eric brochu | haiku factory

I know I’m a philistine, but some movies just work best chopped up into bite-sized pieces. They might not work great as a whole, but watched in 20-40 minute chunks over the space of a few evenings, they go down a lot easier.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a Japanese documentary about Kenzo Okuzaki, who was a soldier in New Guinea in World War II, where he was one of only 30 survivors of his 1000-man unit. The events seem to have left him a little unhinged, and after 40 years in and out of prison, filled with a burning desire to extract the truth, he sets out to interview the other survivors. The doc unfolds as a series of long interviews with each of the survivors, as Kenzo uses a combination of imploring, cajoling, rudeness and direct accusations. When that doesn’t work, he starts (literally) beating it out of them, leading to the bizarre sight of two old men wrestling around while cops in Mickey Mouse gloves ask polite questions. Piece by piece a story comes out, of illegal executions, starvation and cannibalism, and the very strange Kenzo Okuzaki starts to make sense. In fact, the more you learn about what happened, the more it seems odd how well-adjusted the other survivors are. I think watching the whole thing at one time would be gruelling, but watching one or two interviews at a time, it’s fascinating. It’s not just the story of Kenzo Okuzaki, it’s also a proxy for the story of how Japan itself came to deal with its imperial wartime adventures, and neither story is a happy one.

If TENAMO is too much medicine to take all at once, The Fall is too much sugar. It’s the labour of love of the uni-named commercial and video director Tarsem, made largely with his own money, between paid work. It’s a fantasy emerging from a story told by an injured stuntman to an immigrant girl in a hospital in 1915 California. He tells her the simple story of a group of heroes on a quest for revenge, but filtered through her imagination, it becomes something strange and exotic — an aside about native American Indians becomes confused with the culture of a friend from India, for example. The story owes a lot to films like The Wizard of Oz, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen and The Princess Bride, with a bit of El Topo and Prospero’s Books thrown in. But it also contains some jaw-dropping visuals, incredibly, achieved without the use of CGI. Instead, Tarsem uses art direction, landscapes from around the world, and brilliant cinematography to create some of the most stunningly beautiful images I’ve ever seen.

The only problem is, stunning beauty pretty quickly turns tedious. I don’t know if it’s that you need the contrast of beauty and the everyday, or that it’s just the inability of my imagination to absorb something so rich, but I soon started to feel the guilty aesthetic boredom I feel at art galleries. What I did find, though, was that by breaking it up over several days, and stopping when my interest was flagging, The Fall became a really unique and rewarding movie experience. Actually, I wish I could do that with art galleries — I’d probably appreciate art a whole lot more if I could. Philistine I may be, but if that’s the cost of maximizing utility, I’m happy to pay it.

So far this year, a lot of my most anticipated films have been a little underwhelming. I liked Coraline, Watchmen, Public Enemies, Star Trek and Bruno to various degrees, but I didn’t fall in film-geek love with any of them. I did have an intense fling with Crank 2 — and oh, man, it was awesome — but it was purely physical. But in the past week, I’ve seen the two best movies I’ve seen so far this year.

Funny People is a bloated, beautiful mess of a film by your hero and mine, Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up). It’s about a dying Adam Sandler — woah, let me finish, that’s not even the best part! — who takes on struggling young stand-up comic Seth Rogan as a personal assistant, in an impulsive attempt to both avoid and embrace his loneliness and self-loathing. Hilarious, I know, but trust me, this is a very, very funny movie. It’s mostly set in the world of competitive, ambitious young comedians who consider nothing off-limits in their mission to entertain and out-funny each other, and the dialogue is brilliant. Characters make cutting comments, just grazing a buried truth, and then undermining it with a punchline. Sandler is actually really solid — Punch-Drunk Love solid — and I know we were all getting tired of Seth Rogan doing his Seth Rogan thing, but he manages to give a performance more nuanced and heartfelt than anything I’ve seen form him before. Not to mention a (mostly) great supporting cast of comedians, rivals, girlfriends, girlfriend-comedians and comedian-rivals. The only problem is, Apatow seems to love these characters so much, he wanted to make about three movies with them. And then he did. And then he edited them all into this one. And one of those movies, the one which takes over the last 40 minutes, is actually not a very good movie. But I’ll take a lopsided, ambitious mess over safe and predictable any day.

The Hurt Locker, Kathryn “Point Break” Bigelow’s film about bomb-disposal experts in Iraq, is basically the complete opposite of Funny People: tightly focused, visual rather than verbal, and humourless. It’s also wired as tight as a spring about to snap. The Iraq of this movie is a place where any discarded plastic bag could contain an IED, and any cell phone could be a detonator. Also, another difference: Judd Apatow is going from great flick to great flick. If you had told me last year that the washed-up action director who would make the first great Iraq War movie would be Kathryn Bigelow, I would never have believed you. But great it is. I was shocked when the credits rolled — I couldn’t believe 131 minutes could go by so fast. It could have been another hour long and I wouldn’t have minded.

Actually, though, there is something the two films have is common — they are both about process. In Funny People we see how comedians work, trying material, bouncing it off each other, refining it. In The Hurt Locker, we see how someone goes about disabling hundreds of bombs in a one-year tour, how the insurgents and occupation forces constantly learn and adapt to each other’s technique and style. Of course, in one movie, bombing has a very different meaning than the other.

Much more of a straight-up action-comedy than my favourite Pixar movies, but as a piece of cinema, it’s so well-made, I can’t complain. I’m not sure it’s a movie I’ll be revisiting often, but I still admired the hell out pretty much every technical and storytelling aspect.

So where does it fit into the full ordering of Pixar flicks?

The Incredibles > WALL·E > Ratatouille > Finding Nemo > Toy Story > Up > Monsters Inc > Toy Story 2 > Bug’s Life > Cars.

That’s where.

For a Trek movie, Star Trek makes a pretty good Star Wars movie. It has lots of chases and shootouts and space battles. It has lame, obvious humour, winking callbacks to previous instalments, and meaningless blah-blah about “destiny”. Plus, cute alien sidekicks. All of which I kind of dug in the way I still dig, say, Return of the Jedi.

What it’s missing is the retarded-brilliant worldview of the original series. I never got into any of the later Trek series, but I watched the original series as a kid, and I’ve been rewatching it on DVD over the past year. Gene Roddenberry had a crystal-clear vision of future human society as the ultimate secular-humanist fantasy: a perfect multiracial (and ideologically homogeneous) science-based utopia, free from war and religion and prejudice — a universe where the space-babes are all sexually liberated and everybody is self-actualized up the yin-yang. The best episodes of the original series deal with what happens when our crew of altruists comes into conflict with beings and societies that don’t share their 1960s-liberal values. (The worst involve alien women stealing Spock’s brain.)

Now, I’m no advocate for sticking with the source material: if you’re going to do a remake/reboot/whatever, I’d rather see you pick and choose what to keep and put a new spin on things. But I’m slightly saddened that JJ Abrams felt he had to dumb down a 1960s TV show about a planet-hopping space-stud and his loyal buddies, just because it had a bunch of, you know: ideas. Case in point: the pure plot-device villain. Even the Gorn had a more interesting motivation than Eric Bana did.

All that said, though, Trek is a fun movie, and I really enjoyed seeing new actors doing their own takes on familiar characters. I liked the in-joke of Sulu’s “combat training” being fencing (and the payoff later). I’m glad Uhura finally had something to do other than answer the phone. And how awesome was it to see Simon Pegg as Scottie? If you’re dead set on making Scottie the comic relief, for God’s sake, you’ve gotta cast the Pegg.

How’s this for a premise? Jason Statham falls about a mile from a helicopter and is literally shovelled off the asphalt by Chinese organ thieves who steal his heart for their 100-year-old boss (David Carradine). He wakes up to find he’s been fitted with an artificial heart, and proceeds to tear apart the Los Angeles underworld to get back his “strawberry tart”. Only catch is, to keep going, he needs to constantly charge up by electrocuting himself. I know it sounds like I’m pranking you, but I swear, it’s a real movie. And Jesus, what a movie.

With a premise like that, backed by utter conviction and an understanding of the world apparently formed solely from video games, porn, daytime talk shows and Godzilla movies, Crank: High Voltage delivers… something. I’m not quite sure what it delivers, but it’s something pretty great. You should probably go see it now so that when the inevitable cult forms, you can say you were into it before anyone.