Into 'Brokeback Mountain' at all, guys?

LMAO.

Review: The Kingdom

With targets as big as terrorism, American dependence on Arab oil producers, and the clash between Western and Islamic culture, it's so easy to go overboard that Peter Berg's The Kingdom triumphs by being a nuanced, if somewhat predictable, thriller.

The story involves a team of FBI agents going to Riyadh to investigate a major terrorist attack against a U.S. expatriate compound. Naturally, they're gung-ho types who take matters into their own hands while higher-ups play politics, but they're more smart than wise-ass, and their interaction with the local authorities is complex and interesting. Amid action would probably embroil all of world politics, the movie wisely stays focused on the FBI team and its ally in the Saudi army, Colonel Ghazi (Ashraf Barhom). Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper, in particular, make them worth our attention for 110 minutes. Jennifer Garner is also strong, and Jason Bateman, in one of The Kingdom's smart touches, is not as far from "Arrested Development"'s Michael Bluth as you might expect.

Visuals are a highlight of any project by Peter Berg, who brought the high-school football drama "Friday Night Lights" to TV as one of the best-looking series ever. (FNL fans will recognize Kyle Chandler as a distraught FBI agent and Minka Kelly in a more fleeting role.) All the touches that have made the fictional Dillon, Texas, look so good are here: handheld camera, shallow focus, extreme closeups, dialog shots in profile, face shots dominated by out-of-focus objects, characters shot through doorways and other frames, and near-silhouettes against blown-out sunlight. Naturally, the action sequences in The Kingdom are tailor-made for those edgy effects, but what makes Berg's work stand out is that he uses them in quiet in-between sequences too, creating a documentary feel.

The Kingdom isn't a profound film, but beyond a bit of exposition early on, it's more subtle than the average Hollywood production. Much of this is thanks to Foxx, who expertly balances the rage and intelligence in his character. Like Berg's signature camera angles, The Kingdom attacks its subject matter with a masterful series of glancing blows.

New fansite for Mayday

One of the best things about being a fan of a foreign band is meeting other fans from all over. Mayday, it turns out, has quite a few fans in North America and even some in South America. So some friends and I set up a central English-language site (some Spanish content coming later) for fans on this side of the world. Those diehard fans in Asia are welcome too, of course. We have a number of plans for site content, but the first step was to set up a forum. So for any Mayday fans who visit this site as well as MaydayBlue, come join the discussion!

Quick take: The Host

Any of those people who said only America really knows how to make special-effects action blockbusters need to see the South Korean monster flick The Host. Uh, OK, I just did. And I'm amending my superpatriotic spiel by saying America's still the king of incredibly large-scale special-effects action blockbusters. Because The Host is not only thrilling, suspenseful, and pretty darn realistic-looking, but also extremely well-written and funny from top to bottom and all around. Not like, they had to put in some jokes and they were actually funny and nicely distributed throughout the movie, but like, top-notch slapstick and character comedy. Add in a quest to keep a family together, some touching observations about the human condition, and some pointed political satire, and you have far more than a monster movie. Update: And, as Tony points out, there's an American element to The Host, too. The visual effects were outsourced to the U.S., done by a company in San Francisco. So it brings together the best from both sides.

A gravity-free giant glass pearl

A movie by one of my favorite directors, Tsai Ming-Liang, has the same title as an album by one of my favorites bands, Mayday. I was thrilled to learn a few years ago that this is not a coincidence. Both Mayday singer-songwriter Ashin and I are big TML fans. It was a double pleasure a few weeks ago to learn more about Ashin's film-buff life and read it in a blog entry that shows he can write prose as well as lyrics. (It's written in Chinese; I read a translation. But check out the link to see his photos.) This is Ashin's take on Universal Studios Hollywood, which he visited while on tour last month:

"In a corner of the city near the mountains, people have built a glittering, ornate amusement park. Ever since I was young I’ve really liked the idiom, “grotesque and gaudy (光怪陸離);” it’s the finest praise I can give it.

"Brilliant and dazzling, illusory and strange, like in this weekend’s average amusement park, ignoring gravity, ankles leave the earth.

"Thinking back on when I was a student, I would often head off by myself to the movie theater, determined to see independent films from all over the world, especially ones full of Third World, unusual emotions. I’ve always thought Hollywood films to be shallow and overly sweet; only the sort of completely angular, craggy production can give me a fierce shock.

"But, but, as I get older, actually I’m enjoying watching special-effects-filled Hollywood movies more and more, the more special effects, the better. It could be that there’s already too much reality in life; being able to make people happily speed through an illusion, really is a kind of good deed.

"If you call those independently produced films sharp crags, then those special effects films I liked later are colored glass pearls, rounded, luminous and worldly perfection -- as you leave the movie theater you absolutely won’t be carrying with you anything to trouble you.

"In the City of Angels there is just such a glass amusement park, a super movie theater, a grotesque and gaudy model paradise. It packages you up in a gravity-free giant glass pearl; everyday everyday, people are here heartily and playfully dreaming.

"A revelry like there is no tomorrow; it’s so good."

The translation is by Meredith Oyen of the Mayday fansite One Day In May.

Reviews: 3:10 to Yuma

Westerns will never die as an American art form because of what they say about the classic American themes of forging into the unexplored, building civil society out of chaos and grappling with wildness both external and internal. But it turns out that last weekend's opening of James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma was the first wide release of a "traditionally gunslinging Western" since 2003, according to Box Office Mojo. So it's both heartening and dismaying to see Mangold remake Delmer Daves's fine 1957 film.

The original is a deeply psychological work based on an Elmore Leonard story and steeped in the social order and film style of its era. Shot in stark blacks and whites, it raises the question of an average farming man's responsibility in serving justice and maintaining order. Dan Evans (Van Heflin) grudgingly agrees to deliver captured outlaw Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) onto a train as his fellow criminals look out for their boss. Along with the social pressure to help out in a region with few lawmen, there's a countervailing theme of class conflict as the struggling Evans is pursuing Wade for a promised $200 from a stagecoach tycoon.

But that's essentially all that's going on in Daves's Yuma, a film that takes dead aim at its subject matter. It's a talky movie that keeps moving thanks to well drawn-out suspense. A large chunk of its 92-minute running time is taken up by a battle of wills between the two men in a small hotel room. For almost the whole film, there are just a handful of shots fired.

As a movie of its time, the 1957 Yuma has its flaws. The screenplay is a bit stilted at times, its characters look suspiciously well scrubbed, and it doesn't reflect the ethnic diversity of the late 19th century Arizona territory. But after all, at its heart it's a stylized picture. Its abundant energy radiates from Ford's subtle, complicated performance. His Wade is not far from being a pillar of frontier society but has a chilling streak of pure self-interest just beneath the surface. The way the story plays out between him and Evans says something about how men may really have survived in the bleak world of the Old West.

The remake by Mangold, an excellent director of actors who made the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and the 1995 indie gem Heavy, gives us more things to look at but less to think about. Mangold opens with Evans (Christian Bale) being woken in the night by debt-collectors burning his barn, and the action rarely lets up from that point. The new film, 25 minutes longer, is as crowded and noisy as the original was empty and silent.

It's a good artistic strategy to adopt a different tone and style in a remake, but after abandoning the single-minded focus of the 1957 film, Mangold fails to deliver anything nearly as eloquent. What we get is repeated catharsis rather than growing suspense, and in place of Daves's abiding Hollywood hope there's a grimness that feels no less artificial.

Mangold's Yuma isn't a truly dark Western like The Wild Bunch or Unforgiven. Its characters may be desperate and its towns and camps lawless and dirty, but it just builds up to more death, not an overriding sense of doom. There are more references to the Bible in this version, in one example of more accurate historical detail, but it's nothing more than a detail. Characters torture and kill either gratuitously, justifiably, or both, but mostly in the service of spectacle. Self-interest and revenge dominate, while the quest for justice and order fades into the background. It's Grand Theft Stagecoach, with the doggedly sane Evans cast in with an unlikely number of sadistic weirdos.

Despite a screenplay that gives him less to work with than his predecessor had in the role of Evans, Bale gives a stronger performance. It's excellent naturalistic acting, where Heflin's was a workmanlike Hollywood turn. But Russell Crowe is no match for Glenn Ford. His brash, snickering performance is entertaining but lacks the subtle menace beneath Ford's soft-spoken charm.

Mangold and company do inject some physical realism left out 50 years ago. Faces are dirty and sunburned, towns are half filled with tents, and bits of dialog give an historical context that was missing in the earlier film. But their attempts to go beyond the white-male-centric storytelling of the original leave a bitter taste: We get a silent Mexican sharpshooter, Indians who kill for pleasure, startled Chinese railroad workers who just try to get out of the fighters' way, and one black man killed in a shootout. (The portrayal of the Chinese is also historically inaccurate. There would have been no children and scarcely any women in their railroad camp. And a foreman there says the Chinese are lazy and he'd rather have "negroes" on his crew. After the Chinese had started working on the railroads, bosses and foremen no longer thought they were lazy, and white males in the late 19th Century West overwhelmingly opposed the introduction of African-American labor.)

Maybe every generation gets the Westerns it deserves. The 1957 Yuma captured the mood of a post-World War II, Cold War nation that policed the world. After Zapruder, Vietnam, and Taxi Driver, that approach could only play as anachronism. But if it takes a bloodbath to evoke our own time, we would be better served by one that had more to say.

The Graduate was a Christmas release (?!)

Pair this item with the one below and my movie tastes might seem a bit strange, but I'm setting aside two other entries in the works to put up something very timely for once. It's the 40th anniversary of The Graduate, and we read about it in the San Francisco Chronicle today not because the movie premiered on 9/11/67 (as inappropriate as a fall release of this ultimate summer film would have been, it turns out it actually premiered on Dec. 21) but because a new DVD comes out today.

Given its record, the Chronicle's an unexpected place to find such a deep, insightful film commentary. Yet when it comes to The Graduate, which I've seen a dozen or so times, my general feeling is, Never Trust Anyone East of Needles. Because although it was made by a New York stage director and co-written by a New York humorist (Buck Henry) who once said in a sneering way that it's about "the Los Angelization of America," whatever that means, to me it's one of California's home movies. It just happens to be one that takes place at the meeting point between East Coast notions of class and social order and those of our shores.

I first saw The Graduate on TV in suburban Southern California in May 1979, a few weeks after attending the Santa Barbara wedding of my Baby Boomer cousin (who, I learned later, saw The Graduate over and over again on its initial release). My sister had recently started at Berkeley, with the accompanying family drives up and down the state. So you can see where it would resonate. America's film of the moment of 1967 (really 1968) was my film of the moment of 1979. But it also encapsulated nearly everything I knew or faintly remembered about the late Sixties. I'm surprised to read that there's only one direct reference to antiwar protests, because to me it seemed like it was all about that. Credit the echoing cultural conversation about The Sixties that filled the Seventies (not a bad idea for a book, actually) and the key role of that film in it.

I'll put this out now, though I feel there's more to say. But I'll just add, it was at that moment in 1979, despite the 19-inch screen and the commercials, that I learned I loved movies.

Review: The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveras

Filipino-American author Han Ong once wrote that at first hearing, the Tagalog language would seem to require more the services of an ornithologist than of an interpreter. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveras, an independent film from the Philippines recently released on DVD, has excellent subtitles but may have you looking up the number of that tropical bird-watcher you used to know. It's small, soft, colorful, and delicate on the surface but fiercely strong underneath, and it frequently takes sudden cinematic flight.

Like Maximo himself, a 12-year-old boy on the streets of Manila who seemingly couldn't survive as a prancing transvestite but somehow does, Blossoming triumphs despite its tricky premise of a romance between Maximo and a no-nonsense beat cop, Victor. Much to its credit, the film neither judges their relationship nor overlooks its problems. Both Maximo's family and Victor's precinct mates know something's going on, and they're doubly ostracized because Maximo's father and brothers are small-time criminals at odds with the new precinct captain. The movie makes obvious allusions to Romeo and Juliet and plays on the sort of melodramas that Maximo and his friends act out in an early interlude, but at its core it's a subtle and sophisticated film.

Shooting digital video in a real Manila barrio and using a lot of what looks like documentary footage, director Auraeus Solito has created a work that looks as if it rose up from the gritty streets by itself. Some of the night scenes are awash in digital noise from the attempt to shoot in very low light, but that usually accentuates the naturalistic visual style. The two lead performances are excellent, though no one else is spectacular. Blossoming's very flaws make it more vibrant, while its treatment of the potentially overwrought subject matter ultimately is subdued and mature. "Gay movies" with larger budgets and bigger names would benefit from its intelligence and emotional truth.

Quick take: The Good Shepherd

Last year's Matt Damon spy movie, The Good Shepherd, has one big thing in common with the one currently in theaters, The Bourne Ultimatum. They're both about the personal costs of doing the dirty work for one's country. But where Bourne tallies up that cost in graphic detail, Shepherd accounts for it one word of dialog at a time. Make no mistake, this is a well-acted and mostly well-crafted film. It's also smart, parsing the ideals and grim necessities of mid-20th century American foreign affairs without the naivete of typical Hollywood movies. Shepherd is worth two hours and 48 minutes of your time if the Bourne movies and Breach left you wanting even more. But as you hit Play, keep in mind that it's not a thriller, it's an informer.