Dir: John Woo
2004
Some have joked that “Paycheck” alludes to how John Woo saw this film. They’re probably right. The filmmakers take an interesting premise (from Philip K. Dick, who never gets any respect) and make it exquisitely dull by gussying everything up in cold blue techno sheen and throwing in a pointless car chase. When a solitary (CG?) dove flies out of a door for no reason at all I felt the screen should have read Copyright John Woo 1990.
Ben Affleck plays a reverse engineer who has his brain wiped at the end of every top-secret project he works on. Apparently, he’s very good at this and works at some sort of MicrosoftEvilCorp, who employs him to steal competitors ideas and make them their own (wow, just like in real life!).
Then he is approached by Aaron Eckhart to reverse engineer something so furshlugginerly top secret, Ben will have to have all of three years wiped. Benefit? Ninety million dollars. Sure, erase away.
So, three years later he finds himself with no money, the Feds accusing him of treason, and no memory of what he did except an envelope of random objects that he sent to his future self.
The film remains a run-n-chase, just instead of our hero using his brains to get out of a situation, he has a future self handing him objects. There aren’t too many philosophical conundrums here, just using keys to unlock doors…and the keys are clearly marked.
Uma Thurman turns up to play the girlfriend (Woo’s not very interested in her, or any females, as usual, or the idea of having your lover lose all knowledge of you. It’s interesting that this film came out the same year as Michel Gondry’s near-classic “Eternal Sunshine,” which takes on all these themes and ideas with 1/25 of the budget, but 10 times the intelligence and caring. When will Mr. Dick stop being dicked?
Author: tedmills
Back to the Source: Ian Nairn
Here’s an excellent post over at 2blowhards.com on Ian Nairn. I’d never heard of him until now, but his writings on London apparently would go down very well with the James Kunstler/David Sucher crowd (to which I belong). He was more of a fan of modernism than Kunstler, but still understood the essential truth that people like to live in walkable, friendly cities, not in pod boxes out in the suburbs. And this was many many years ago.
Looks like it’ll be slightly difficult to find some books by him, but I’ll start looking.
Spartan
Dir: David Mamet
2004
The title is correct. David Mamet’s kidnapping thriller is pared down to its essence, with dialog and a plot that doesn’t wait for the stupid people in the audience to catch up. So many thrillers and action films tell you something three times just in case you get it. Mamet will have none of that.
Val Kilmer isn’t my favorite actor, but he’s well cast a Scott, and Special Ops Navy Seal (I think, I don’t pay particular attention to thing like that), a guy who just gets the (bloody) job done with maximum efficiency and never asks questions.
“Spartan” then sets up Scott in a situation where he must question his elders, as others are dying around him. I went into this film knowing nothing except for Mamet’s name and the fact that the film came and went. I can see why it did–most people couldn’t catch up with the film, despite being in a safe Hollywood genre. I also don’t want to discuss the plot too much as I found many of the twists unexpected. The trailer, however, is made for the mouthbreathers and tells you most of the film.
Mamet’s vision of modern politics is of a ruthless and efficient engine that chews up those far and near. And the gulf that separates the soldiers from those that give orders is wide when it comes to morals.
5 Minutes Online
Boasting an impressive roster of hard-to-find films on DVD-R, 5 Minutes Online is another in a series of homegrown companies who are fed up waiting for their favorite cinematic obscurities to be released. The legality of any of this is questionable, but what company is gonna go there for a Mr. T PSA collection?
Myself, I’m thinking that Anna Karina music video film is looking good for $20…
Collateral
Dir: Michael Mann
2004
Shot on 80% DV, Michael Mann’s latest captures the airless nighttime of Los Angeles, and is fairly truthful to the city’s geography (Thom Anderson would approve). When a hitman played by a grizzled-by-GQ hitman enters the cab of tktk (Jamie Foxx) for the first time, they have a small discussion about Los Angeles. Cruise finds it empty and cold; to Foxx it’s his city, and he knows it inside and out. L.A. is the kind of city where a man can die on the Metro line and nobody will notice him for six hours, says the hitman.
He may be right. Certainly there are times in Collateral where major things happen in the streets and nobody is around to witness them. A car hits a road block, flips upside down, and two survivors crawl out, one running off. Because this happens in the Bunker Hill area of downtown, Mann convincingly stages it right in the middle of the road. Nobody passes by. If you’ve ever driven around there at 3 a.m. you can bet Mann’s crew didn’t have to have much security for the shot.
As Foxx and Cruise make their afterhours journey (hitman has a list of five targets, the cabbie is forced to chauffer), Los Angeles unveils itself as a series of tribal encampments that only the in-the-know can visit. Two apartment complexes–one lower class, the other with a view of the city–three clubs, a jazz club, a Mexican dance club, and Korean nightclub out in the middle of nowhere. Mann gets the ethnic make-up and dispersement of L.A. correct here too, even though it’s used for a backdrop.
There’s also something to the fact that Collateral is about a black man unwillingly chauffering around a well-paid white guy as he knocks off people of color. After the first murder, Cruise throws Foxx’s moral panic back in his face: “tens of thousands killed in one day in Rwanda, and did you shed a tear? Did you join Amnesty International? So what’s one dead Angelino?” (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s close). The hitman is a bit of a moral relativist. The cabbie is not. Anyway, I don’t know if there’s much to be made of this or not, but we are made to feel empathy for the victim who is African-American (the club owner) whereas the rest are just cyphers. And of course, the last on the list is none other than the African-American prosecutor that Foxx has in his cab at the beginning of the film. In one way you could see Cruise’s hitman as the white elite coming down into a city of mixed race he has chosen not to understand, and the cabbie’s progression towards someone who will staunchly defend the city for all its problems. The film ends on a different mode of transport–the Metro line, method of transport for those who can’t afford cars.
Am I reading more into this film or not? Your comments welcome.
Photographer Peter Funch
Some photographers just have that gift of making you see something with new eyes. Peter Funch is one of those guys.
Dumbass Daniel
How wonderful is this? 2,000 years ago, Romans had to throw Christians to the lions. Now they go willingly!
MSNBC – Man tries to convert lions to Jesus, gets bitten
TAIPEI, Taiwan – A man leaped into a lion’s den at the Taipei Zoo on Wednesday to try to convert the king of beasts to Christianity, but was bitten in the leg for his efforts.
“Jesus will save you!” shouted the 46-year-old man at two African lions lounging under a tree a few meters away.
The Subways of New York
You may know that I love subways and/or “the underground”. For anyone who’s been to my place, you will see a large framed map of the London Underground that’s been on my wall since 1991. It’s sort of essential to have it nearby, like a talisman of sorts. Here’s a neat little blog entry over on Design Observer about that other classic subway map, Mr. Vignelli’s Map of New York.
Frank Lobdell
The strange art of Frank Lobdell. Kooky, jazzy stuff, like relatives of that Dave Brubeck album cover. You know the one…who’s the painter of that?
John Peel Dead at 65
I’m absolutely stunned. I woke up to the sad news this morning that John Peel died while on holiday in Peru. Just like many of his fans will say, Peel introduced me to a whole new world of music when I was in my teens in the U.K. Without John Peel, I wouldn’t have known about The Fall, or The Smiths, or more obscure bands like Fats Comet, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel, Hypnotone, and (the record I’m still searching for) Colonel Kilgore’s Vietnamese Formation Surf Team.
But what made Peel’s show special to me was not so much the music, but his in between breaks patter. Unpolished but never at a loss for words, Peel was a friendly voice there to guide you through some of the noisy patches of alt-rock. Good at popping pretensions and self-deprecating to a fault, he didn’t try to hide mistakes–like playing a record at the wrong speed, or not knowing when a song would start (“This one fades up a bit” he’d say as the music faded up).
When I had a radio show for a brief period in college, Peel was the model, and his chatty, casual style, like a best friend who couldn’t wait to play you the new records he bought, was quite hard to pull off. You realised it came from years and years of work, total comfort at the DJ station, and a humility that kept his ego in check. For someone who broke nearly every major music genre of the past 30 years, he never wore it like a badge.
I remember his glee over certain records. One was “Sidewalkin'” by the Jesus and Mary Chain. He had just got the single and opened the show with it. He loved it so much, he said that he played it again almost immediately afterwards. Then two hours later he closed the show with it, just like a giddy teenager.
Though I found it hard to listen to him here in CA (even with streaming radio), he is still the yardstick I measure other radio shows by.
After Peel, what else is there?
Goodbye John, you will be sorely missed.