It is day six of the festival, and through safe and unchallenging choices, I’ve come to the depressing tally of 3 not particularly good films in a row. As usual, it is interesting to compare and contrast- all three are different in tone and in style, they come from all over the world, and all fail in their own particular way.
The Stool Pigeon, by Dante Lam, is from Hong Kong, and is about a police officer whose job it is to locate and handle potential informers. The film shows the tension and anguish involved in sending people into dangerous situations. Shows it boringly, without an eye for composition, an ear for dialogue or a sense of plot. The film is laugh out loud bad at times. One of the major plot points surrounds our hero’s wife, and it goes like this: After getting drunk one night, our hero has sex with a prostitute, from whom he gets syphilis. His wife contracts the disease from him, and in a fit of despair or madness shoots herself. She survives, but loses her memory. She takes a job as an instructor at a dance studio, where our hero visits her regularly. Her father sees him there one day and assaults him, which jogs his wife’s memory. She is so shocked that she runs outside, where she is promptly and fatally hit by a car. It is difficult not to feel derision for a filmmaker who does so many things that are stupid, insulting to his characters, and insulting to his audience.
Winston Churchill: Walk with Destiny seemed like a very safe choice. Who doesn’t like a good Churchill documentary? Well, apparently, the answer is The Simon Wiesenthal Center, who made a pretty poor one. To be fair, much of that has to do with the fact that I’ve read up on the subject, so they weren’t going to wow me with information. But presentationaly, this film doesn’t bring much to the table, aside from the same archive footage and recording I’ve seen many times before. Its talking heads –historian Martin Gilbert, two of Churchill’s grandchildren, a singer from the era- aren’t thrilling, and it loses track of its main character for large periods of explaining WWII as if no one has ever told the story before. When it does show Churchill, it’s pure hagiography, with an atrocious score that swells at EVERYTHING. But that’s not the worst of it. Produced and conceived by Rabbi Marvin Hyer of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the film makes it seem as if the plight of the Jews was at the forefront of Churchill’s mind, and that as a diehard Zionist, the creation and safety of Israel was a crucial factor for him. It’s like the 90’s commercial with Fred Astaire selling a vacuum cleaner, hitching a ride to an icon’s legacy, without him being able to defend himself. This film is insulting intellectually, poor dramatically, and dull cinematically.
The greatest disappointment so far, though, has been Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing. Skolimowski is the director of great films like The Deep End (1971) and Moonlighting (1982), who returned to filmmaking in 2008 after a 17 year absence with the terrific 4 Nights with Anna. Essential Killing stars Vincent Gallo as an Afghan fighter on the run for his life, after escaping his US military captors. Gallo –an actor I find extremely unsympathetic for his off-screen persona- doesn’t utter a word in the film. It is supposed to be a primal tale of survival. Man versus nature, man versus man, man versus violence…it might have been okay with an actor with less of an entitled, egotistical persona. But with Gallo in the role, it seems like a vanity project, an increasingly off-putting experiment (“How about if he’s so thirsty that he sucks the breast milk of a woman who’s feeding her baby? That’s ****ed-up!”). There is a vague undercurrent of criticism of US military action, but it’s done half-heartedly and boringly…it’s disappointing when a filmmaker as original as Skolmowski shows you that same thing everyone else is (reminded me of DePalma’s Redacted). Furthermore, aside from the opening of the film –no logos, no credits, just the film’s title- there was none of the force or wit or humor or precision I expect from a Skolimowski film. It just kind of sits there; my only hope was to be able to blame it on Gallo, but no, Skolimowski is credited as writer, director and producer. It is a baffling and dismaying film. More interesting was the short shown before, a 3D simulation of a helicopter tour of 1945-era Warsaw, an utterly devastated town. It is a simple, one shot overview of scorched earth. It may not be deep, but at least it effectively conveys something, unlike any of the above films.
