ssg7 Reviews

The Band's Visit (2007)

The bearable lightness of being

[10/10 · 10 February 2008]

In this surprising comedy, a blue costumed Egyptian Police orchestra gets misrouted in Israel on the way to play at the opening of an Arab cultural center in Petah Tikvah. They land in a tiny desert town, where Dina, an Israeli cafe owner, (played by a strikingly smoky voiced Ronet Elkabetz), disburses the eight musicians overnight among her bored regulars until tomorrow's bus comes. Of course, the conductor, Sasson Gabai, stays with her.

Not much of a plot really, but the intelligence and composition of the film makes what I've seen from Hollywood lately seem like kindergarten. Israeli Dina disemboweling a watermelon for her two Egyptian guests, a morose Egyptian-Israeli after dinner men's chorus of "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess, romance at the Israeli roller-skate discotheque, two men talking by a sleeping child in the bedroom of a failing marriage -- each scene saved from treacle by the film maker's wit and pacing.

As stereotypes and the enmity of decades fall by the wayside, Egyptians and Israelis alike endure difficulties of communication, autonomy, leadership, relationship, and isolation. No moment is rushed. No character trivialized. No irony ignored. No soundtrack tells us what to feel.

Music and sounds in this film are source only. The band's music, arising as the credits roll, is glorious - the key, in fact, to something each of us, or them, so desperately needs: joy! The film is so well crafted my enjoyment of it was effortless. It seems an enormous amount of thought, care, and love went into "The Band's Visit". And this is precisely the message, told with enough humor to keep it fresh. Ordinary individuals encountering each other with honesty, respect, and the gifts of art, music and laughter -- how else to breach the gulf between these two, or any two, cultures.

The Minus Man (1999)

An excellent, highly original film.

[10/10 · 17 January 2008]

Don't read this until after you see the film!

The Minus Man explains what we so want to know about serial killers -- just what, exactly, is wrong with them.

The plot seems straight forward: A quietly pleasant young man, drives his pick-up into a small town, selectively poisoning others from a flask of Amaretto laced with extract of rare Pacific Northwest fungus. He makes friends with an older man, Doug (Brian Cox), rents a room from Doug and his wife (Mercedes Ruehl), gets a Post Office job, meets a girl (Janeane Garofalo) who likes him.

The drifter, Van, (Owen Wilson), is oblivious to his own murderous feelings. We know this because Van narrates the film. Superficially polite and caring, Van completely lacks empathy -- note his bizarre behavior as a postal carrier.

This film is a working demonstration of deep psychological malfunctions: splitting, (unconsciously denying hatred/rage/anger to protect the good), and projective identification (unconsciously making the other feel what you can't allow in yourself).

When romantic love comes toward Van, he can tolerate only so much before hatred takes over. His would be girlfriend, Ferrin, a winning young, soon-to-be alcoholic from the Post Office, escapes Van's poisonous impulses because she is vigilant about what happens to her whiskey bottle. Van is invited to embrace Ferrin, and botches the attempt when he quakes with rage.

Ordinarily Van doesn't appear to have negative emotions, like, say, jealousy. Except Van calmly murders the local football star after seeing his new friend Doug fawn on the boy at a sports dinner.

Meanwhile, mounting deaths have attracted the interest of authorities. Van has to cool it. Without his usual outlet of murders, Van's splitting stops working. He begins to project his hatred into two imaginary detectives,(Dwight Yoakam & Dennis Haysbert), both harassing him. These fantasies are Van trying to blow off emotional steam until he can kill again.

Doug begins as an ordinary nice guy, the more time he spends in Van's company, the more rage and chaos Doug experiences. In the spiraling second half, Doug is arrested, a psychotic who has killed his wife. The minus in this equation is Van, of course.

The discrepancy between Owen Wilson's considerable personnel charm and Van's fractured interior is revealed when external events in the movie are increasingly infused with loss, alienation, emotional torture, and devastation. Then Van, no different from when he arrived, drives off into the darkness (get it?) with the poison securely attached to the underside of his pickup truck.

Suture (1993)

See this one many times, it gets better and better

[10/10 · 17 January 2008]

Apart from being wholly original, filled with homage, visually stunning, and satisfyingly rich on levels that expand with each viewing, I found this movie's deadpan conceits hilarious. The plot hinges on extreme physical resemblance between a skinny, sociopath, upper-class white guy (Vincent), and a man who looks and is nothing like Vincent, except they share the same father, whom Vincent has probably murdered. A similar trick was played, but in reverse, in Charles Willeford's brilliant short novel, Pick-Up.

But back to the conceits. Awful Vincent enacts a plan to beat the patricide rap by fratricide. To this end, he invites brother Clay, whom he met at Dad's funeral, to Phoenix for the weekend. Clay, (both malleable and model-handsome - get it?) survives murder-by-exploding-car with horrible injuries and no memory, and is, in fact, taken to be Vincent. Throughout the movie, few notice the difference between the strange white guy and the giant, hunky, wonderful, black man. The difference, when taken, is moral, not physical.

Among the many virtues of this movie: the psychic soundness of Clay's return to mnemonic wholeness; genuine happiness between the surpassingly lovely plastic surgeon and Clay; the pleasure of viewing (for once) the character delineation of a whole man incidentally black, with the white folks stereotyped. Good acting, especially by Dennis Haysbert and Dina Merrill.