I Never Liked You

There must be something about the suburbs of Montreal that makes a fertile breeding ground for introspective, obsessive, gentle hearted graphic novelists.  Two of my favourite comic strip men live in Montreal – Seth and Chester Brown.  Chester Brown is sadly not as well known as he should be, and although it’s somewhat exciting to look like a geek in a comic book store, I want more people to know about him.  His work is exquisitely drawn and disarmingly honest – whenever I look at the lean lines of his quiet suburban streets my heart aches with the memory of the late afternoon sun soaking the pavements of my own childhood.

I Never Liked You is a memoir of Chester’s early high school years.  It’s my favourite Chester Brown book and one of my all time favourite graphic novels.  Moments of life are captured here in all their awkwardness and difficulty.  Chester longs to tell Skye he loves her, while Carrie, the little sister who lives across the road pines for Chester.  Chester’s mum is struggling to cope (she is schizophrenic, and the details of her illness are drawn in another book, My Mother was a Schizophrenic) and little brother Gordon tries to keep the peace.  All the emotion is expressed in the drawing style and the layouts.  There is plenty of space between the panels, and quite often there is only one panel on a page.  Each panel is a simple black and white line drawing.

In one of my favourite sequences, Chester and the girl across the street Connie go to the movies together.  When they arrive, some boys from Chester’s school are there and they yell out, ‘Hey Chester, who’s the girl?’  In a heartbreaking moment Chester decides to sit behind Connie so the other boys don’t think he is with her.  They sit through the movie in tandem.  A panel shows the light streaming through the projection windows, drawn with gentle lines that flow to the corner of the panel.  Another shows the projectionist through the little windows, taking out the last reel.  Chester and Connie walk home together in silence.  ‘It wasn’t even scary.’  Connie remarks.  At home they part ways in a single little frame set in the middle of the page.  The drawings present each moment without judgement or reflection, the events simply unfold.

I love Chester Brown because he takes tiny moments of his life and turns them into something more.  It’s all the tiny flickers of loneliness, hesitation and bewilderment rendered in a few infintely tender lines.

The Wackness

So I won tickets to The Wackness the other day – exciting because it’s the first time I have won one of those ‘first person to email back wins movie tickets’ things.  I bounced joyfully up to the counter at Nova, where the guy knocked back my free tickets because it was cheap Monday.  Seriously?  The tickets were free, the cinema half empty…  After I acted like a spoilt child about the situation for a few minutes my cinema going companion decided he would just pay for tickets.  Fine.  Nova: 1, Sarinah: 0.

I have one thing to say about The Wackness: totally awesome soundtrack.  It’s a pretty funny movie, shot well with nice colour grading, but the thing that makes it sing is the tunes.  Directed by Jonathan Levine, whose previous feature All the Boys Love Mandy Lane wasn’t released in Australia, The Wackness follows Luke (Josh Peck) around New York as he spends the summer of 1994 dealing dope from an ice push-cart.  One of his customers is the crack-brained psychiatrist Dr Squires (Ben Kingsley) who gives Luke therapy sessions in exchange for weed, and offers him a friendship that is sweet in its honesty and mismatch.  Luke’s heart beats for Dr Squires’ stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby), who never bothered to talk to him at high school, but with her friends away for the summer shows some interest. It sounds like a typical first love, last summer, coming of age flick, but the music that pumps through its streets makes the film dance.  It’s mostly nineties hip hop – Wu Tang Clan, Notorious B.I.G, Nas, Raekwon, A Tribe called Quest, with a little bit of Smashing Pumpkins thrown in for the break-up breakdown.

Having a stream of good songs really can make a movie.  Even with Liv Tyler and her floral baby doll dresses, Stealing Beauty would be a horrible film if it wasn’t for Hole, Portishead, Bikini Kill and Liz Phair, and who could imagine Lost in Translation without Kevin Shields’ soft-focus-streetlights-on-a-rainy-afternoon atmospherics and Death in Vegas’ ‘Girls’.  (Speaking of ‘Girls’, Annie’s Lane wines has recently taken this song and stuck it on a horrible wine ad.  I am not impressed.)  Part of why I love the TV series Felicity is for it’s smattering of New York indie pop-rock.  Hong Kong films use the song thing to create an audience out of the millions of canto-pop fans, and many of the film stars, like Andy Lau, are also pop stars.  It’s a whole give and take thing.  There are songs that I can’t disconnect from their filmic images and films that I can’t recall without hearing a certain song.  A film music teacher I once had argued vehemently against the use of classical music in film for this very reason.  For him, music had personal connotations and he felt that in having a celluloid image imposed onto the sounds, one was prevented from developing one’s own images or of having the choice of a non-visual experience.  There are times when I would agree with this, and I generally think less is more when it comes to music in film.  The relentless scoring of Brokeback Mountain irritated me, because I think the film would have worked better with more silence, but then again, I’ll happily overdose on Wong Kar Wai’s string laden tangos anyday.  It all depends on the nature of the beast, and in The Wackness, the music is king.  Word.

The Killer

The other day Cadillac was telling me about his ‘year of film’, a year where he crammed as many indie, arty, filmy films as he could, and it reminded me of my own film watching binges.  Every now and then my life stops, and in the gaps I watch movies. The first time it happened was in Bondi, where I lived in a small and ugly apartment a few blocks back from the beach.  I hated this apartment.  It was on the ground floor, had a grimy, pungent stairwell, damp blue carpet and a kitchen the size of a pin.  (I also hated Bondi’s beer breathed birkenstock wearing backpackers, and moved back to Darlinghurst after only three months.)  The apartment overlooked a melancholy reserve, a forgotten space that was neither a park nor a vacant lot.  There was a strange little scouthall parked in the middle of a ring of pines – shlocky horror cliché I know, but it was disconcerting and I never felt comfortable being in such close proximity to it.  Nevertheless, Bondi did have one saving grace – a video store with two dollar weeklies.  This abundant store was manned by a middle aged film geek who didn’t tolerate questions.  He always looked distinctly unimpressed by my choices, but was disinclined to share his own tastes.  Clearly he thought anything he had to say would be lost on a bohemian twenty something year old with unwashed hair and a lazy pout.

For me this was a strange time.  I was adrift, floating in an unknowing neverland of idleness that gave rise to heaps of good ideas, but no action.  (Really, no action – at one point all I did was take a weird contemporary dance class…)  I don’t remember every film I watched, but a lot of the films from this time are the ones that sit squarely on my ‘films that blow me away’ list.  One of these was John Woo’s The Killer, and as I feel vaguely guilty about my recent Michael Mann crush, I’m writing about it to even the score.

The Killer is one of those sweeping male melodramas that the Hong Kong film industry does better than anyone else, where the bullets fly in a blur of slow motion bliss and the men are masculine and sensitive at the same time.  It’s true the women here are merely accessories to the plot, but for me it’s irrelevant, because I love the men in these films.  The Killer stars Chow Yun Fat as Jeff ( or John, depending on your subtitles), an assassin who wants to retire but (as they always do) agrees to do a last job.  The film opens with a montage of the Hong Kong skyline at dusk, drenched in sweaty monsoon rains.  More than a setting, the image of Hong Kong is a symbol of Jeff’s identity, a city that straddles both east and west, properly occupying neither.  Jeff and Inspector Li (Danny Lee), his law abiding double, both live by their own codes of justice, and although they are in one sense opposing forces, they are also mirror images – both have light and dark shades.  This interchangeability is played up through the plot and the imagery.  Both men have unintentionally wounded women while on the job, and it is the desire to cleanse themselves of these errors that motivate them through the film.  Visually they match up – early on Jeff wears a black suit and a white shirt, while Li wears a white suit with a black shirt.  By the end of the film they have switched colours, and it is clear that although one of these men has the law on his side, their hearts are in the same place.

In another wonderful sequence Li tries to ‘get inside the mind and skin’ of the man he is hunting, and sits in Jeff’s apartment listening to Jenny (the singer who Jeff accidentally blinded)’s record.  In a long gliding pan, the film cuts together two time frames, showing Jeff sitting listening to the record in the past, and Li sitting in the same position listening to the same record in the present.  It’s a strange and unforgettable scene.  The lyrics of the song are ‘I don’t care what’s right or wrong, I’m not sentimental about the past.  Just set me free from this reverie, for the pain lingers on, it dwells deep in my heart and soul.  Only time will tell if we are meant for each other.’  Ultimately, Jeff and Li are meant for each other, and when they finally come face to face, they are so perfectly balanced that neither can gain the upper hand.  With the camera tracking around them in a glorious 360 degree loop, they press their guns against each other and move them in unison.  Obviously one can scream ‘homoeroticism’ here, but for me it’s more a case of the men being somehow symbiotic – it’s a true meeting of minds and hearts, and a doomed one at that.  In the end it is Li who eventually wins out, and in a fiery, writhing end Jeff dies weeping the slowest tears of blood you’ve ever seen.  Excessive, yes.  I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Heat

For some reason or other I had forgotten about Michael Mann and his epic Heat, possibly because the first time I watched this film I was a peachy video store baby with a naïve leaning toward Wim and Bernardo.  (I still love them, but less blindly.)  This time around, Heat literally made my heart beat faster – the incredible inky blues, the eye-blowing compositions, the choice of shots, some so surprising and so perfectly used I had my hand to my mouth.  It’s madly visceral and I will never forget Michael Mann again.  In fact, he is screeching past John Woo on my list of favourites.  Gah.

At the core of this film is the old cop/criminal mirror, and here, with Vincent (Al Pacino) and Neil (Robert De Niro) we get two actors whose careers are somewhat parallel facing off as the straight and crooked equivalents. It’s enough to make any movie geek weep.  Even though the divisions here are not as messy as those in say, Infernal Affairs, where the cop is actually a crim and the crim a cop, I love the kinds of questions these characters raise.  Vincent, despite his alliance with the law, is every bit as fuelled by personal desire as Neil.  He lives and breathes his job because it fills some primal part of himself, he never feels more alive than when he is tracking down a crew.  For him, like Michael (Tom Sizemore), ‘the action is the juice’, and it is this involvement – the sensation of figuring out how the crew thinks, identifying their weakness, trying to stay one step ahead while watching his own back, that makes him feel present.  For Vincent, family life is an empty shadow in comparison, a holiday island that grows grey if you are there too long.

Is it my bias toward De Niro as an actor that had me in Neil’s court?  The outlaw with a strict code, the man so focussed on his own survival he calls it a discipline to be able to walk away from any woman is a seductive character.  Even though it’s clear he is emotionally unavailable, I found myself wanting to believe that Eady’s (Amy Brenneman) love could change him.  On one level, Neil does want more – he sees the connection his friends have with their wives and wants to feel that sense of belonging to another, but in the end, his desire for vengeance is deeper.  Perhaps it is that he thinks he wants what others have because they have it,  but doesn’t know what he himself really wants.

Heat has its fair share of beautiful women, but the true beauty of this film is the stunning cinematography.  The city, with all its blue, grey, green wetness seeps with longing.  It is as if the whole city has been submerged, and the light that trickles down from above the water is refracted into tiny pockets of desire, all red and pink and yellow.  This city is drowning the men who live in it, engulfing them with its concrete, its shadows, its endless boulevards.  But what better place to drown than in a celluloid city?  And when the bodies float to the surface, their heat will shine, like dedos or stars.