AND BACK HOME AGAIN - BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT : "SWEET SIXTEEN"

Not everyone is a great fan of Ken Loach. This, by the way, is something I can quite understand. Social realism is all well and good, heck, I’d go as far as saying that it is necessary, but it is very hard to watch at times. Ironically, it is hard to watch for different reasons whether it is done well or not; badly done it reeks of melodrama and takes itself far too seriously; well done it can be heart-rending, the sort of thing that sticks in your mind for days afterwards. Nearly all Ken Loach’s films are, without a doubt of the second kind. Sweet Sixteen is one of his more recent works that takes an unflinching look at the difficult lives and choices faced by people living in Scotland.
At 15 years old, Liam has already dropped out of school and is something of a businessman. He and his best friend Pinball have a tidy little business selling cigarettes – among other things – on the streets. Liam has had to learn to take care of himself quickly; his Mother is in jail, his father is not in the picture and his mother’s latest boyfriend Stuart is a total and utter bastard and his older sister is busy trying to raise her son on her own. Bleak as the situation may seem, Liam has a dream. His mother is due to come out of prison soon, if by that time Liam can buy a nice house for her to live in, he can get her away from his latest step-father and they can start a new life together, mother and son. What is more, a chance encounter with one of the important men in town seems to offer Liam the break he needs. Sure the dealings he has to get involved in are more than a little shady, but does that really matter if they bring him closer to his dream? Whether the closeness of the dreams is an illusion or a reality however, remains to be seen…
As is most of his films, this too is a stinging critique on the part of Ken Loach of the system we live in today. In Liam’s world, determined by material needs, ethics really do not have a place. Liam’s dreams are those of many young people today really, he dreams of money, a house, material gain. All this, he hopes at any rate, will “buy” him the happiness and more importantly the motherly love he craves. So goal-oriented is young Liam, and also of course he is in so deep at such a young age, that he doesn’t even realize there is an important price to pay for all these, especially in the way he is trying to achieve his goals. As he gets sucked into the underworld, Liam will change, but sadly he will lose very little of his initial naiveté; thus he ends up mimicking the gangsters in films; Scarface and the like, or more immediately for him the real live gangsters all around him, all leading to the films dramatic climax…
As some of you may know, Loach has a number of films specifically about Scotland and the North of England, detailing the economic strife and tough life lived there. This is not least because he is originally a miner’s son from the same area. However, just because a message has been repeated often, it doesn’t make it any less true. And not just in Scotland; all around the world wherever there is economic under-development. Sweet Sixteen is a beautiful and sad reminder of our times, well worth watching and ruminating on…

SURREAL TV : "NATURAL BORN KILLERS"

Having sampled some of life’s bitter truths with Kusturica, let us now turn to some light entertainment. As I was preparing for the review on this one I realized something… This film can be likened to a family fight. In it, under the direction of Oliver Stone, the cinema takes a massive bite out of its younger cousin, the television. And put like that I know it sounds a touch unfair, but really it isn’t anything the TV culture doesn’t deserve… I honestly feel sometimes that the “media” has gone completely barmy and could have disastrous results… And I liked this film because it is precisely this hypothesis that Stone explores. If the film is completely surreal, it is more to set us in the type of universe where everything is possible and where the more outrageous possibilities can be explored; this is akin to the sense of liberty the medium of animation affords… It also has the added benefit of rendering the film watchable; even though the amount of bodies that pile up all over the screen can only be described as carnage, the whole thing is so unbelievable it just doesn’t sort of you know… Hit you… (Excuse the bad pun)
Mickey (Woody Harrelsson) and Mallory Knox (Juliette Lewis) are “Natural Born Killers”. They love each other and they love life, and for them, “life” means rolling round the countryside, getting drunk, getting high and killing pretty much whoever they want whenever they want. The manhunt that begins is massive, as is the media frenzy. And of course the whole thing does nothing but get worse when, in a hail of bullets, the couple actually get caught. Now they are safely behind bars, it’s the press that wants its pound of flesh. In depth reports, close ups… The natural born killers love the attention, the problem is, they are NOT as dumb as some people seem to make them out to be… And the fact that they love the attention doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to use it to their advantage…
Oliver Stone’s attack on “TV Culture” is two-pronged. First of all there is the very obvious interaction of Mickey and Mallory with the media who takes the form of Wayne Gale (Robert Downey Jr.), the uber-cheesy reality-show host who thinks of nothing but his own face on TV and his ratings. And then, just in case you missed that one, there is the media in general’s “feeding frenzy” – Mickey and Mallory become super-stars overnight, their faces are all over the front pages of newspapers, morbid fascination pervades and as the audience we receive a little poke ourselves… Come on, admit it, you DO read all those gory stories in the newspaper… But there are also a few more slightly less-obvious attacks going on. First of all, as I already mentioned, the whole film is very OTT. So much so that the overly cliché characters in it just pass one by. But in fact these men, Wayne Gale, the police officers, everybody is the epitome of B-movie characters. So intelligently enough, the film criticizes what television has become by becoming rather disturbing itself. Here, the credit that is due must be given to the actors, especially Tom Sizemore as detective Jack Scagnetti and Tommy Lee Jones as the prison warden, one of the most laughable yet psychopathic characters I have ever seen on screen… Then of course, there’s Mickey and Mallory. In actual fact, what they are doing is no more than simply copying what a lot of us see in bad action movies all around the world late at night (I assume some things don’t change no matter where you go). Even though their love for eachother is genuine – as far as we can tell – the things they use to show that love (apart from the murders of course) are again all the old clichés we’ve all seen a thousand times before. They are not educated, they are not cultured, this is the only means they know of self-expression…
Oh yes, the movie may seem all innocence and light, however, Oliver Stone actually has a lot of scathing things to say about where media and modern culture are today… Just don’t get mesmerized by the fast- moving script, open your eyes and ears, and listen.

AN EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER : "THE HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG"

We all just about know by now that the heart of a good film is a good story. If there is a good story there, the rest will somehow pull along of its own accord. The same is actually true of the reverse. If the technical side of a film is good, “holes” in the storyline and plot may be forgiven. I mean take Avatar; it is, for all intents and purposes the story of Pocahontas with a few twists. Oh and special effects in three dimensions the like of which had never been witnessed before. When I left that particular film, my first reaction was “That was NOT a film.” Well it wasn’t. An experience, certainly, exciting, you bet, fun – are you kidding I wish I had the budget to see it a second time – but NOT a film. Something that was closely related to a fairground ride, crossed with a film. This is why, although I tend to tell people who exclaim “But it has no story at all” that they are being a little harsh, secretly I do know where they are coming from… Gosh I’ve swerved off topic on this one but I am actually trying to make a point… The point is, that House of Sand and Fog contains some of the best acting I have seen in a long time (hence it was nominated for various Oscars® in the field), the story is full of emotion and desperately gripping, but there are holes in it the size of the state of Texas. And yet, strangely enough, the rest is so good, you are gripped, by the story, by the performances and let yourself be carried away with it. And the rest of it is SO good in fact that one almost hasn’t the heart to mention them, but there you are… Let me just tell you the story and we’ll get to the matter properly…
Colonel Massoud Behrani (played superbly by veteran actor Ben Kingsley) is one of many Iranian citizens who have immigrated to foreign lands after the revolution of 1979. He and his family have settled in the United States, they are citizens now, and they are doing their best to start a new life there. Life is not easy, however. All their resources must go into keeping up appearances so their daughter may marry well – a task they succeed in – and after that, there is their young son’s education to think of. Colonel Behrani must work; keep down two menial jobs despite his advancing age to keep the family afloat as his wife barely speaks any English. Then he spots what seems to be a blessing from God Almighty himself. There is a house, a beautiful bungalow out in the woods on sale; it is to be auctioned off it appears, because the previous owner hadn’t paid her taxes. For the colonel this means one thing only: buy the house, renovate, sell at a profit, make a killing and thus have the money for Eshmail, their son’s college. What he doesn’t know, however, is that if the house has been seized, it is partly due to an error on the part of the government, Kathy (equally expertly played by Jennifer Connoley) is accused of not paying her business tax, but she in fact has never owned a business in her life; she has merely been lazy and ignored the government warnings until too late, partly due to her own personal problems. Thus she strongly feels the house is hers by right. And she will go to great, great lengths to get it back…
“Americans, they don’t deserve what they have. They have the eyes of small children forever looking for the next source of distraction; entertainment, sweet taste in the mouth… We are not like them. We know rich opportunities when we see it and do not throw away God’s blessings.” This is a direct quote from the film, something Colonel Behrani tells his young son at some point in the film. And this is, in fact, the whole point of the film really. Throughout the film you will note parallelisms being made between the “Caucasians” and the “Iranians”. One of the most striking is between the Colonel, who despite his sometimes undue strictness is a devoted father and Les, a sheriff’s deputy Kathy has an affair with and who thus begins to take evicting the Behranis a little too seriously, who doesn’t hesitate when walking out on his wife and two very young children without any explanations, just for Kathy who he has only known a few days. Another striking parallel is between Mrs. Behrani, who may not speak English but is the epitome of what it is to be a “lady” in the true old-fashioned sense of the word, not hesitating to wash Kathy’s foot (much to Kathy’s surprise and humility) when she has an accident. Kathy on the other hand is a mess, in many senses of the word, and seems to have a mildly illogical emotional attachment to her house, wanting to turf the family out at all costs, right until the very end… In short, some people seem to consider the “immigrants” the savages no matter what, but in fact when the behavior is analyzed, sometimes, the old fashioned “foreign” values trump it over good old fashioned, individualist, consumerist and in short capitalist society.
Which is where the bits of the plot I find mildly unbelievable come in. For example, quite quickly we find out that Kathy is a recovering alcoholic and her relationship with her parents is problematic. Yet, despite having joint ownership of the house with her brother, even after the house is foreclosed on and taken from under, her she doesn’t call her brother, stranger still neither do the authorities. Kathy then prefers to be homeless rather than go to her family for help, her family, from the little we hear from them, are not hostile to her in any way, just a typical, busy scattered and slightly egocentric family. That aside, the whole matter of the house being foreclosed on is a touch too sketchy for my liking too. We figure out that there is a matter concerning business tax involved and that this is in fact a mistake because Kathy has never owned a business in her life but then, we must believe that she has done almost virtually nothing about it since finding out about this situation; I mean, someone might have forged her signature, there is an ex-husband in the picture; he might have been trying to pull something but no. She is simply so negligent she just lets it slide. Then again, later on in the story, I will give no actual details but injuries are sustained in the house, yet it occurs to no one (until the finale where the ambulances vanish into the fog) to call an ambulance, and believe me, they are situations where you or I would be on the blower like a shot…
And then again, this is a film with a purpose. It is a film full to the brim with emotion and with some of the best acting performances I have ever seen. Incidentally, I would like to say that Ben Kingsley is probably one of the actors I respect the most in the entire industry, from Mahatma Ghandi to hired assassins, throw at him what part you will, he carries it off to a sterling standard. In short, the film is definitely worth watching. And it is definitely thought-provoking… I mean, just for example, how justified is Colonel Behrani in his criticism of Western society that I quoted above? Take a minute to think about it before you answer…