Stand Up Guys

I haven't seen RED or The Expendables, so I can't speak to the relevance this new wave of what I'll call, if you'll let me, the Geriaction genre has to a movie like Stand Up Guys. I get the sense that any connection would be flimsy, though. Stand Up Guys is more of a tried-and-true buddy flick, a more thoughtful, crimeful Grumpy Old Men with a splash of The Bucket List. Al Pacino and Christopher Walken play aging hoods Val and Doc. After twenty-eight years in the clink, Val is coming back down the river, and Doc is there waiting for him. Doc hasn't done any dirt since his partner went away. He's spent his life watching cable TV, trying to eat healthy, and painting the sunsets; he's seemingly mellowed. But Doc's not the only one who's been waiting for Val to get out. Before going in, Val accidentally killed the son of a crime boss. He expected to be dealt with in prison, but the vengeance didn't come. And so a reunion turns into something of a last hurrah, and Val and Doc cram as much skullduggery as they can into what time they have left together. There's a sort of interesting double-play with this movie. It's a look at the people that characters are, and a look at people wanting one more taste at being characters.

By the late 90s you couldn't swing a samurai sword without nicking a movie one could qualify as Tarantinoesque. Every other flick seemed to be bad men bandying banalities, all set to a soundtrack so cool everyone in the theater was crab-eyeing through their shirts a little. This fad has mostly dissipated, that style having pretty much the last drop of vim sucked from it. However, Tarantino somewhat less notoriously popularized the rounding of theretofore mostly flat genre--or, pulp--characters. He wasn't the only one, but he was the most visible. All of a sudden we have once cucumber-cool jewel thieves arguing about Madonna, once stony hit men rattling on about international fast food and TV. Tarantino presented his gangsters as mostly regular people for whom gangsterism was a job they went home from at the end of the day. This narrative influence has been more long-lasting than the stylistic one, thank God.

Stand Up Guys is a small movie, a quieter and more solemn hour and a half than I assume those other geriaction movies are. And maybe the difference has something to do with that Tarantino influence. You will get some shoot'em up and car chases, but even these genre tropes come about as great effusions of sometimes winsome nostalgia. There's plenty of I'm old levity (read: boner pills) which can be a hoot when executed by heavies like these, but that penchant can sometimes subvert the more thoughtful alleys that the movie seems to want to go down. 

BONUS TRIVIA: Speaking of Tarantino, did you know that Quentin's dad, Tony Tarantino, is in a sort of troupe along with Al Pacino's dad, Sal Pacino? The name of that troupe? The Silver Foxes! Also in the group: Magic Johnson's mom, Cindy Crawford's mom, and Patsy Swayze, Patrick's mom. For the life of me, I can't figure out what this troupe is actually up to. See if you can make any sense of this description:

Together, the Silver Foxes represent a broad cross-section of ages, backgrounds, and abilities. The Silver Foxes work to turn around some of the negative stereotypes about aging and the resulting self-perceptions that adversely affect health and well-being. The Silver Foxes are about recognizing the importance of movement and keeping active no matter what level of ability you have. The Silver Foxes Community is also a research team that takes a holistic view in bringing people aged 50 and above the tools to maximize their body, mind and spirit power.

- Andrew

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GMC: The way I see it, if you're gonna build a movie club, why not do it with some style?

It’s just two weeks until Guelph Movie Club Episode 3: Back to the Future (that's Thursday, March 28 at 9:00 p.m).

Like we did last month, we’ll be announcing the movie for Episode 4 just before we show Back to the Future. But right now, the future is in your hands. We've put together a short list for the April GMC movie from the nominations you submitted at last month's Big Lebowski screening, and your vote determines which one gets shown. Here they are:

• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Goonies
• The Godfather
• Gremlins
• Zoolander

You can vote on which movie you'd like to see in April by taking this GMC Facebook Poll.  May the best movie win!

 A few notes on the poll: You don't have to have a Facebook account to vote. Just choose a movie and click Submit. You can only vote for one movie, and you can only vote once. Voting will close Thursday, March 21st at 11:30 p.m. Oh, and don't forget to think about what movie you'd like to see at the May GMC showing, because in addition to announcing the winning movie for April at the Back to the Future screening, we'll also be taking your nominations for the May movie.

For newbies: Never heard of Guelph Movie Club? Follow along starting with our first blog entry.

Last time, a few of us met up early (and stayed late) for a drink at the eBar and Green Room to chat about movies. We’d love to have you join us.

Till then, see you at the movies,

- Danny W.

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The Impossible (Take 1)

Today we have not one but two people here at the Bookshelf commenting on the Ewan McGregor/Naomi Watts film The Impossible. Here's Michelle; next comes Andrew.

An Appreciation of Family


If you have the ability to carve two hours out of your schedule anytime between now and Tuesday, March 12th, I'd highly suggest heading to The Bookshelf cinema for a chance to see The Impossible.  I saw it last night and haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since.  Habitually, I kiss my sleeping children before going to bed myself each night, but this movie made me actually climb right into each of their beds—top bunk included—for that goodnight kiss. It permeated my dreams and made me so, so thankful for the husband and family I woke up to this morning.

The Impossible is the incredible true story of a family who were celebrating Christmas in Thailand when the tsunami of 2004 hit.  Far from the average Hollywood disaster movie, The Impossible shows us just how strong the bonds of family can become when tested. It is wrenching and jarring and at times extremely hard to watch, so "enjoy" would not be the right word to use as I send you on your way to see it.  More like ready yourself, bring tissues and prepare for a harrowing journey that will leave you with such a fine appreciation for the loved ones in your life.

 - Michelle

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The Impossible (Take 2)

I forget what book it was, but it was new at the time, by a noteworthy Canadian writer, and had something to do a child or children being abducted. I was in a circle of a few other writers, all of them about fifteen years older than me and, most notably, all mothers. They were talking about his book, which I hadn't read. It came out that each one of them, at about the same point in rising action, had jumped to the end to make sure that everything came out fine, that the natural order got mostly reset. I couldn't believe this. As craftspersons, it seemed inconceivable to me that they'd balk the tension that this other craftsperson had so striven to build. And I told them so (there may have been free wine at whatever function this was). Here was their somewhat miffed response (free wine, remember): I wasn't a parent. I especially wasn't a mother. I let the subject drop and, maybe still a little incredulous, sought out another comped cup of vino.

Genuine suspense is no easy feat. It intensifies those fundaments of great storytelling, namely those that get you to care, in a physical way almost, about what will happen to a person or about events that happen in a story. Even more difficult is sustaining suspense in a story that everyone knows the ending to. Though some are of the mind that the final getaway in Argo was overwrought, there was a tangible tension in the theatre every night those faux filmmakers tried to catch their flight. We all know they get away, but still our fundaments scooch to the seat's edge. It really is something else when we can be brought to doubt a turnout we are already aware of. The Impossible was sold on the merit of it being a true story of the Alvarez family being exploded and then reassembled by the 2004 tsunami. So we go into the movie knowing that everything will turn out jake—the end's been skipped to for us—but the movie's job is to make us second-guess ourselves, worry and stress about whether everything actually will be okay.

The Impossible is, among other things, a suspense movie. It's also a horror and disaster movie. And it marries these elements pretty slickly, a ceremony officiated by young Spanish director J.A. Bayona. By all appearances, The Impossible seemed like an incongruous follow-up to his 2007 atmospheric creeper The Orphanage, but a subtly ominous opening dispelled whatever assumptions I had. To begin, Maria, Henry, and their three boys—now white and British—descend into verdant Thailand, mostly all smiles, an affluent family in vacation-y love with each other and their surroundings. The first trope that came to mind was the horror flick stand-by of a cheery family moving into their bright, new dream home, their dark demises the furthest thing from their minds. But the viewer knows better. Knowing the background of the movie informs us that something bad will happen, but Bayona reminds us visually, tonally, that these lives will be circumstantially bent to a breaking point. At one point he even adopts the POV of the oncoming sea, a waft of Jaws.

The family is splintered by the disaster, and most of the film is spent with a severely injured Naomi Watts and her oldest son, Tom Holland. It would seem Watts is drawn to the challenge of being brutalized in film, likes to begin so entirely pearlescent and see just how scuffed she can get. (See Mulholland Dr. or the American version of Funny Games.) In a switch of convention—because this is a real story—Watts, set-up to be the protector, is too hurt to fulfill her role, and so it falls to her young son, Lucas, to be the leader. Disaster, suspense, horror; The Impossible is also an incredibly cogent coming of age story.

The Impossible is good. I stress this because I frankly thought it was going to be fluffy tripe framed by real devastation. I'm a detail guy. A perfect detail can turn an okay work into a gangbusters one. In the calm after the disaster, Lucas and Maria are staggering single-file through the wreckage, and Lucas sees that his mother's calf is severely injured. He calls this to her attention, and Maria turns around. For the first time we and Lucas see that her shirt is torn and a breast is exposed. (ED If I need only one reason to despise Seth MacFarlane's "We Saw Your Boobs" Oscar song, this will do.)  The boy says to his mother, "I can't see you like this." 

I've got to say that this might just be one of the most genuine moments in any movie I've ever seen. It's rare that the puppet of a movie ever turns into a real boy, but that one detail did it. For me, these people became real, and so did their struggle. And I thought of that chat with those other writers/mothers, as muzzy with free booze as the memory was. With just that one line, I needed to know that these people would be okay, even though I knew they would be. Even though I knew that nearly a decade later they'd be gussied up and embracing on a red carpet photo shoot for a movie based on the worst thing that will ever happen to them, I needed to know that it would all work out.

Now I just want a glass of wine.

- Andrew

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Head to the Cinema and Travel the World

Scanning the magazine racks the other day, I was struck by the cover of The Economist magazine loudly (in print, mind you) proclaiming "Send in the Clowns" and featuring photos of Beppe Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi. It has been decades since I've visited Italy, but it got me wondering just how bad or good things are over there. Heck, they don't even have a big guy in the Vatican right now. 

And with no travel plans on the horizon, or in the budget, this makes for a timely presentation of Italy: Love it or Leave it (March 12-14), wherein Luca Ragazzi and Gustav Hofer spend six months touring "the boot." Their film is a colourful and engaging travelogue indeed.

But, looking at the rest of the March film program, I realized that the cinematic voyaging  doesn't stop with Italy. This month we're offering trips to Paris (Hugo, Amour), India and Thailand (Life of Pi, The Impossible), Cold War East Germany (Barbara), Iceland, Alaska, and the polar ice cap (Chasing Ice), Japan (the graphic novel world of Tatsumi), and heck, we've even got some time travel ahead (or behind) of us (Back to the Future).

Look at it like a budget vacation or an entertaining stay-cation where you can forget your boarding pass and leave your passport in the drawer. Just toss a little cash in your pocket or purse and join us for some foreign excursions.

  -Peter

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Zero Dark Thirty

"Most of us rig our own moral calculuses in such a way that our actions become automatically justified in accordance with our own wishes."

That's William T. Vollmann in Rising Up and Rising Down, his seven-volume essay on when violence is and isn't justified. It's fine that Vollmann's a prolific brainiac, and that RURD contains just about everyone who has ever thought about violence, but the four-eyed Vollmann has also spent much of his career clad in Kevlar. As eyes in a gallimaufry of war zones, Vollmann's borne witness to more atrocity than I think any of us would like to admit exists in the world. The starting pistol for his critical and active interest would seem to begin in the early 80s when he--white, young, and out of shape--went to Afghanistan and attempted to join an American-funded Taliban that was then pitted against the Soviets. "They were my heroes," he says of the mujahedin, "I’ve never met anyone who was so serenely confident of doing the right thing, so willing to sacrifice his life for his homeland, so brave and so disciplined. The case of Afghanistan vs. the Soviet Union is the clearest case of good against evil that I’ve seen in my lifetime. I thought it was terrific the way they got their country back. I’m deeply saddened by the fact we stopped helping them once we got what we wanted, which was for them to be a thorn in the Russians’ side. I feel like we sort of let them down."

Early on, assembling his moral calculus, Vollmann sets down seven points, some "Reasons To Do Harm." The first is "What you've done (You've physically attacked me)." Here's the rest: "What you are," "What you haven't done," "Whom you associate with," "What you might do," "What you are," and "The fact that you are." Most of the reasons stem from the first, from this notion of provocation. Of course, if what someone's done to you was provoked by something you've done to them, then we begin to see why an essay on violence, and all the moral "rigging" we smart monkeys are capable of, might consume seven books.

Zero Dark Thirty is a tricky flick, especially so because of its seeming simplicity. Based on "first hand accounts of actual events," it presents the search for and killing of Osama bin Laden. There are three acts to this search. First, the use of torture to extract information in the aftermath of 9/11. Next, the bureaucratic morass combined with daily on-the-ground struggle in Afghanistan. Finally, there's the establishment of bin Laden's possible whereabouts and the subsequent deployment and killing. Director Kathryn Bigelow presents this process with the sort of moral ambiguity that really charged her previous film, The Hurt Locker. That film's interest was mostly psychological, examining the type of character able to excel and live with modern warfare. ZDT has created a molehill of controversy, because it presents no clear opinion on its subject. Most detractors' opinions of the film's opinion have much to do with their own agendas. Does it condemn or celebrate the use of torture? And what kind of math is the film doing when torture and bribery equals the murder of an unarmed man? And where do we, the viewers--politicized or not--locate ourselves when the characters, the agents of these actions, hardly voice an opinion. Because, subject matter aside, ZDT is mostly about people doing their jobs. Duty trumps morality.

President Obama's declaration of bin Laden's murder turned out to be something of a litmus strip. To some, the slaying was nothing less than triumphant; an eye for an eye. (The fact that bin Laden was shot through the eye comes close to turning the situation into a pun.) For others, the actions reeked of barbarism; very un-Obama. In some ways, the only wrong opinion was no opinion. Another line of Vollmann's comes to mind, vaguely recollected: you may not care about politics, but politics care about you.

Is ZDT political? Or is it about people so entrenched in a task that the larger implications get obfuscated? And if that's the case, then what's the greater implication?

In exploring when violence for the purposes of vengeance is just, Vollmann declares, "Deterrence, retribution and revenge must all be didactic to accomplish their ends." He then goes on to compare the public executions by Pancho Villa and the private ones of Stalin. I can recall a great discomfort accompanying the murder of bin Laden. It was great that it was done, but it had been done secretly, performed by a team of people that must remain unknown, and after all the body got tossed overboard. Regardless of any intrinsic political view, ZDT portrays a protracted, difficult act of vengeance. As a reenactment, the film amounts to a public execution. Never mind whether that settles hackles or raises them.

Maybe I want Zero Dark Thirty to have an articulate opinion of its content. Maybe it's what I've come to expect. Political greyness mostly vanished after 9/11. What's that catchphrase? "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention." On both left and right, though, discourse has been replaced by outrage. If there was a tangible intention in Bigelow's film, a firm stance, then I could talk against it, or stand up to it, calibrate my morality against its own. Instead, it leaves me alone to puzzle through my own math problems.

- Andrew

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Django Unchained

I saw a lot grisly stuff a little too early—or, let me qualify that: I saw representations of grisly stuff. My brother has five years on me and was a movie buff, so I was exposed, over his shoulder, to the likes of Natural Born Killers, Pink Flamingos (few are ever old enough to see that one, really), and, inevitably, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In some ways, when we're talking themes and such, the films of Quentin Tarantino are for a mature audience, but as far as the tone itself goes, Tarantino makes a movie so that even your pets and house plants know it's awesome. And that's about the short and skinny of it: we can jaw all day about referentiality and the like in the works of that motormouth, but for me all that is a thin layer of ice over a deep sea of awesomeness. Depending on whether you love or loathe Tarantino, this estimation might be either laudatory or insulting. I don't mean awesome in a good or bad way, but in a static way; Tarantino is awesome in the way heavy metal is loud, the way hoppy beer is hoppy. For my age—11 or 12ish—and head space, I fell in love with Tarantino. I memorized Tim Roth's "commode story," recited Samuel L. Jackson's "Ezekiel speech," watched Michael Madson's low-key boogie to Stealers Wheel over and over again. Tarantino is, frankly, catnip for males, exciting the men in boys, and the boys in men.

Maybe chalk it up to seeing Tarantino at a young age, but the guy's films, after Jackie Brown, have felt somewhat childish to me. Or maybe youthful would be more apt. I might also attribute this new-found aplomb to a feeling of joy present in his post-millennial movies. His work lately is shot through with this exuberance. You really get this feeling that this guy loves what he does, that he makes movies like he was ringing a bell. This, of course, is usually the main point put forward by Tarantino's detractors: that his stuff is just a little too cool, too awesome, that he loves himself and what he does just a little too much. I don't have an opinion about this being positive or negative. It just is what it is. Tarantino is only ever Tarantino, and seems constantly thrilled to be so.

Maybe it's finding Christoph Waltz that has really exploded the joy in Tarantino. That theretofore unknown Austrian actor sings the guy's banter, rides the air streams of it like some raptor. But the introduction of Waltz into Tarantino's realms also points to a disquieting shift in Tarantino's work. Waltz, as the repugnant Jew Hunter in Inglorious Basterds, is beguiling and mellifluous. He steals the show. With anyone else in that role, the movie—a WW2 What If?—might not have been as well received. I imagine many more people would have been snagged on the sharp edges of the content were it not for Waltz's smoothing. Tarantino has always loved the bad guy, and made a habit of distinguishing one's job from one's character. But his previous mugs have mostly been extracted from the world of film. With Inglorious Basterds and now Django Unchained, Tarantino has been harvesting his loveable villains from the real world, first from a Nazi-sick Europe, and now from the antebellum South. As a result, it becomes a bit more difficult to love his baddies qualm-free.

Jamie Foxx picks up the role of Django, here a slave emancipated (sort of) by a German bounty hunter posing as a dentist, cheekily named Dr. King. King needs Django's help identifying a troika of nasty brothers, and from there takes him under his wing, killing white men. A friendship blossoms and King agrees to help Django find and free his lost wife, Broomhilda. Tarantino loves himself some revenge narratives, and this one might be his bloodiest. Dr. King and Django track his lost love to Candyland, a plantation lorded over by Leonardo DiCaprio.

There's egregious violence in Django Unchained. Gore is Tarantino's cowbell, if you will. And it blows the kid in me's hair back. It's thrilling, joyful violence, taken right out of some bored teenager's sketchbook. But considering the historical contexts that Tarantino is beginning to explore, a serious tension is beginning to creep in. The giddy gore is being juxtaposed with very earnest, brutal, hateful cruelty. With Django Unchained, Tarantino might be presenting some of the grossest, near-real examples of the extreme dirt we've done to one another in the past. There are some scenes here that go at your empathy with the claw-end of a hammer. It makes you sick, and it should. What does it mean, though, when violence that's a little too close to reality exists next to violence that is so far from reality as to be comical? I'm not entirely sure what balance Tarantino is trying to strike, but the lingering result is unsettling. A month after first seeing the film, I still don't know what to make of it, still don't know if I'm okay with what I saw.

I do wonder sometimes how seeing what I did when I did might have damaged my character. Time and my loved ones will ultimately be the judges of that. But a movie like Django makes for an interesting litmus. The ten-year-old me loves the look of this movie, loves the performances, loves the cool-for-cool's sake anachronistic hip-hop soundtrack, the incessant nodding to and winking at film history, and he even kind of loves the laughable jam-red melee of blood and guts. However, I take a sort of solace in the discomforting crawling I feel during the more blunt, human incidents of savagery. Tarantino's always walked the line (or the blood trail?) between the glorification of violence and the critique of it. And while it's still obvious that he relishes the special effects splatter of it all, I get the feeling that there's an increasingly adult, less nerdy discussion of that line and his role in it that he's maybe preparing to have—with himself sooner, and hopefully with us soon thereafter.

- Andrew

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