In both Breaking the Waves and last year's Dancer in the Dark, director Lars von Trier's two biggest hits, the words "film-watching" seem determined to become synonymous with "masochism"; in both movies, the world itself seems engineered for one purpose--to mutilate their strong female protagonists. An 'anti-musical,' Dancer is literally The Sound of Music meets Bjork--in hell. It assaults musical conventions, like the happy ending and the campy-spontaneous-dance-numbers-by-irrelevant-extras, so it can show how the 'real' world pales in comparison to movieland's idealized version of it. (Irony is a cruel trope and Dancer is a cruel movie). But is Dancer juts a blatant reversal of musical tropes--or a powerful drama in its own right? If you're left thinking the former, then the movie will seem crass and manipulative, a failed, sadistic experiment fringed with embarrassingly campy musical numbers. But if you believe that the heart of the film is its heart, its dramatic trajectory (fueled by Bjork's animalistic performance and von Trier's camcorder realism), then the over-exaggerated song and dance numbers can only make the film more devastating. 

Dancer in the Dark and Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage, a biopic of silent screen star Ruan Lingyu (AKA "China's Garbo"), both gain emotional momentum by rebelling against themselves. Dancer splices Stanley Donen music with the more depression Lyndon Johnson America; Centre Stage is less flamboyant, cutting between different levels of reality: the original 1930s film stock; reenactments of the same scenes being filmed and acted; the reenactment of Ruan's actual life; and documentary-style interviews between Kwan and round-faced Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, who plays Ruan. Though now known primarily for her highbrow Wong Kar Wai movies, Maggie Cheung has also played a dynamite-throwing biker girl (The Heroic Trio), a magician tortured by centipedes (Eagle Shooting Heroes), and a sweaty nymphomaniac hotel owner in ancient China (Dragon Inn); as Professor Chris Berry pointed out when Centre Stage ran at the PFA, Kwan uses Maggie Cheung's reputation for goofiness to undercut the otherwise dramatic film. One might spend the first half of the film snidely skeptical of Cheung, only to spend the rest of it completely convinced that Ruan is both Ruan and Maggie Cheung--and completely moving.

It's not really that Unbreakable is such a bad movie--that's another conversation--it's that we liked it better the first time when it was called Sixth Sense. Both movies look at a green-tinged world through he eyes of an annoying child actor: meanwhile, a Bruce Willis look-a-like sits in the background with a bad marriage and creepy supernatural powers. (Add crying, cue classical music and ambience.) More importantly, comics writer Grant Morrison has declared that the pen is mightier than the world--once the 'inferior' medium, now it is comic books that are dictating what's going on in film and lit; consider: X-Men, The Matrix, and now Unbreakable, in film, and comic artist Ben Katchor's 2000 MacArthur fellowship for lit. You may find Morrison to be a little  sketchy (no pun intended), but just take a look at the recent Pulitzer for Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel about comic books--it's class to write about superheroes, just not to write them.

Unbreakable's project: to create a superhero that's believable, but wondrous. While it doesn't succeed--especially in comparison to The Matrix and Crouching Tiger--Unbreakable's fun comes in how it brings to mind better comic books with similar goals. The best examples now is Alan Moore's monthly comic, Top Ten, an NYPD Blue-style police drama in a city where everyone--children to hot dog vendors--have superpowers. Most Unbreakable-style comics like Astro City, Marvels, or the mid-'90s Valiant line all run the story from the perspective of the 'common man'--either reducing the superhero to our abbreviated human scale or writing the story from the perspective of the innocent bystander rather than the hero. Top Ten reverses this logic--instead of humanizing the heroes, it augments everyone else. The heroes always seem real--sometimes moving, often funny--and Top Ten's unique set-up distinguishes them not by their silly supernatural abilities but by their personalities.  

This May, the creators of The Rock are releasing Pearl Harbor, another archetypical summer movie with Ben Affleck and Cuba Gooding Junior. What many people don't realize is that there was actually a battle in World War II bearing, coincidentally, the same name. The inevitable bursting of declining Us-Japanese relations, the Pearl Harbor surprise attack at Oahu Island, Hawaii, signaled the U.S.'s military unpreparedness and hastened its entry into WWII. The Japanese fleet and approximately 360 planes devastated the American forces in the initial 30 minutes of the attack. US military causalities totaled more than 3,400, leading Congress to declare war on Japan on December 8, with only one dissenting vote. President Roosevelt called the Pearl Harbor attack a "date which will live in infamy." Not recommended for younger viewers offended by graphic violence. 

Two lovers holding each other, wet, naked. Then, Hiroshima. Clumps of abandoned hair, unpeeled skin. A mound of fish--irradiated. A man's eye removed with forceps. So begins Hiroshima Mon Amour--with a thirty minute-long collage, probably one of the most gracefully energetic in film history, one that spans a Hiroshima of newsreels and museum displays. This is a Hiroshima of the Western imagination--and like all of the film's landscapes and characters, it exists primarily in ideas ("Like you, I have struggled for a memory beyond consolation, a memory of shadows and stone... Like you, I forgot"). Directed by Alain Resnais, the king of filmic trickery, and written by Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima balances Resnais's narrative inventions with Duras's more passionate writing. Aside from the WWII theme, Hiroshima has little to do with Michael Bay's upcoming Pearl Harbor, the extravagant summer emission that surely promises a swelling of maple-syrup music, the American heart, and Ben Affleck's ever enlarging head. Instead, look at it as an experiment in artistic treatment, a controlled taste-test: watch both and see which one makes you a deeper person. Hiroshima is surprising in how it is both sparsely honest and brilliantly artificial--lyrical, experimental, undidactic, passionate, sexy--what we had previously thought impossible: an epic in miniature, a movie about a nuclear holocaust that somehow makes individual pain commensurate with the memory of history. |||