Still Walking

We have all gone to our parent’s house for an afternoon lunch with the family; in fact for some people it is practically a Saturday/Sunday tradition followed throughout the entire year and so to that extent pretty much anyone can appreciate Still Walking through its basic plot.

Hiroshi Abe plays a man who brings his family from the city to meet up with his sister and her family as well as his mom and dad at their parent’s house. The main plot is nothing more than the aforesaid and, surprisingly, it doesn’t need to be. In its simplest sense, the minimalist approach of just watching a mother and daughter prepare lunch together, a father and son straining to find something to say to each other and kids running left and right talking about trivial things is quite entertaining. Perhaps this is so because it strikes a chord in both the past and present tense. There is something strangely familiar about the entire scene, despite the obvious differences in eastern and western culture and watching the children run about has a nostalgic feel to it, transporting me back to family meals when I would play with my brother and sister or cousins in some garden now long forgotten.

The problem with minimalism is that it sometimes leaves one with little to say and Still Walking is a prime example of that very issue. Unlike other films of the same nature, like Jim Jarmusch’s Limits of Control, there is little focus on backgrounds, colors or surroundings. Still Walking is not trying to paint a picture, to the best I can tell, and it feels almost like a glorified high-quality home movie which interestingly enough is exactly how it should be. Kitchens feel like kitchens, bedrooms like bedrooms and space and time never feel betrayed: by the time the characters are brushing their teeth I too felt like I had passed the day with them.

What is unfortunate is that the film betrays itself somewhat, adding on a needless subplot about the family’s coping with the death of their eldest son, Hiroshi Abe’s older brother, who died in unexplained circumstances, saving a local man who visits once a year to thank the family for their son’s sacrifice. In a film that feels so basic, this subplot is needlessly complicated, never really explained, but always present and while I understand that the film was adding a bit of drama, something for the characters to brood over and be at ends with each other about, there was absolutely no need for it.

In the great tradition of less-is-more Still Walking could have survived just as well if not better on more discussions about the existing characters’ daily dilemmas ranging from Hiroshi Abe’s unemployment to his father’s disapproval of his career choice. There were so many small character bits that could have been developed with only a minute or two more of dialogue instead of needlessly adding another character.

And on that note, this subplot brings me back to one of my biggest pet peeves, which I feel obliged to bring up again. A lot of the plot synopses for this film talk about it being a story of Hiroshi Abe dealing with the death of his brother, and it’s not. This is not a film about redemption, forgiveness or healing. It’s a movie about lunch- well, and dinner for the characters who stay for the night. Waiting for anything more will lead to disappointment and I don’t understand why marketing departments, especially in the so-called ‘artsy’ world don’t get this.

Nevertheless, I understand that the film was getting at something; and even though I was unmoved by that fact, I am open to the idea that many might in fact enjoy the little plot addition and to them I say ‘good for you!’

But the bottom line for Still Walking will be if you enjoy stories about family plain and simple. Still Walking is an excellent exposé about people and for that I can applaud it.

Five Minutes of Heaven

When I found out about Five Minutes Of Heaven I was rather excited partially because I enjoy most of Liam Neeson’s work but also because I am of the opinion that we have made more than enough Vietnam/Woodstock/anything-about-the rise-and-fall-of-the-American-Dream-and-its-struggles-of-the-1960s-1970s films whilst completely ignoring the madness which was occurring all over Europe during the same period. One such conflict would be that of Northern Ireland, in which thousands lost their lives due to riots, political killings and, in many cases, senseless murders over nothing more than religious and political intolerance of people who did little else to deserve death than be born. Five Minutes of Heaven is intended to tell one such story.

Jim Griffin was murdered in Lurgan, Northern Ireland on October 29, 1975, shot to death by Alistair Little in front of then eleven year old Joe Griffin, Jim’s little brother. The film is broken into two parts, the first of which was pain-stakingly recreated as much as humanly possible in order to depict the murder as it happened that night.

This first part of the film is brilliant, not only setting a tone and giving a real feel, or at least what seems like a real feel for someone who has never been to Northern Ireland, of the atmosphere that lurked over Lurgan in 1975. Perhaps even more importantly, the understanding of our teenage anti-heroes soon to be murderers is amazingly well fleshed out. The dialogue goes a long way in helping to explain what was going on in their minds, which is all the more powerful knowing that the dialogue was inspired by interviews with the real Alistair Little.

The second half of the film then jumps forward to present day and depicts a fictive scenario in which Jim Griffin and Alistair Little meet in an organized TV interview which is, sadly, where the film then grinds to a halt and begins to fall apart. The idea was good in principle, all of the dialogue again was spliced together using interviews that that been made with both Little and Griffin and the idea of what they would have to say to each other was an interesting one to ask. It turns out that what they have to say is nothing terribly surprising: Little is sorry for what he did, but does not deny having been proud for doing it, and Griffin is torn and full of rage with nothing but a desire for revenge and we all ultimately learn that revenge leads to nowhere and we would all be better if we could learn to let the past go. The theme, though getting old, is not necessarily a bad one, but in order for it to mean anything, an audience needs to know why they should care about the characters.

Most stories have three acts, in which the first sets up the scenario, the second brings the drama to a crest and the third resolves said drama either comically or tragically. The problem, ultimately, with Five Minutes of Heaven is that it only has the first and third act. Where is the second act? What happened between 1975 and 2009? Why did Little repent? How did Griffin, who is portrayed as a man driven by a solitary desire to seek revenge, start and maintain a family during all of this? What happened when Little went to prison?

So many moments of dialogue explained in the second half could have easily been fleshed out into entire sequences that would have given the characters a bit of depth. In such one moment, Little explains what had happened to the Griffin family as a consequence of the death of Jim Griffin, explaining that it is sad because it happens often to the families of murder victims. Why didn’t they show that? I don’t want to sound like a sadist but it is through seeing that kind of suffering that an audience has time to sympathize with a character. If we suffer with Griffin, we see him more as a tragic hero when he starts thinking about trying to kill little than assuming he’s gone completely insane- and believe me with some of the monologue scenes in this film you might well think he has.

Speaking of which, the monologues are something else I have to complain about. They go on forever and I understand that in theory they should allow us to understand the inner thinkings of the characters, here especially Griffin, but I felt like reminding the director that there are other tools at his disposal and if he were so inclined he might choose to use some when attempting to develop a character. Regardless, I don’t want to entirely rip the film to shreds on the issue of these scenes because they did at least show one emotional reaction that I haven’t seen in a movie: random cursing. Seriously, I am persuaded that we all do it but I don’t know anyone who admits to it: being so angry about something in your mind that you just burst out with an obscenity, making you look like a total psychopath to all those around you because they have no idea why you just snapped. Little moments do keep the film from being a total dud to just being not memorable.

In all fairness though, my criticism of Five Minutes of Heaven is only the latest in a long list of reviews that were not moved by the films approach to the troubles of Northern Ireland, save for the paper called Culture Northern Ireland who in fact gave it four out of five stars. I would imagine here that the problem here is that people in the know don’t need all of the extra drama and input that critics like myself feel robbed of in this film. If you lived anything similar to the conflict these men represent, you don’t need their motivations fleshed out because you already know them, perhaps even all too well. Like a lot of foreign films, Five Minutes of Heaven seems to speak more easily to those who understand the subject matter with some real experience in it and after all, the film was made by the BBC first and foremost for people living in Northern Ireland.

And on that note, it turns out that Five Minutes of Heaven was in fact a made-for-TV movie in Britain so how come I had to pay to go see it at the Ritz?

The Burning Plain

So this Friday night teenage America has been offered two films in which at least one of the principle characters represents their demographic field. Naturally, one of those two is Jennifer’s Body which you don’t need me to tell you about if you live on planet Earth and you’re not Amish. Seriously, I don’t have cable, I don’t subscribe to any major publications and I am rarely in places that would have advertising for this kind of movie and still I am already to the point of oversaturation with Megan Fox’s body plastered all over the entire universe in a desperate ploy to make the young and weak minded associate that Jennifer’s Body and Megan Fox’s body are one and the same. Just a quick visit to Fandango or any supermarket attests to this fact.

Really, I don’t get the point, I don’t understand what the obsession is; why all of anyone under the age of thirty seems so obsessed with a Sasha Grey want-to-be with no talent and not a single title of merit under her belt. Besides, every major movie website has already shown that damn lake scene over and over again enough so that it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone what is going to happen.

It is thus not without some irony that I had to chose between a film in which the actress playing the teenage main character is already twenty-three so that people can justify nude scenes of fantasy teenage girls but still be horrified when they read about cases of adult-pubescent crossover relationships, or I could go see Burning Plain, a film in which our teenage protagonist is, well, a teenager.

Guillermo Arriaga’s Burning Plain starts out very much like all the other of films he has written, although most of them were directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which a number of stories begin seemingly unrelated and finished almost entirely interlocked with each other. It is a tried and true method and it is by this point Arriga’s trademark. Guillermo Arriaga’s new story is no exception and it shines primarily because he knows how to tell it so that the climax of each is almost simultaneous, which took me from over an hour and a half of ‘where is this going’ to a blissful realization of the entire story as if it were some kind of divine epiphany. Fair enough that that might be a bit over the top, and I might be a bit thick because I was the only one in the cinema who made an out loud ‘ah’, but for me the entire story coming into light was pleasantly surprising and when all was said and done, it made sense.

All the same, I can not help but complain a little as there were a number of small moments that annoyed me. For example, I always find it strange that one character speaks in one language and another character speaks in a completely different language and the conversation continues onwards as such in a film in a phenomenon I like to call the Star Wars Syndrome. I appreciate that conversations like this exist in Quebec and around my own dinner table but not with total strangers. Most multi-lingual conversations at least begin with ‘excuse me, do you speak…’

Something else that got on my nerves were a few moments in which logic seemed to simply skip the Burning Plain all together. One character drives off in their car and is followed by another character on a bicycle.

Some character development could have been better fleshed out. Again, I can at least appreciate that some of the characters were left a bit ambiguous for the grand finale but there was a lot to be said of each character and they simply don’t get their time in the sun, most notably Joaquim de Almeida, which annoyed me because he is one of the only reasons I even went to see this movie in the first place.

And that brings me to one of the better parts of this film: the acting. Joaquim de Almeida was brilliant for the whole of five minutes he was on the damn screen but made me feel that I got my tickets worth all by himself. I had also forgotten going in that the film stared Charlize Theron, who never ceases to amaze me since the model turned actress is the only one of her kind who actually performs in quality roles as opposed to being a useless bimbo in some Hollywood blockbuster. It turns out that she and Jennifer Lawrence steal the show, and rightfully so because both of them are brilliant.

But what really made Burning Plain shine for me were the moments focusing on the adolescent couple in this movie. While I am sure elsewhere in the city Megan Fox’s interpretation of a teenage school girl is fulfilling the fantasies of many, Jennifer Lawrence and J.D. Padro’s time on screen together felt genuine and even reminded me a little of what it was like to that age with so much uncertainty and the nerve racking experience of one’s first serious encounter with the other sex.

Overall, the film was solid with an ending that sealed the deal for me, which is either because it was well written enough to keep me wondering or because as I said earlier I am extremely thick and only realized at the end what everyone else had much earlier on in the film.

As far as the choice for teenage America, I would suppose that they have made it because I was sadly the youngest person in the entire cinema and my days of being a teenager have long since come and gone.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

There has been a trend since the early 2000’s, in part inspired by 9/11, the War on Terror, the Bush Administration and an economy acting like a vengeful Greek God to compare everything to the late nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies. It makes enough sense in theory, after all there seems to be a comparative point for each of these things: Bush is often compared to Nixon, the economy has been argued to be similarly bear-like and the War in Iraq is often compared to the War in Vietnam. The issues of government conspiracy and acts of terror, have, however, been the forefront of historical fiction in cinema as of late with regard to this trend, which is a shame because most of the films attempting to teach today’s generation to ‘learn from the past’ have been awful.

Steven Speilberg’s 2005 train wreck Munich was perhaps the most discussed, followed almost immediately by the quickly forgotten Tim Robbins film Catch a Fire. Funny enough, up until now, the only retro-reflective film of the genre- if you can call it that- that I have enjoyed has been the little discussed The Bank Job of last year which, despite needing to fill in enormous blanks where history admittedly has no idea what happened, was a captivating story which at its minimum kept my interest. Perhaps The Bank Job did so well at telling the story because it was British and thus like most other film industries has some distance with all the nonsense of modern American story telling.

Which brings us to this year’s installation of the remember-when films The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a German film about the story of the Red Army Faction (RAF), an extremist terrorist group of the communist persuasion in West Germany.

The film follows a rather linear and comprehensive biography of the group from its origins and the inclusion of its main members to the end of what today is known as the German Autumn, whose real life climax is that of the film’s which I won’t state here in case anyone is looking for something to do in the near future.

As a historic piece goes, it works. I am always one to run home after a movie and look into how much of a film was telling the truth, how much was changed for ‘drama’ and how much is simply unknown. In the case of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, the facts are pretty much the facts. It would be hard to avoid throwing in some useless dialogue to keep the story moving, which it does, but all of the main events seem to be faithfully represented with just a hint of real news reels from the period here and there.

I am not terribly knowledgeable on the subject of the RAF and so I am not sure if the characters are or are not faithfully represented in the film, but regardless of if this is true or not, they are certainly the weakest link in the film. The characters are for the most part fleshed out enough that we understand their motivations but I could not help but have zero empathy for them whatsoever. Their arguments were one dimensional and uninspiring. Someone in the film even criticizes this exact fact at one point saying that it ‘sounds good when you’ve smoked a joint’ and while I can not help but laugh at such an observation, it all seems a little too easy and I find it hard to believe that the people involved in the RAF, most of whom were well educated, could be reduced to such simplicity.

The only commentary that even touches on this fact is briefly mentioned by one of the shining stars of the film and one of my favorite German actors (who by the way is Swiss), Bruno Ganz, now infamous as Adolf Hitler in the movie The Downfall and victim to what must be the most overly-abused meme in the history of the internet.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex certainly gives you something to think about and exposes an interesting piece of German history which I think most people, even in Europe, forget. It is a shame because the film does not employ properly all of the potential a true story like this one has to offer. The trailer (again) promises inexistent reflections about a generation growing up after the fall of Nazism, something which is barely a footnote in a sequence of dialogue.

Nevertheless, The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a fresh change from the never ending arguments about terrorism, dealing with the subject as simply something that happens as opposed to shoving one position or another down our throats. The audience is very much left to decide if the action taken in the film was really revolutionary action in the name of an idealistic cause, or the madness of some gun wielding hippies who were simply angry at the world.

Though the film doesn’t really have any lasting power beyond being a good afternoon at the cinema which is bound to provoke some conversation afterwards, it is still a great example of how history has so many moments yet to be explored without the need of re-hashing yet another visit to Woodstock as if that were the only thing post-World War Two of interest in the counter-culture resistance to the man, and for this alone The Baader-Meinhof Complex is commended.