man whose gun was used in the shooting — struggles with the lingering wounds of her mother’s suicide.

Babel was directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose 2000 Mexican debut, Amores Perros, was a similarly twisty blend of interrelated stories and whose follow-up, the Memphis-shot 21 Grams, was temporally disjointed to the point of impenetrability.

As the title indicates, Babel‘s primary subject is miscommunication across cultures, but fitting its epic ambition (and, at 142 minutes, epic length), it touches on any number of globalization issues: immigration, terrorism, class disparities, the prominence of American media and its concern with blond, white women in peril.

There’s a critique of American arrogance and solipsism running through Babel: After Blanchett’s character is shot, her rescue is complicated by poor communication between the American and Moroccan governments. The U.S. State Department won’t let her be picked up by a Moroccan ambulance because the Moroccan government won’t acknowledge the shooting as an act of terrorism, even though it isn’t at all clear that’s what it is. This forces her to wait for the arrival of a U.S. military helicopter in a dusty hut, her wounds being stitched by a village veterinarian. Days later, a world away, the same woman’s daughter sits in a car gazing out the window at Tijuana, telling her nanny, “My mom told me Mexico is really dangerous.” “Yes,” says the nanny’s nephew, played by Gael García Bernal, “it’s full of Mexicans.”

But Babel also seeks to acknowledge things that link people across cultures, finding common themes among its many stories with unexpected subtlety: parent-child relationships, drug use, familial loss.

Babel has been compared to last year’s surprise Oscar winner, Crash, which also weaved multiple characters around a big-picture look at How We Live Now. But Babel is not as facile. It’s less of a tract and, as a result, less likely to take home a gold statue.

It’s also less likely to thrill more-discerning filmgoers. There’s one sequence where the deaf-mute Tokyo teen gets high on pills and whisky in a public park. She and her friends play in the fountains, ramble through the city streets, and ultimately enter a disco to throbbing music, the sound bobbing in and out as the film oscillates between her perspective and that of the world she inhabits. This is a good scene but not a rapturous one. It’s easy to sense how you could be swept away in the hands of a more dynamic filmmaker, a Wong Kar-Wai, a P.T. Anderson, or a Quentin Tarantino. In Iñárritu’s hands, the scene underachieves before finally landing with a thud in a distracting blur of strobe light.

Babel‘s reach exceeds its grasp. It makes much better use of similarly complicated thematic and visual material than 21 Grams did, but, like that underachiever, it’s not as significant as it wants to be.

Babel

Opening Friday, November 10th

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Death of a President

After an absorbing opening act, Gabriel Range’s documentary-style fantasy about the 2007 assassination of President George W. Bush succumbs to narrative torpor; in a telling, unintentional irony, the film’s gradual decomposition into symbolism and senselessness mirrors the problems all revolutionaries face when they seek and achieve violent regime change: Namely, what do you do once the bad guy is gone? Oddly, this strange provocation is most successful in its sympathetic treatment of G.W. Bush as both a public figure and a homespun mythological presence; once the president dies after giving an RFK-like final speech, the rest of the film doesn’t know whether to explore the political aftermath of the event or expose the suspected assassins. It ends up throwing up its hands in confusion.

For more rigorous and outrageous political speculation, seek out the DVD works of pseudo-documentarian Peter Watkins. Or better still, pick up Sinclair Lewis’ vitriolic 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, which addresses the major flaws of Death of a President succinctly: “In America, which had so warmly praised itself for its ‘widespread popular free education,’ there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted — indeed knew about so few things to want at all.” This film doesn’t help matters.

Now playing, Palace Cinema

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Film Features Film/TV

Evangelical doc preaches a scary sermon.

The first children we see in Jesus Camp, a documentary about youth ministries on the far-right end of white, evangelical Christian culture, are adorned in camo and war paint. They’re performing a play at the Christ Triumphant Church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, promising their God, “I’ll do what you want me to do,” and readying themselves to “radically lay down their lives for the gospel” as children “in Pakistan or Palestine” are doing for Islam, in the words of Pentecostal youth minister Becky Fischer. War analogies, we quickly learn, are legion in this little corner of the religious world.

Fischer is Jesus Camp‘s hero or villain, depending on your perspective, and though filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (whose Boys of Baraka screened in Memphis earlier this year) have apparently made pains to get their film shown in evangelical-friendly communities, if you’re seeing Jesus Camp at all, you’re probably preconditioned to see Fischer as a villain.

Though it may not want to be, Jesus Camp is an art-house horror movie for secular liberals, a bias telegraphed by the odd, unnecessary inclusion of Air America radio host Mike Papantonio in a framing device that gives urban libs a mirror to reflect their horrified reaction back at them.

At the heart of the movie are Fischer and three elementary-aged kids who attend her Kids on Fire summer camp in North Dakota, where kids clutch tiny plastic fetuses, pray about (not, crucially, to) a cardboard Dubya, and sing and dance to evangelical hip-hop (“kickin’ it for Christ”) at sessions that evolve into admonishing, tear-filled confessions. (There are, apparently, “no phonies in God’s army.”)

One boy, Levi, is an aspiring pre-teen preacher who was saved at age 5 because, he says, he “just wanted more out of life.” Tori is a Christian heavy-metal fan, first seen break dancing in her bedroom. Most compelling is Rachael, a mousy, excitable, and preternaturally self-possessed 9-year-old. She explains that she’d like to be a manicurist because it seems like a great opportunity to proselytize to the unconverted all day.

Jesus Camp likes these kids, and you probably will too, even as Rachael strolls up to strangers at the bowling alley or on the street to attempt a conversion. And because you like them so much, it’s painful to watch them manipulated or discouraged from thinking. It’s rattling to watch small children coaxed into tears of religious ecstasy over matters they can barely understand. And it’s infuriating to watch a kid as bright as Levi being home-schooled from a book called Exploring Creation with Physical Science and learning that creationism provides “the only possible answer to all the questions” and “science doesn’t prove anything.”

Which is why, though Ewing and Grady might like their film to be an evenhanded examination (and, if so, why spike it with monologues from an Air America host?), it’s really an exposé — shoddily filmed and poorly thought out but helplessly riveting.

Jesus Camp

Opening Friday, November 3rd

Ridgeway Four

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Film Features Film/TV

Keeping Up Appearances

I’ve always had a loyalist’s fondness for the English decision to have both a prime minister and a royal head of state. It seems to make a ton of sense: The prime minister takes care of the ugly business of politics, and the king or queen ensures a regal and dignified image to the rest of the world. Such a system might improve American politics. A split role definitely would have helped Bill Clinton at home during his presidency, and a split role would certainly boost George W. Bush’s international popularity. Of course, this ain’t England. So an examination of the uneasy truce between the English head of state and the English symbol of state is best left to director Stephen Frears, whose new film The Queen is one of the finest fall releases.

I’m pretty clueless about English royal history, so I’m not sure whether other American viewers will find the premise of the film flimsy. But the setup pays off handsomely. The Queen begins in the spring of 1997, when Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) ceremoniously receives newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen). After an awkward conference — Blair and his wife favor “modernization”; understandably, the royal family seems just fine where they are, thank you — the narrative flashes forward to the death of Princess Diana on August 31st of that year. As the queen and her family resist Blair’s image-savvy counsel, the royals gradually realize that their true enemy is the same ravenous media culture that devoured “the people’s princess.”

As Blair and the queen negotiate these unprecedented circumstances, Frears emphasizes the class differences between Elizabeth and the new PM. Blair conducts his business on a cordless phone in a study cluttered with paperback books and domestic detritus, while the queen receives the prime minister on a rotary phone surrounded by walls of hardbound books. Blair steps among childrens’ toys and electric guitars as he negotiates with his wife, while the queen marches everywhere with purpose; even her obedient corgis trot along at a princely clip.

But Blair knows where the public heart is and that the great force that unifies queen, prime minister, and British citizenry is television. The royal family watches the news with increasing dismay, whereas Blair’s moves to protect the family bolster his own public image. The presence of continuous television coverage and media scrutiny also leads to some fascinating rhymes within the film. One suggestive shot of Elizabeth alone in thought on the banks of a river rhymes with an earlier paparazzo photo of Diana contemplating the water beneath her from the diving board of an expensive yacht. And the opening sequence of the film, where the queen sits for an oil painting and muses about “the joy of being partial,” is evoked again as she “sits” for her televised address to the British people about Diana’s death.

Mirren is extraordinary throughout, and she controls the last third of the film; her palace-side mingling with Diana’s mourners unearths unexpected feelings of heartbreak and compassion. But as she assures Blair in the film’s final minutes that his moment of public excoriation will come, she emerges bitter yet triumphant. How apt for this neoclassical filmmaking gem to side with tradition over modernization as well.

The Queen

Opening Friday, November 3rd

Studio on the Square

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Film Features Film/TV

The Prestige

In what amounts to an imaginative, thrilling, and mildly creepy movie-length version of Spy vs. Spy, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play former magicians’ apprentices in late 19th-century London who become bitter rivals after a disastrous botched trick. Co-written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins), a deft handling of actors and keen sense of pop imagery makes this film superior to the similarly themed The Illusionist in every category. Indeed, The Prestige has more bewildering narrative twists, more fascinating insider information about the magician’s craft (which apparently involves countless cages of dead birds), more surprising double-crosses, more vivid supporting female roles, and more mischievous uses of facial hair than its artier, more ponderous predecessor. As Nikola Tesla, David Bowie cherishes his supporting role as the human MacGuffin around which the main characters orbit. But the show belongs largely to Bale, whose focused monomania causes actors sharing screen time with him to vanish into thin air.

Now playing, multiple locations.

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Zhang Yimou’s familial road movie is a long haul.

My math teacher told me the closest distance between two points is a straight line. In the Zhang Yimou film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, the two points are an old man and his terminally ill, estranged son; the straight line isn’t one, following the elderly gent away from Japan and his son to southwest China as he endeavors to film a mask-opera singer perform the greatest mask opera ever so that he can show it to his son back in Tokyo and be reconciled with him. Warning: This film is more than just geometrically challenged.

Follow me on this one: The old man is Takata (Ken Takakura), a Japanese fisherman whose son, Kenichi, is dying in a hospital. The father and son haven’t talked for 10 years, and Kenichi refuses to see Takata. The dad watches a documentary Kenichi made about a great mask-opera singer, Li Jiamin. In the doc, the singer invites Kenichi to return the next year to film him performing the greatest mask opera, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Sad that his son won’t be returning to China and wanting to earn forgiveness, Takata goes on his trek to find Li Jiamin, in the process encountering one difficulty after another, including language barriers, Li Jiamin’s imprisonment and abandonment of his own son, broken-down tractors, and being lost in a wilderness.

If the film’s plot was just improbable, much could be excused. But Zhang’s direction, Takakura’s acting, and the script all conspire to keep matters from getting any better.

For a man who made two of the most visually beautiful films of the last few years — Hero and House of Flying Daggers — here Zhang is at his languid worst. This is the kind of Zhang Yimou movie where people on roofs are trying to get cell-phone reception rather than fighting off battalions of arrows. As The Road Home proved, Zhang is capable of handling less fantastical material. But at times, Riding Alone looks like a made-for-TV movie.

Takakura is known for his stoic roles, but as Takata he plays his feelings so far beneath the surface the audience is left without clues as to what’s going on internally until it’s narrated, and by then there’s no emotional weight behind the punch.

The film is about the red tape one man erects between himself and his love for his son. It plays out literally as Takakura encounters one hoop to jump through after another to get his precious film of the opera. Riding Alone isn’t a journey into the heart of darkness but rather the heart of bureaucracy, and while it’s intellectually interesting in a recap sort of way, it plays out only as exciting as, well, people talking about their emotions rather than expressing them.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles doesn’t say with a hundred narrated sentences what Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru conveyed in one look and one song.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

Opening Friday, October 27th

Ridgeway

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Film Features Film/TV

The Fire Last Time

Phillip Noyce is an Australian director who established himself in Hollywood during the 1990s with a series of forgettable commercial projects (Sliver, Patriot Games, The Saint, The Bone Collector), but in the current decade he’s taken a hard left turn with a series of smaller movies that deal with global political situations — typically the clash of indigenous cultures and white intruders. In 2002, he delivered two such films, an expert adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, with Michael Caine as a British journalist witnessing American misadventures in Vietnam, and Rabbit-Proof Fence, about aboriginal rights in Noyce’s native country.

Noyce’s newest, Catch a Fire, about the last throes of apartheid in South Africa, fits in neatly with those films. It’s based on the true story of Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke), an oil-refinery foreman and soccer coach who is steadfastly apolitical even as societal tensions flair around him.

Patrick lives in a shanty town adjacent to the Secunda Oil Refinery with his wife, Precious, his two daughters, and a mother-in-law who — much to Patrick’s disapproval — listens to pirate African National Congress radio broadcasts at night.

But the quiet equilibrium of Patrick’s life is broken when he is arrested under suspicion of committing a bombing at the refinery. A government security agent (Tim Robbins), fearful of further “terrorist” attacks and desperate to stop them, has Patrick tortured in pursuit of information, ultimately abducting and roughing up his wife in an attempt to break him.

This experience radicalizes Patrick: He travels to Mozambique to train with an ANC cell and re-enters the country to attempt an attack similar to the one he was falsely accused of before.

Like The Quiet American, Catch a Fire is true to its historical period while emerging as a commentary (intentional or not) on present-day American domestic politics/foreign policy. What is terrorism? When is violent resistance justified? What is the real purpose of torture and what impact does it have not only on the tortured but the torturer? Catch a Fire forces viewers to confront these types of questions, though the gulf between the historical oppression that inspired ANC resistance and the root causes of current terrorism make these questions tricky. Certainly, Noyce doesn’t mean to imply any correspondence between the ANC and al-Qaeda.

Tim Robbins plays a role similar to that of Kenneth Branagh in Rabbit-Proof Fence — he’s not a monster but a normal bureaucrat, a man of his times whose service for a racist government puts him on the wrong side of history.

Robbins is perhaps a bit too subdued, but the film gets a magnetic lead performance from Derek Luke, a young African-American actor who has made appearances in sports movies (Glory Road, Friday Night Lights) but whose most telling performance to date was probably as Katie Holmes’ tender boyfriend in Pieces of April. His Patrick is the kind of role and performance that could catapult Luke into the first rank.

Catch a Fire was written by Shawn Slovo, whose parents were leading white South African anti-apartheid activists who are minor characters in the film. Catch a Fire was also shot on location with excellent period music (both South African and, believably, Bob Marley).

Slicker cinematically than The Quiet American or Rabbit-Proof Fence, Noyce seems to have applied the lessons of his Hollywood work to more reputable material, which could mean a better chance at capturing a decent multiplex audience. On the other hand, this is a movie that goes places and asks questions that a lot of American moviegoers may not be willing to confront right now.

Catch a Fire

Opening Friday, October 27th

Multiple locations

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Film Features Film/TV

Indie Memphis Award Winners

Local filmmakers Alan Spearman and Lance Murphy were the big winners over the weekend as award recipients were announced at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The duo took home the award for Best Documentary (and its $400 cash prize) in the festival’s Hometowner Competition for their film Nobody, and followed that up by winning the Kodak Tennessee Filmmaker’s Award, which comes with $1,000 in film stock. Nobody screens Thursday, October 19th, at 8:45 p.m., with Ron Franklin performing at an after-party at the Gibson Showcase.

The other Hometowner winners this weekend were Just the Two of Us for Best Narrative Feature ($600), Ad Man for Best Narrative Short ($400), The Importance of Being Russell for the festival’s Ron Tibbett Excellence in Filmmaking Award ($500), and What Goes Around … director Rod Pitts for the Promising Filmmaker Award.

In the Soul of Southern Film competition, Joey Lauren Adams‘ opening night film Come Early Morning won Best Narrative Feature ($750); Kubuku Rides (This Is It) won Best Narrative Short ($500); Playing With RAGE won Best Documentary ($750), and Found won Best Animated or Experimental Film ($500).

For more information on the festival, see IndieMemphis.com.