Sacral King Movie

Had an interesting thought about King Arthur this morning. I was watching Excalibur. That movie has Campbellian mythography written all over it. They stripped all the overt catholicism and courtly crap out of Mallory's Morte D'Arthur and created a kind of strange melange of sacral kingship myth and hero's journey. The thing is, I think they might have missed a great oppurtunity to comment on the nature of religion and its place in a society. Arthur is a christian king in a land that is still pagan. His court upholds the (anachronistic) christian values of medieval chivalry, but at the end, he calls on Merlin (the representative of the old ways) to help defeat the embodiment of his sin and folly, Mordred (his son by his sister). The pagan and the christian are warring in Arthur. He must call on the old ways to entrench the new, the development of celtic-christianity boiled down to melodrama in a small epic film.

This, to me, underlines the similar-ness between the pagan and the christian as modes of control. They both are frameworks around which the stability of a society is built (at least then, for in my opinion, religion has been replaced with democratic law--at least in the west). The old and the new work together to take out the chaos of the sacral king's sin, to bring about the end of the beginning of the new society, of which Arthur's Camelot and Britain were the progenitors.

This is also underlined in the scenes where Percival seeks the Grail. The Grail is turned from the cup of Christ back into the celtic cauldron of plenty, while keeping the overt chirstian overtones in its iconography.

It's kind of a disappointment that these weren't explored more on screen, but these definatley were not in the filmmaker's balliwick when they were making the film. They were just trying to create, in director Boorman's words, "mythic truth", which to a degree they did. Perhaps they were smart to leave thesubtext the subtext, and just tell the story.

A Ramble About Robin Hood

In the commentary to the Director’s Cut of Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott said that he would jump at a chance to return to make other movies in that particular era. He did so with Robin Hood, and he should have looked before he leaped.

It’s frustrating not because it’s a bad film. It isn’t. It’s just hamstrung by being called Robin Hood. It isn’t Robin Hood. But then again, this is another secret history movie, like Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur. By creating a narrative that supposedly is about the man behind the myth, the film cannot decide what it is about. Sure, Russell Crowe’s character is well drawn and executed, bit he doesn’t need to be Robin Hood. As a matter of fact, the film would have been better if all the references to Robin Hood and the like were absent until the very end. I say this because it is obvious that the Robin Hood bits are a subplot, or perhaps an after thought. Because I think that Scott really wanted to make a movie about William Marshal and King John.

I really hope that, like Kingdom of Heaven, there is a superior cut of this film waiting to be released on DVD. But instead of Kingdom of Heaven, where the director’s cut restored the characters to the film (where the theatrical cut was all politics), I really hope that Robin Hood gets the politics put back in. I’m not saying this cut exists, I just hope it does. Because if somebody where to make a movie about medieval English politicking, I want that somebody to be Ridley Scott. He creates a singular verisimilitude in his period pieces that I think is absolutely necessary for this type of film. The technical side of this film is near perfection, which just adds to the frustrating nature of the film.

Watching the movie, you get the idea that Scott really doesn’t dig on Robin Hood. First off, there is no real Errol Flynn-like good-natured action; while relatively bloodless (especially in comparison to Kingdom of Heaven) the violence is brutal and realistic. There is also very little of the Robin Hood myth in here. There is a little bit of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but it’s narratively more of an aside than the main thrust of the film. There is very little humor; Scott would appear to be one of the more dour and humorless filmmakers out there and thus a poor choice for something like Robin Hood, if that Robin Hood was to be a traditional kind of RObin Hood movie. A movie that Scott is uninterested in making.

Not only that, but there are just so many good ideas that are just completely undeveloped in the film that you really wonder weather they had a full script when they started. First, you got the orphan thieves who live in Sherwood Forrest; visually exciting and new, and frankly, the only real bit of swashbuckling you get in the move. I would have loved to see a movie that was 1 part Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and 1 part Lord of Flies that takes place in medieval England and was directed by Scott. Second, you got Isabella of Angouleme, kingly-bed-usurper and political player in the making. Third, how can you make a movie that is more or less about the Plantagenets and not get down with some hard core political conniving from Eleanor of Aquitaine? The worst part is, that with the exception of the orphan thieves, you can see that that was the direction that Scott would have rather gone in, but he was signed on to make a Robin Hood movie.

The historical record for this particular era (1199-1216) is absolutely fascinating. There is so much a writer or a filmmaker can do here. First you have the fact that before the Plantagenets, most of the politicking going on in Europe was more-or-less tough guys with type-A personalities going around and raping and pillaging; the type of back room dealings, marriages for power and the clandestine maneuvering were relatively new to the European stage (or at least relatively returned to the European stage after the fizzling out of the Roman Empire). Also, there is the ethnic divisions going on in England at the time. The Plantagenets were Normans, which is to say they were French, and the upperclass was pretty much divided between Saxons and Normans, and the underclass was Saxon, with celtic fringes. The cultural identification that we think of as English was still two hundred years off (it was mostly a product of the Hundred Years’ War); England was not a homogeneous whole. Ethnic strife was the rule of the day. That’s where you get to the meat of what the movie could have been: a movie about the Baron’s Rebellion and the creation of the Magna Carta. All of this makes it hard to wedge Robin Hood in, especially considering that Robin Hood was a folk hero that has little to do with actual history, and since the real history of it all is so rich, kind of superfluous.

But there are other problems with the film, aside from the fuzziness of what it’s about.

The first act is essentially lifted in total from the beginning of Robin and Marian, the 1976 film about an aging Robin Hood starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. The final action sequence, an amphibious landing of the French army at Dover, poses even more problems. First, Dover does not have beaches. Second, the entire sequence cribs from Saving Private Ryan, with a few Star Wars: A New Hope bits thrown in as well. Marian shows up with the orphan thieves, for more or less contractual reasons.

All of this nit picking is mostly because I wanted this movie to either be incredibly surprising, like the Kingdom of Heaven directors cut, i.e. an intelligent, astute, historically respectful film about people and politics, or to be a rip-snorting-swashbuckling-fun action movie. It is almost both of them, but the filmmakers waffled and didn’t make a fully satisfying movie, but another beautiful failure.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex (movie review)

I have a bit of an obsession with the militant left groups of the 1960s and 1970s, you know, the Black Panther Party, The Weather Underground, Democratic Students Union, Red Army Faction (RAF). Their histories, and their part in the overall development in the world we live in today, constitute a secret history of political will. But, it is nearly impossible to get an unbiased portrait of any of these groups, their politics, their motives, or their actions. You know of them as either Robin Hoods going out to right a wrong, or as a bunch of angry kids railing against a system that they don't quite understand.

Uli Edel's 2008 film Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is a film that suffers from not being able to choose a side in the story. It could've been an attempt to be fair in the retelling of arguably the most successful leftist militant group of the era, but in the end it just comes off as empty and devoid specificity. On on hand you have Andreas Baader (played by Moritz Bleibtreu) and Ulrike Meinhof (played by Martina Gedeck), the ideological leaders of the Red Army Faction (though Ulrike Meinhof's leadership of the group can be debated, some say she was merely a hanger one who was accepted because of her newspaper columns and the real brains behind the operation was Gudrun Ensslin), and on the other, Bruno Ganz as Horst Herold, the investigator who is tasked with bringing the RAF to justice. Neither side is painted in any kind of light by the writers and the filmmakers. The matter-of-fact-ness of the film goes a long way of debunking the myth of the noble leftist militant.

But then again, it is very easy to debunk the RAF myth given that the founders of the RAF took their cues more from the films of Jean-luc Goddard and Marlon Brando than Mao's Little Red Book and Marx. As a whole, the ultraviolence of the assassinations, bombing, and kidnappings committed by the RAF have more to do with the worship of style over substance than they did an actual political theory. Sure they couched all of their manifestos in the language of the New Left, labor unions and Marx, but they still dressed like Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo when they went to bomb a department store. Real ideologues who who want to bring about the change they crave go to great lengths to become ascetics, to remove themselves from the world at large so that they can more readily commit violence to it; the student sycophancy of the RAF did not.

But what the film does well is show the ultimate dead-end of the RAFs politics. It shows, in a very subtle way, how the media began to paint the RAF not as a group committed to political change by any means necessary, but as terrorists who are a part of a larger international movement to change the western, democratic way of life. Of course, that is exactly what the RAF wanted to do, but their motives were not nihilistic in any way, in fact, they had a point, it's buried in the film, but it is there. They disliked the hypocrisy of the west, the failure of denazification in postwar Germany, and railed against American imperialism. If they would have gone against these societal shortcomings in a peaceful manner instead of kidnapping bank managers and killing cops, then they might have brought about some real change for the good. Instead they ended up bringing about the very fascist, militant, police state they thought they were already living in.

I know what you are saying, we don't live in a police state. But really, we do. But not because of some centralized, oppressive Gestapo. We live in a police state that was brought about through consumerism. The RAF were the first people brought low by the police through the use of computerized data sifting. The police did it by seeing who paid their bills in cash as opposed to bank drafts or cheques. In the end the RAF was brought down by the very consumerism that they despised. This is the one part of the film that is absolutely fascinating, after you get past the chic posturing the RAF members and their portrayal as dangerous, spoiled children (which I maintain that they were not), but ultimately goes nowhere. After all, this is a film about terrorists, not police. I would have liked to have seen more of Bruno Ganz and his character, and more time spent on the implications of the first generation RAF member's suicides while in custody.

All the performances, handcuffed as they are by preconceived notions, are solid, especially Bruno Ganz and Moritz Bleibtreu. Photographically, the film is very journeyman. It tries to take visual cues from Spielberg's Munich, but fails, and the editing seems to fast. There is very good production design and costuming, but in the end it merely supports a narrative that cannot make up its mind. But at the same time, the film manages to give us a portrait of the birth of the modern world, a world where the ultimate political statements are either not buying anything on Black Friday or killing yourself.

Movies and Politics

I have heard a lot of interpretations of the movie 300 than I care to really think about, and the fact of the matter is most interpretations of the film are wrong. It is not homophobic, anti-Iranian, a liberal treatise on the fight against hegemony or a neo-conservative wet-dream about soldiers fighting and dying for "what the believe".

None of these are the case. 300 is exactly what it appears to be: a big dumb action movie without any inherent political statement at all. Except for maybe that when a movie like this is is seen by people far and wide, it becomes political litmus paper. You paint this canvas with your own psyche.

The Spartans can be the Americans, if you are a conservative that likes the idea of the righteousness of the warrior, or the Persians can be Americans, if you are a liberal that sees the current actions of our country's government as being hegemonic and imperial.

And of course, how can a movie with so much flexing man-meat on display actually be homophobic? Because the bad guy is a bit swishy? I don't think say.

The Spartans themselves don't even make a good stand in for America, historically speaking--they were exclusive and isolationist. They despised the more liberal democracies of Greece and produced no art, outlawed immigration and warred constantly with their neighbors.

The Perisans don't either--dynastic empire with forced conscription.

They're better suited to being stand ins for the Soviets and the Chinese.

Of course this movie isn't history, it is a fantasy. So that point could go either way, really.

But the fact is this movie is pure violent eye-candy and nothing but, and damn good eye-candy at that. I've seen it twice and think it is a great, fun movie.

The political movie of the season that people seem to be ignoring it Antoine Fuqua's Shooter. This movie is an American Centrist statement against outlaw government agencies, independent mercenary armies and the use of a good man with gun for ill by the powers that be. It is seeped in righteous indignation, wells used political statements and is being accused of being what it isn't: a big, dumb action movie.

Shooter has for the liberal/centrist set the shadowy government agency acting outside the law, the conspiracy to cover up bad dealings and a Blackwater stand-in. It rails against the military industrial complex and out government's use of mercenaries.

For the centrist/conservative it has the lone man standing up for justice, out of control government that allows for bad things to shuffled under rugs, the military-industrial complex doing the bad things, a law and order system that actually works and shouts out a big commercial for private gun ownership.

And in the end of the movie it drives home an American idea, or maybe myth, that one man can make a difference, even if it is a just a drop in the bucket of the wrongs of the world.

And it's good eye candy with great action sequences.