Franz Biberkof has just been released from prison, after serving four years for killing his girlfriend. The first chapter of his story, as its title suggests, catalogues Biberkof’s readjustment to a society to which he’s afraid to reintegrate. It launches into a relatively difficult scene with a Jewish man telling a parable which we take to more or less summarize the next fourteen hours we’ll be watching. This, of course, would be a mistake, as the film points out the second the man’s brother-in-law comes in during one of the most portentous thunderstorms ever captured in film (maybe that should be capital). So he attends to the red light district for a whore, to prove his manhood this side of jail. It doesn’t work of course, and he’s ridiculed. This scene is particularly effective with its carnival-loop of player-piano music streaming in from the bar below.

Nevertheless, Franz is a sweet man, hopeful for the future and generous, but emotional. He returns to his apartment and the murder scene of Ida, the aforementioned girlfriend. It seems not much has changed in his absence, and the landlord welcomes him home with equal parts motherhood, worry and suspicion. Franz attempts to make peace with Ida’s sister by getting her flowers and nearly raping her. There are plenty of hints that the sister and Franz carried on prior to Ida’s death, but it seems more that Franz is invested in re-establishing his manhood with something that is familiar.

Ultimately, Franz runs into an old friend whom he goes drinking with, where he meets a young, impressionable Polish woman who moves in with him, and is instructed by the Berlin police department that as a convict he is not allowed to live in many neighborhoods of Berlin as a convicted murderer. The scene where Biberkof reads off the districts is the most effective and moving scene of the first chapter, as you can see not only the effect on Franz, but on the polish woman and his friend as well. Enrolling with a charter called Prisoner’s Aid allows Biberkof to stay in Berlin, provided he do work for them and check in once a month.

It must be said that the story of Biberkof resembles in more ways than one that of McTeague by Frank Norris. Considered the first “Gothic” American novel, both Alexanderplatz were constructed into monumental films of gargantuan length (McTeague as Greed by Erich von Stroheim). Both are about simpletons, big hearted men found to be in circumstances above their heads. I’m sure Biberkof’s struggle lands him in a metaphorical desert, with something a lot more guilt-inducing than a briefcase of money handcuffed to his wrist. Leave it to the Germans to obfuscate something so pure as a golden tooth outside your shop.

Use this link to find all posts about Berlin Alexanderplatz as they become available.

See all the Fishing with John posts.

See all the Fishing with John posts.

Mulligans, by Chip Hale, is not as bad as its first 45 minutes portend. It eventually gets its hooks into you and you begrudgingly accept that it isn’t Night at the Roxbury. I’m not sure I can pinpoint the problem with gay movies in one little posting – but they’re never any good. And a caveat that I’m excluding major Hollywood efforts from this quest, the likes of Brokeback Mountain, Milk and Philadelphia, which are all good gay movies, but deserving of their own category yet to be formed on this blog: GGMWTGGDATE. Yes – exactly. Good Gay Movies Where The Gay Guy Dies At The End. This is the Hollywood gay movie. Only movies about lesbians have found their way out of the hurky-lurky shallowed dregs of gay movies where Mulligans resides onto the fairway.

Seriously: marvel at all the pained attempts to equate a hole in one and golfing positions with gay sex. Sure, one maybe, but again and and again and again. This movie is so tone deaf that I assumed the two boys were gay lovers at the beginning.* Yet, alas, college homostud Chase is just going home with his straight-strapping bud Tyler. The plot scrub says “two friends from college go home for the summer and one of them makes a mistake that may tear a family apart.” And yet it’s the father that makes the mistake, right? Oh so many years ago. Chip Hale stars in an upcoming short called BBQ; scrub says: “Friends. Grill. Meat. Secrets.”

But okay okay, it’s the dad that makes this ultimately not a virulent spastic self-hatred-encouraging bile fest like Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. Or was that the first one we watched? His character is decently fleshed out and tragic, and the film’s ultimate prognosis is that sometimes in life there are no mulligans. I don’t remember an overwrought golfing scene with father and son talking about 9 woods (aw yeah) and 3 irons (aw yeah) and sand wedg(i)es or putting clubs (come again?), or the explanation of what a mulligan actually is*, so it should be commended on the level of not driving its central metaphor into a sandtrap. Sometimes, little Birdie, there are no mulligans.

* Eugene points out that I wasn’t watching or paying attention during the first 15 minutes, so obviously I didn’t know they were just friends. Apparently I also missed the explanation of what a mulligan is. C’est la vie.

Someday I’ll check out the rest, but in the mean time, I’d rather watch Deadwood or The Wire again.

There’s not much else to the documentary, making the title apropos. His backup dancers are in awe of him, and it’s refreshing to see through the veneer of lunacy he (according to Bubbles) meticulously constructed around his persona. This torch was naturally carried by the media, and became more and more grotesque, in aid by MJ himself, of course, with the bedding of children and whatever exactly happened there.

Not too much here shows the wacky personality – he’s soft spoken and kind, and maybe his demure attitude reflects a level of arrested development, but that’s projection on my part. A reading of a man in action as dictated by the media of his life, the narrative constructed both by him and others which was carnivalesque, to say the least. But regardless of the other passions, kosher or otherwise in his life, you can see that the music is what engages him, drives him and inspires those that surround him.

So what are you left with in the movie? A glut of unappealing men talking about their unappealing perspective – which is fine, often the monologues are entertaining in a kind of gross way. But is there any way these interviews have any particular weight in the study of feminism as the movie suggests to reason this sociological study? Feminism? I guess, maybe, if you’re an undergrad at Sarah Lawrence College but wouldn’t a study of how men are affected by feminism negate the entire premise of feminism? Or has Women’s Studies reached the post meta post land, and thus this kind of thing would be an acceptable basis for an anthropological study (and excuse me, there’s methodology to an ethnographic study? Thank you Dr. Valentine) but it certainly wouldn’t be as unrealistic as the exchange between Timothy Hutton’s teacher and the girl which is just there to be some base justification for the whole ordeal that comes off as nothing more than a base justification and is kind of an insult to, like*, DFW’s writing.

The best monologue in the film is that of Subject #42, who recounts his father’s work as a Washroom attendant of which he’s simultaneously respectful and embarrassed about. It’s delivered with a raw intensity that really works, and maybe it’s because it isn’t at all hurried. I suspect it’s rather faithful to the book, but I honestly don’t remember it at all, and it’s one of the few monologues that’s representatively showcased (Christopher Meloni’s, on the other hand, is laughable in its winking, smirking, want-to-be-bad but is actually bad-ness) by actors and a set, which helps to fill in some of the void standing between the son and his father.
It raises some good rhetorical questions – Dominic Cooper’s monologue about rape is not at all believable or convincing, in part because it’s so loaded toward surprise and is absurdly confrontational. It’s an argument that gives you pause – it’s true, but given so much amplitude I think it loses a lot of its potential. If he were calm and collected and talking about perspective and knowing some thing, I would be more inclined to believe him than if he were hysterical and in my face screaming about how he’s in a better position because he’s been raped and knows what it’s like. That sounds more like post-traumatic stress disorder, which okay, is fine if that’s what we’re after here, but then why is the monologue so shift and loaded toward knocking the viewer on her ass.

And for fuck’s sake, can’t a one-armed stud play the one-armed stud? Do we honestly have to endure the embarrassment of watching that scene?

* This is another thing you’ll notice about his fiction that seems frequently absent from Wallace’s essays or non-fiction writing. Go back

The Hurt Locker is a story, on the other hand, driven entirely by character. There are a few scenes that are a bit familiar involving alcohol and stomach punching but then again, the whole picture is imbued with the sense of showing you something real and fantastically dangerous (or unimaginable) so maybe those familiar scenes are a good anchor for us. What we see vets as “realistic,” but it is utterly psychotic. The film posits in the beginning that, simply, ‘war is a drug’, a simple fact not necessarily cogently backed up by reality, but certainly proved beyond reason within the context of the film. And yet the characterizations are grown throughout, by characters ignoring each other, standing beside each other, and offhand glances. There’s no awkward exposition or backstory beyond a few minor details.

There are, however, two scenes that deserve to be chided. The first is the heroic (and granted, reckless, so its in character) night trip off the base to find a boy’s family and attempt to get some answers as to why he’s seemingly been used in nefarious ways. It’s filmed in a way that’s a little gratuitous in its indulgence to Hollywood (perhaps ironically), with its lone star gunman bashing down doors, triceps ready at a moment’s notice to absorb the kickback of his big gun. So, it’s a little ridiculous, and beyond William James’ accepted recklessness and need for adrenaline, it just doesn’t make much sense. Or it hinges on an accepted sentimentality that is wildly out of context (and smacks a little bit more of something akin to The Blind Side). James’ recklessness better demonstrated at the end of the film where there are more unsavory outcomes with a bit more meat on the bone than that skinny kid has/had/has/had/who-cares.

The second scene, perhaps only because I found it a little difficult to relate to, works a lot better but is still awkwardly raw. When Sanborn confesses that he finally understands what he wants in life, he’s like an alien specimen to James, who already has a family and child whom he finds difficult to disarm. There’s one of those countdowns going on throughout the movie, and this scene happens right around with one or two days left. The countdown gives the movie a shape, since every scene is shaped as a sort of vignette, with its own tensions, characters, bomb-makers, etc, and in that sense each scene is more or less structured like a videogame level where the characters have a goal and an ever-increasing amount of pressure/danger coming their way (with exception to one scene, where the tension mesmerizingly bleeds out of the scene over minutes).

I’m frequently amused by movies that attempt to undercut the “Oh Hey, It’s that guy!” syndrome. In summer movies and those that are bound to Chekovian motifs, you can always spot the bad guy and/or traitor by the famous actor in the seemingly unimportant role (yes, this applies to Law & Order, and only recently that I can think of did Gone, Baby Gone have an interesting slant on it). Here, it appears there’s real Hollywood talent that’s stationed in Iraq, and handled to good effect when, shortly after the first irAqt, the film mildly threatens a more typical plot. There are some “blackwater” type dudes out in the desert with a broken down truck pulling in some guy with a bounty. Kathryn Bigelow throws out all kinds of Hollywood signals about this developing into something, only to let them slowly settle back down into the sand while the audience patiently waits for someone to lose an eye in the whole affair.

And there are some series I remember fondly, His & Her Circumstances, or FLCL (you pronounce that “Fooly Cooly”). But for the most part, I can do without it. So a friend at work has insisted I watch Texhnolyze and has provided me with the means of doing so. I finally put in the first episode tonight and it was baffling. But something about the stories that ABe aligns himself with (or maybe it’s just his pretty drawings) pulls me into this. There’s a characteristic of the animes he’s been involved with: yes, they’re annoyingly abstract but they don’t succumb you to needless explanation – instead, a lot of the images and actions are just presented as, and the rest is left up to you, almost as if it’s a challenge (unwinnable, if you ask me). But there’s something a lot more engaging about watching nonsense when its justification isn’t presented. If you prefer a good example of this in live action, see Mulholland Drive. If you want to see a bad example of this in live action, see Inland Empire. I thought Ghost in the Shell was such a superior version of The Matrix in my first year of college, but am so disheartened by that lengthy gas-bag conversation after the tank scene that I can’t bear to watch it again. That whole scene is imbued with such a sense of sorrow, of an acceptance of a fate that’s resolute – do we really need 5 minutes of un-animated explanation about this? I’m sure the explanation she gives is far more in-depth and interesting if you’re willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, but the emotion of the scene is what’s imprinted on me, not the philosophy. The emotion points a direct arrow to the philosophy. So that’s what Heibane-Renmei (kind of a perennial magic hour anime – it’s like Terrence Malick got a pen almost – at least you can always replace a brown pen when you run out of the color) and Lain and Texhnolyze (at least appears to be) are: the tank scene without the chattiness afterwards.

But the converse of that is: I’ve watched a 20+ minute episode of this anime, and written a whole two paragraphs about anime, and not said a single bloody thing about what it’s about. Here’s the “brief” description of the episode from this site:

In this episode, we learn that Ichise is currently living his life as a fighter in an underground fighting ring. He is incredibly strong and is rewarded for his efforts with a nice whore. She goes kind of crazy and he throws her off during their ‘love making’. As a result, her ‘employer’, Aida, calls up a member of Organ, Isshii, to punish Ichise. Isshii cuts off Ichise’s right arm.

At the same time, we see our first sighting of Yoshii, a member of the Class who has come down to Lux for reasons unknown at this point. When he gets to the bottom of the stairs that connect the two worlds, he meets Ran, a girl from the nearby village of Gabe, which is situated on the outskits of Lux. Ran leads him to the Elder of Gabe where they are soon accosted by a couple members of the Alliance. Yoshii protects Ran and the Elder and fights them off.

We are also introduced to Oonishi, the leader of Organ.

Hm. Really? I think I counted four lines of dialogue in the twenty minutes. Here’s what I took out of the episode: there’s a dude with nice hair, he has sex with a lady, some shit happens, and then they cut off the guy’s arm. There’s something about some guy being a leader, some girl named Ran, and then there are credits which have a song that references something about wearing a white t-shirt.

So here’s the thing: in order to ‘get it’, you need to watch it and then can you only retrospectively ‘get it’. It was the same with Heibane, where all the girls were angels, they came out of eggs, they baked bread. But the pacing was so deliberate and slow, when you eventually got answers to questions like why is it everyone seems so sad and where are the boys, you’re really invested in not only the world and the story, but the feeling. Less so with Texhnolyze I think – maybe because of the pacing, but it seems so intentionally oblique. The world is well rendered – everything looks great, and I have to admit, afterwards, I really wanted to watch another one, but I can’t exactly say why. I tire of the ‘question narrative’ that’s so popular in television, where mysteries are presented in compellingly well-rendered cliffhanger style for the purpose of viewership vs. answers. I think the story telling angle here is more that you’re being dropped head-first into a Sci Fi world with different rules, and instead of explaining everything, you just need to give it the benefit of the doubt for a couple hours. Sure, why not.