Friday's Old Fashioned: Take Aim at the Police Van (1960)

Seijun Suzuki’s monochrome “Take Aim at the Police Van” belongs to a post-war Japanese genre of film known as borderless action, blurring geographical lines by simultaneously blurring genre lines, utilizing an American-like spirit to appeal to American audiences, which feels eerily appropriate given America’s postwar occupation. Of course, if America was seeking to instill its values in the newly democratic country, what does a movie like Seijun Suzuki’s dynamite noir-thriller hybrid say about them? In fact, let’s amend that description to noir-thriller-comedy. The opening images seen through the scope of a sniper rifle on a dark mountain road show four signs in rapid succession – “MANY ACCIDENTS,” “HAVE OCCURRED,” “IN THIS AREA,” “CAUTION” – that is so emphatic it compels your laughter. It’s not so funny, though, when that same sniper rifle takes aim at, what else, a police van, assassinating two prisoners inside, an ambush that ends with the prison guard in charge, Tamon (Michitarô Mizushima), put on six-month leave. And though for one brief scene at home, he entertains the idea of a six-month vacation, he just as quickly decides to investigate the incident himself. Almost as soon as he does, he is pulled into his police precinct and kindly told by his boss to leave the investigating to them. Tamon agrees and leaves with a smile on his face. The second he closes his boss’s door, though, the tone immediately changes, his smile vanishes, and in voiceover, we hear him ponder his next lead. The tonal shift is so severe that, I swear, if you altered the soundtrack just a little, it could work as a scene in “Police Squad!” It’s a thin, thin line in “Take Aim at the Police Van” between black comedy and a black pit of despair.

Jean-Luc Godard was utilizing the jump cut in new and exciting ways that very same year in the trailblazing “Breathless,” and while “Take Aim at the Police Van” might not be quite so avant-garde in its own editing, it is impressively furious, nonetheless, constantly pushing the narrative forward by not lingering on the ends of scenes. It createss a rhythm that echoes Tamon’s dogged determination as much as the swift 79-minute run time. His character might be modeled on Sam Spade, but Tamon also effuses much less cynicism, viewing his prisoners as human and worthy of redemption. Yet, it is the surviving prisoner of the van attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), who kickstarts Tamon’s off the clock sleuthing, bringing his hopeful worldview into tension with the sordid, cynical one he encounters that is defined by a human trafficking ring tying back to an enigmatic crime lord known only as Akiba. The so-called agency funneling girls to this ring is run by Yuko (Misako Watanabe), proving more formidable than she might first appear, conveyed in a conversation with another lowlife character where Suzuki’s masterful blocking of the actors demonstrates the ever-shifting upper hand in the power dynamics. Yet, even as Yuko proves formidable, she proves more vulnerable too, demonstrated in the revelation of Akiba that blurs love and hate to such a degree that you can’t even tell them apart.

Best TV Shows of the 21st Century

We are a movie blog, of course, first and generally foremost, and half-performatively, half-seriously contend that television is an inferior artform. Yet, at the same time, we must admit that because of TV’s semi-takeover of the culture and Hollywood’s emphasis on youth-focused formula, the small screen has become the only place you can find a postmodern version of a Douglas Sirk movie melodrama that takes place entirely on the other side of the looking glass. Which brings me to The New York Times recently naming the best television shows of the 21st century and then inviting readers to submit their own ballots. 

My ballot did not take long. See below.

Alright, back to regular programming on Friday.

Hope

Na Hong-jin’s two-hour-and forty minute sci-fi action-thriller “Hope” begins not with a slow build but a cold plunge, as if “Jaws” immediately dropped us aboard the Orca with the hunt for the great white shark already in progress. One minute, we’re standing with Hope Harbor police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) on a rural road investigating the perplexing, grisly death of a cow and the next he’s tracking some unseen monster on foot through the rubble of his South Korean village with a shotgun. The dexterous camera yokes us to his point-of-view, making it feel as if we are along for this terrifying ride as much as he is along for the ride when he winds up in the car driven by rookie cop Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) with the gas all the way to the floor. That we don’t get a sense of Hope Harbor before its destruction is not an unintentional oversight preventing emotional connection but a deliberate choice emphasizing the confounding immediacy. The scene is set via context clues, signs warning of enemy infiltrations, oblique references to fencing, and ordinary citizens armed to the teeth. This is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, in other words, and yet, the emergent enemy is not from the North but outer space, a revelation shrewdly teased out over the course of this hour-long opening chase. And when the payoff finally comes, “Hope,” it turns out, is just getting started.

Yet, in widening its scope to reveal far more rampaging aliens than just the one, and all not alike in form, it gradually becomes clear that Na’s pacing works better throttled up than throttled down. He not only introduces more E.T.s, but also more humans, like an old man getting stitched up in the hospital with a story to tell and hunting party in the forest who find themselves as prey, none of whom are conveyed with any real dimension. Even a bout of friendly fire that seems readymade to reveal character from the extreme circumstances ultimately comes to nothing. Maybe this could have been glossed over had “Hope’s” action stayed in the stratosphere, but in ramping back up, it becomes oddly repetitive, consequently monotonous, and so reliant on machine gun fire that by the end it had literally given me a headache. One endless sequence on a highway becomes emblematic of a movie that does not seem to know how to call it quits. What’s more, the striking tactility of so much of the first hour is undercut by much of the creature design that feels disjointedly inserted from a video game. It’s not just the old rule of thumb that the less you see of the monster(s), the better, but that one character’s evocative description of them being a mush of peas and beans proves too much to live up to.

The imagery is all the more disappointing given Na’s willingness to see the aliens as more than unthinking predators. He demonstrates this via narrative revelations of his screenplay, but even more than that, through a pair of captivating lengthy close-ups of deceased outsiders. These seem primed for classic horror movie jump scares, holding and holding the shots until...nothing happens. Like Chief Ko finding himself unexpectedly moved by looking long and hard at the creature he’s chasing when he’s supposed to be taking aim with his rifle, Na lingers over these alien faces to instill compassion. But even if he does, he continually undermines it, giving his his characters, including Chief Ko, so many familiar action movie one-liners that he seems to suggest these aliens really are just brainless beasts to be dispatched. The sequence in which Chief Ko enlists a doctor to perform an alien autopsy yields ferocious blood-splattered comedy, though the movie itself does not seem to know what we’re supposed to be laughing about.

The monotony of the overstretched conclusion, meanwhile, is ironic because “Hope” leaves us not just with myriad loose ends and unresolved feelings but literally drops a whole other gigantic question right out of the sky. When this question arrives, it will leave you feeling like the characters on screen, literally unsure what you are seeing in more ways than one. This lack of resolution, though, leaving the human characters spiritually stranded, running along a road toward figurative points unknown, conjures the sensation of ontological response that we are generally told would go hand-in-hand with the discovery of not being alone in the universe while simultaneously imparting the unmistakable sense that they are not really the protagonists in this story. In that way, the whole two-and-a-half hours plus might have paradoxically locked into place without locking anything into place at all. Except that afterwards, I discovered “Hope” was merely set-up for a sequel, a post-movie revelation as the most predictable revelation possible, leaving me not only disappointed but retroactively insulted, unmasking a movie without even the courage of its seeming enigmatic conviction. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Linda Linda Linda (2005)

When a teenage Japanese rock band calling itself Paranmaum loses both its singer and guitarist with three days before the Shiba High Holly Festival at which they are set to perform, the remaining trio presses on by having the keyboardist switch to guitar and recruiting the Korean exchange student as their new vocalist. It sounds readymade for crisis and complication and yet what’s notable about the 2005 comedy drama “Linda Linda Linda” (the title is the name of a song by Japanese punk rock band The Blue Hearts) is how it mostly eschews traditional drama. Once the band is in place, director Nobuhiro Yamashita emphasizes the sweet camaraderie that emerges in late night practice sessions while his preferred visual approach of long takes and static frames epitomize how so much of teenage life takes places in the in-between spaces where nothing and everything happens. (Yamashita also likes to include all four bandmates in those static frames to underline their emergent group dynamic.) Their school principal seems ripe for antagonism, but secretly, he’s their biggest fan, charting their progress from afar with a wistful countenance, as if he’s daydreaming about his own lost rock and roll dreams. When a rainstorm briefly delays the band getting to the big gig, it feels like a deadpan nod to such manufactured machinations and can’t slow them down. And though rock and roll movies often turn climactic performances into catharsis, by deploying a narrative that does not culminate in anything momentous, exactly, Paranmaum’s climactic performance is given a spectacular immediacy that would do their punk rock forebears proud.

Late Fame

Set in present-day New York, the resurgent celebrity of director Kent Jones’s “Late Fame” is Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a one-time poet of the city’s downtown bohemian art scene. Based on a posthumously published novella written in 1895 by Arthur Schnitzler (Samy Burch adapted it), “Late Fame” begins with Saxberger’s lone published collection of poetry, Way Past Gone, having been discovered by recent NYU grad Meyers (Edmund Donovan) who loosely runs a small artistic circle. That Saxberger is less a celebrity, really, than a cult favorite, and that he is reclaimed by this miniscule clique rather than, say, a poetry foundation, or a New York Times culture writer, evokes “Late Fame’s” more modest aims and quiet revelations, both of which help to temper some of its broader elements, as does Dafoe’s affecting, understated performance.

Saxberger has been working at the post office for decades with his poetry-writing past so far behind him that his dive bar buddies are unaware of it. Yet, for one brief moment, we also glimpse Saxberger with a plastic bag that appears to contain a couple books, not only suggesting that he has maintained his interest in the art world but subtly rebutting the frequent movie cliché that a blue-collar lifestyle and intellectual pursuits do not go hand in hand. He is carrying that bag, in fact, when he is approached by Meyers, who lavishes him with praise. Meyers talks about how much the poems relate to the present moment, an idea that is never expounded upon any further, tinging it with the scent not so much of someone blowing smoke but the way a young person who doesn’t yet know any better tends to talk in too many superlatives. As he prattles on, Jones gives Dafoe a big, juicy close-up, his lips transforming into a smile at once flabbergasted and flattered, instantly communicating that no matter how much he begs off, he will become ingratiated with Meyers and his group.

That group dubs itself The Enthusiasm Society, an alternative to the cynicism and snark that rules the modern age, even if occasionally in their Whit Stillman-like affectations a little snark still shines through, especially when addressing the social media influencer gang that hangs out in the same place on the other side of the same room. They welcome Saxberger into their group as some odd mixture of mentor and mascot, urging him to write a new poem for a reading they plan to stage. Given not just these plot points but The Enthusiasm Society’s retro attire, like it’s a “Midnight in Paris” costume party, “Late Fame” tiptoes right up to the line of caricature. Yet, if they become semi-unwitting caricatures in the context of the movie’s world, they never quite become caricatures in terms of the movie itself. You find it hard to take them seriously, but you believe that they take themselves seriously, rich kids cosplaying as struggling artists. 

Their performative nature is echoed in Gloria (Greta Lee), the lone female member of their expectedly male-heavy group. Saxberger does not meet her initially, a shrewd narrative decision to enhance her intentionally created air of mystery, and from the moment she first sweeps into the room in her cabaret star-like costuming and larger-than-life manner, it is obvious to us and to him that she is performing. It’s a charismatic performance, both Gloria’s and Lee’s, and though Saxberger is partially content to let himself get caught up in it, he also delicately presses her for the truth. That truth is not hard to foresee and speaks to the screenplay’s occasional tendency toward pat predictability. Yet, just as often, the script transcends it, appearing to plant familiar seeds that don’t quite pay off in ways you expect, or even more refreshingly, such as in the case of Saxberger being on the wagon, don’t pay off at all.

The Enthusiasm Society does expectedly combust, but this is portrayed less as a nominal surprise than a reflection of how such movements are always destined to burn as briefly as they might brightly. Indeed, the one fragment we hear in an internal monologue of Saxberger’s never-finished new poem merely evokes how the season of Saxberger’s poetry has long since passed. The poem he reads at the climactic event turns out to be an old one, and that poem turns out to be an act of remembering, providing the sequence two layers of reflection. And the way Dafoe infuses his character’s reading with a sense of peace rather than disappointment or even wistfulness brings “Late Fame” home. It’s as if he is flipping through an old photo album and when he’s done, he shuts it and puts it back on the shelf, happy to have the memories, content in knowing that’s all they are. And the final scene goes to show that in a movie made of so many words, or attempted words, that sometimes, no words need to be spoken at all.

The Show Went On

It has been 25 years and 10 days since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and so that means it has been 25 years since America: A Tribute to Heroes. That was the hybrid telethon-benefit concert broadcast live on all four major television networks, and all cable channels too, organized by George Clooney and produced by Joel Gallen in which various celebrities phone banked and esteemed musicians performed to help raise money for the United Way’s September 11th Fund. The show opened with Bruce Springsteen offering “a prayer for our fallen brothers and sisters” by repurposing his unreleased song about his adopted hometown of Asbury Park, “My City of Ruins,” as one about New York City and Washington. (Watch here.) It’s a singularly powerful performance, one that meets a moment no one wishes they would ever need to meet. As a noted Springsteen admirer, you might think I would have been on my couch and in front of the TV for America: Tribute to Heroes, but I wasn’t. No, I was at the Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa seeing Lucinda Williams live for the first time.

You know the cliché when it comes to music: “I like everything except for country.” And for the first 20 or so years of my life, I was under the impression that I liked everything except for country too. I worked at a pizza place in high school, and the owners loved country most of all, and so most of the time, the little radio propped above the pizza prep table was tuned to 92.5 KJJY: Iowa’s Country Station. This meant enduring lots of Alan Jackson, Brooks & Dunn, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill. Enduring might not be the right word. There are plenty of people, snot-nosed critics included, who would go to bat for those artists, and fair enough, it’s just, they never did much for me. How many times can one sullen teen who prefers Public Enemy listen to “Gone Country?” The one song that I remember hearing on KJJY and liking was Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Passionate Kisses.” It was only some years later that I learned this song was, in fact, written and originally recorded by Lucinda Williams.

If I can credibly claim that any two albums changed my life in so much as they fundamentally reoriented my taste in and understanding of music, they are “Fever” by Kylie Minogue and “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” by Lucinda Williams. Grunge was the genre always said to speak for my generation, but it never really spoke for me, not like Kylie did and has continued to with her unique blend of authenticity and joy. And I innately and spiritually connected with Lucinda’s synthesis of blues, country, and rock ‘n’ roll in a way I never did with grunge’s sludgy guitar, or all the soft-as-The-Andrews-Sisters pop-punk that followed it. I had already been drifting toward country through deeper inspections of The Rolling Stones, but “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was the light and the demarcation line. Lucinda not only opened my eyes to country but made me realize that music was alive, that on some level it was all love and theft, to borrow the phrase of Bob Dylan, and that genre was flexible. For me, all music is Before Car Wheels and After Car Wheels. 

Nobody would confuse suburban Des Moines with rural Louisiana, or Mississippi, or Texas, or Arkansas, places where Williams cut her teeth and set her songs, but when you stepped inside the Val Air Ballroom back at the turn of the century, you felt transported to some honkytonk down south. Lucinda certainly made it appear that way when she and her band, including Iowa native and guitar hero Bo Ramsey, strolled on stage that Friday night on September 21, 2001, most of them sporting cowboy boots and shit-kicker hats. She leaned into the microphone and in her immaculate southern drawl said one word: “Hey.” Then they tore into “Metal Firecracker,” the greatest break-up song ever recorded, and proceeded to play, I don’t know, four, five, maybe six songs in a row before she said another word, foreshadowing the theme of the night: we’re here to play.

It’s not that Lucinda did not speak. She did, briefly commenting on how much the Val Air resembled an old honkytonk, in fact, and as a prelude to her bluesy onslaught “Joy,” she excoriated the 43rd President. And though Iowa was still a purple state in those days, this was the patriotically correct post-9/11 era, remember, where a single discouraging word could bring you up on charges of treason in the court of public opinion, and so her boldness stayed with me. Mostly, though, she just played. She and her band played so long that they reached a point where they had obviously exhausted their planned setlist and at the end of a song, they would stand there on stage for a minute and discuss what to play next and then play it. During this improvised portion of the show, they played “I Envy the Wind” off the record she had just released that June, and midway through it, a woman standing near me ran off in tears, hiding her face. Maybe the song made her cry, maybe the world did, or maybe it was both. It was 10 days after 9/11, everybody was a wreck, and nobody would have minded if the show just kept going forever.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Rose Bowl Story (1952)

There’s a line in “The Rose Bowl Story” (1952) about how the only thing that matters in Pasadena, California is keeping the Tournament of Roses committee happy. It suggests the fabled Rose Parade and those who oversee it as akin to a nefarious cabal running the whole southern California city. Alas, nothing so diabolical is allowed to infiltrate this wholesome, humdrum motion picture. Why at one point the Rose Queen, Denny Burke (Vera Miles), lectures the star player of an unnamed Midwestern college team, Steve Davis (Marshall Thompson), that he is not paying proper homage to the so-called Grandaddy of the Bowl Games. Perhaps not, but I also wonder why if the Rose Bowl was so significant, William Beaudine’s movie was made under the umbrella of a low-budget studio like Monogram Pictures rather than, say, MGM, or 20th Century Fox. The camera panning the interior of the mighty stadium nestled in the Arroyo Secco at night that ends with an obvious cut to disguise that its two actors sitting in the bleachers are not really in the Rose Bowl at all made me wonder if Beaudine broke in overnight to steal the shot.

Though the scene-setting narration of “The Rose Bowl Story,” with accompanying aerial images of Pasadena, hint at a movie about the Rose Bowl itself, that’s not really the case. It proves more of a melodrama-romantic comedy hybrid with Coach Hadley’s (Richard Rober) wife in the hospital, and Steve not only falling in love with Denny once his team arrives in California but struggling to learn the right reasons for playing – that is, for love of the game rather than money and future business prospects. It’s a storyline that current shadow college football commissioner Nick Saban and his junior senator from Texas consigliere could love. The plotting, editing, and blocking, however, evince next to no snap, crackle, or pop. Even at a mere hour and thirteen minutes, “The Rose Bowl Story” is one of those movies that moves like it’s stuck in mud. The only time it perks up are the scenes in Denny’s home. Yes, her father Iron Mike Burke (Jim Backus), predating the other Iron Mike, a one-time football player himself, is just a broad, if not occasionally insulting, caricature, but the scene where he re-enacts an old football play with a decorative artifact is more exciting than the climactic Rose Bowl game itself. What’s more, Denny’s phone-hogging younger sister Sally is played by a young Natalie Wood who, bless her heart, brings energy where there generally is none. And though it’s not enough to redeem this stinker, in so much as it has one, Wood is “The Rose Bowl Story’s” MVP.