Attending a film festival alongside a bunch of industry people really drives home the fact that movie making is much more about the business than it is the show. I might go as far as to describe seeing a film premiere on Toronto’s advertising packed Yonge Street as the pinnacle of consumer Hell. You’re surrounded by billboards as big as the buildings they’re attached to, a Coca-Cola executive is handing everybody tiny bottles of Diet Coke as they wait in the line, a candy company comes by stuffing everybody’s face with sugary treats, top 40 music is pumping out of a speaker from God knows where, you get in the theater and a bunch of the best seats are reserved by corporate sponsors who don’t even show up to the screening, and then before the movie starts you have to sit through a festival employee reading the same lengthy list of said sponsors before every film. Even once the screen flickers alive you get regaled with commercials for Bell and Cadillac.
The streets here are packed with people carrying Starbucks cups, fast food wrappers, and cell phones. One of the biggest shopping malls I’ve ever seen looms over half of the festival village, and the whole town has a maze of shopping centers underground (meanwhile there’s two measly subway lines that go almost nowhere). Half the cars that drive by have corporate logos stuck to them; any inch of real estate that isn’t taken up by storefronts has a makeshift stand set up on it. People are asked to sign up for free offers, fiddle with new gadgets, get free makeup samples slathered on their faces. There is so much consuming going on in such a concentrated area that all of the garbage cans are stuffed full to overflowing. When the trash section fills up, people just start sticking their garbage in with the recyclables. Then they pile their cups on top of the bin, and eventually just cover the surrounding ground. It’s manifest destiny for refuse.
That’s just one side of the coin though. The other side is the ridiculous concentration of theaters, stages, comedy clubs, galleries, and other varied venues in this area. Downtown Toronto is a packed Mecca of art, culture, humanity, and expression. Where else other than TIFF is it possible to spend your entire day watching well made, progressive, life affirming filmmaking in beautiful theaters with state of the art equipment? It’s really a special experience to be here and take part in the tidal wave of enthusiasm going on about movie making. But there’s a price to pay. Putting on shows costs money artists don’t have, and getting everyone together in one place provides the perfect opportunity for corporations to take out huge swaths of potential consumers with advertising bombs. And it doesn’t help that Canadian money looks way too much like something from a sci-fi film to seem precious and valuable. The stuff flies out of your hand way too easy. I mean, there’s one and two dollar coins for the love of Mike. I don’t care what dollar amount you attach to a coin, it’s just change to me. You could give me a coin worth a hundred dollars and I’d probably just hand it to the next bum who has a snazzy sales pitch and doesn’t offend too much with his smell.
Long story short: having a good time watching movies, but I’m going to need to borrow some money. Today I watched the new Herzog documentary and a strange, coming of age film by Lymelife director Derick Martini.
Into the Abyss
If you’ve seen a Werner Herzog documentary before, then you should pretty much know what to expect from them. He’s going to pick a subject, and he’ll dig up some interesting footage exploring said subject, but the real attraction of the film is going to be the bits of himself that Herzog injects into the narrative; his points of view, his asides, his tangents; everything that he adds to the movie that a more disciplined filmmaker wouldn’t. Sometimes Herzog goes off on a run and the sheer absurdity of what he’s doing crumbles the whole production around him, but other times he stumbles into transcendent bits of artistic brilliance. Into the Abyss finds the filmmaker maybe more reigned in than I’ve ever seen him before, but it ended up being an intriguing doc to watch regardless.
Herzog’s subject here is a triple homicide that happened in a small town in Texas. He looks at the murder itself, how the victims of the family responded afterward, and what happened to the two young boys who committed the crimes after they were convicted. A large part of what Herzog is doing looking at this tragedy is using it as a framework to make a stand against the death penalty and how prevalent state sponsored murder is in the state of Texas. But on another level, what he’s doing is taking you through a nightmarish vision of what life is like in the Hellish, dystopian world that is the rural United States. It’s there where you get the real Herzogy goodness.
Herzog starts things off by interviewing a religious authority who counsels death row inmates in their dying days. The guy seems like a real idiot who the gravity of murder by state is lost on completely. By the end of Herzog’s questioning the man squirts out a few crocodile tears, but before that he’s all stupid metaphors about golf and squirrels that he uses to try and explain away what he does as not being horrific. At that point it was hard to tell if Herzog was making fun of the man or what, but soon after it became clear that he was just exploring the confusion that people experience when they’re involved in something as traumatizing as systematic murder. The second thing Herzog shows us is footage of the room in which these people put inmates to death. The camera moves slowly, lingering over the empty cells where they’re kept before hand, the gurney where they get strapped down, and the clock where their final seconds tick away. The music is subtle, but effectively doom and gloom, and the whole scene really hammers home the gravity of what it means to condemn a man to death and then carry out his execution.
Herzog is up front and clear about his anti-death penalty position, but he’s not afraid to go all the way in presenting how grizzly and awful the triple homicide that his two main subjects committed was. We get footage of the crime scene, a real blood bath. We get details about their motives, which were petty, juvenile, and unbelievable. And we get details about what the boys did while committing the crime and during the days after, before they got caught, which shows how unthinking and inhuman they were. These boys were complete animals, immoral monsters, and clearly they don’t deserve to live. But Herzog contends that this still doesn’t give us the right to say that they have to die. It’s a complicated issue, and Herzog’s position on the matter is made all the more strong because he fairly looks at the situation from every point of view and still sticks to his guns.
His one big digression in the film is a chapter in which he interviews a local roofer who knew the murderers and the victims very casually, and a bartender at a local pub who the murderers took on a joy ride after they stole their victims’ car. Here he finds a couple of characters that he likes. The man casually tells the most hillbilly story I’ve ever heard about getting stabbed by a screwdriver while in a fist fight, he reveals that he never learned to read until recently when he did a turn in jail, and he’s got a penchant for turning and spitting on the ground while giving interviews to legendary documentarians. He’s Grade A local color. The bartender, for her part, mostly just comes off as a real life version of Parker Posey’s character from Waiting for Guffman, and it’s pretty amusing to watch her airhead reaction to joyriding in a stolen car, littered with guns, and driven by crazy murderers. This sequence added a lot of entertainment value to the doc, but for a story that has both a prologue and an epilogue, it probably could have been excised for brevity’s sake. I did find myself looking at my watch every couple minutes by the end.
Overall, it’s an effective film though, especially for people who are fans of Herzog already. He gives us a real awful story, colors is with depressing details about the lives of all the people involved, adds complications when he reveals that some of the victims weren’t all that great people as well, adds further complications when he reveals that the police surely used excessive force and created a dangerous shootout situation when apprehending the boys, and he even manages to bring things around full circle by the end of the film by giving us some indication that another generation of ignorant hillbillies is being reared to someday take over the hellscape of this rural community. On the surface Into the Abyss is a documentary about the death penalty, but in its heart it’s actually the most effective horror movie set in the state of Texas that’s come out in a while.
Hick
Director Derick Martini and writer Andrea Portes would probably have you believe that Hick is a story about a frustrated young woman struggling to discover herself and find her place in the world. But it seemed to me that Hick was little more than an excuse to take a beautiful young girl in Chloe Moretz and sexualize her on the big screen several years before something like that could be viewed as remotely appropriate. A huge part of the film’s runtime is spent in tight shots on Moretz’s face as she pouts, flashes bedroom eyes, and bites her lip while flirting with the camera. The shots linger, and they happen about every three minutes; pacing be damned. We get a scene early on where the girl traipses about in her underwear, pointing a pistol and striking sexy poses, despite not yet even having a fully developed body. All but two of the male characters that Moretz’s Luli encounter in the film are willing child rapists, and we watch her be put into one sexually threatening position after another. I’m sure there are plenty of arguments that could be made as to why these scenes were essential to the story and true to the character, but I don’t want to hear them. What I was watching was just exploitive. And the fact that Moretz’s parents were both listed in the credits as executive producers made my skin crawl all the more.
The movie started promising enough. Luli is stuck in a small town in the middle of nowhere and her parents are drunken losers that aren’t responsible enough to be raising a child. Luckily for her, Luli is smart beyond her years; the type of girl who speaks in insightful monologues and can inexplicably quote Billy Wilder movies. The dialogue between characters and Luli’s internal monologue are undeniably well written. I initially felt like I was being introduced to a character who was insightful and who would learn some important lessons along her hitchhiking journey to Las Vegas. And once she meets a mysterious cowboy with a limp by the name of Eddie (Eddie Redmayne) and a troubled young grifter named Glenda (Blake Lively) who survives on wits alone, the film seemed like it was going to get even more interesting from there on. Eddie and Glenda have a past together, and we’re not quite told what it is. It was an intriguing mystery to me for a while, but it takes to long to get resolved, and once we do get our answers, where the film goes afterword is so out of left field and head scratching that I can’t convey how rapidly I was shaking my head in disapproval. What starts off looking like a sensitive character piece ends up becoming a pseudo horror movie, and nothing about the turn the movie takes works. In it’s second act Hick started to bore me, in its third it made me completely check out.
The biggest problem with the film isn’t where the plot goes though, it’s the way that Luli doesn’t grow, change, or learn any lessons whatsoever over the course of the film. Not only is that pretty much a prerequisite for being a good protagonist, it’s also the thing that the film tells us we’re watching. We see a bunch of Luli’s drawings representing her past experiences, we hear her thoughts on everything going on around her, and we listen to her predictions for where the future will take her. By the end she seems to think that she’s come to a new place and is heading in a new direction. But that’s all nonsense. Luli is, in practice, just a blank page non-character who reacts passively to everything that happens to her. She never comes to any revelations, she never gathers her strength and accomplishes anything; she just follows people around and watches as they do horrible things to her. By the end of the film she’s just blindly following yet another order from a stranger, but this time we’re supposed to think that things are going to end up differently for her for some reason. It doesn’t work, and the resolution isn’t earned.
The strongest aspect of the film is probably the performances by the three main actors. Moretz, as I said before, is a beautiful girl and she has a real magnetism to her. Here she proves that she also has some potential to develop real acting chops as well, but I don’t quite think she’s there yet. While she knocks a couple of scenes out of the park, there were a number of others where very serious things were happening to her and I don’t think she was able to convey the gravity of the situations nearly effectively enough. Blake Lively is nothing special, but she’s charming and vulnerable here as Glenda. The only thing I’ve seen her in before this was Green Lantern, and from her blank-faced performance in that film I had a theory that she was actually a store window mannequin brought to life and sent to Hollywood. I’m glad to see that isn’t true. The real find of the film is Eddie Redmayne as the earnest but unhinged redneck kid Eddie Kreezer. Redmayne goes to some really deep emotional places, he projects way more menace than he should be capable of, he’s captivating to watch work through conflicting motivations, and he’s able to create an organic, human character that I stayed with every step of the way despite the fact that he was working with some ridiculous material. This guy is good, and he needs to get some more work.
Redmayne is a find, and Moretz has huge potential, but when taken as a whole Hick is a movie that gets served up feeling half-baked. It seems to be working through matters of power struggles, intimidation, and domination, but it doesn’t have anything to say about the subjects by its end. There are a bunch of blatant references to The Wizard of Oz throughout, but they don’t ever amount to anything and I’m not sure anybody involved in making the movie knows why they were there. Ultimately, while the main characters were initially interesting, the film was never able to make me actually care about any of them; so what happened to them never much concerned me. I found my mind wandering a bit by the end of the movie, and it wasn’t because it was the worst thing I had ever seen, it was just because I realized I couldn’t care less where it was going or how it was going to end. By the time the credits rolled, not even the Alec Baldwin cameo was enough for me to call this one time well spent.
