DVD Review: Automata—Clunker with a Heart of Gold

I missed this movie when it came out a year ago, but that's nothing new. I miss a lot. And foreign-made films don't always rate first response from the American press. I suspect that's why the reviews were not so good, either. Hollywood loves nothing so much as itself, even with Antonio Banderas in the lead role and Dylan McDermott and Melanie Griffith backing up. It's just not a Hollywood flick and that speaks volumes. Even Robert Rodriguez rates better press than this from his Texas stronghold, but then he follows the bang-bang playbook to a 'T'.

Okay, so 'Automata' might not be 'Birdman' or even 'Matrix', but it's not bad, not bad at all. It's not easy making a good sci-fi film. It has to be 'scientific' enough for that crowd, yet realistic enough to be believable, and still satisfy the human need for narrative and sympathy—not easy. Apparently the main beef seems to be that it doesn't live up to its promise. Geez! Give it credit for even having a promise! Most sci-fi flicks don't, and action films don't even pretend to..

'The Matrix' was great, but totally unbelievable. 'Star Wars' doesn't even count. That's just live-action animation based on the 'Hero with a 1000 Faces' mono-myth like 1000 other stories. And space-based tales like it and 'Star Trek' are largely a failed paradigm now—too bad—though '2001' will never be surpassed in that genre. Space is dead—for now. Wait for the Mars space program—if we're lucky. So we're left with robots for our science fix, still relevant if kept up-to-date.

Remember 2014? Remember 'The Interview'?

The year 2014 had to be one of the weirdest years ever, politically and socially, almost unbelievable even months later. First (but not necessarily most) was the wave of child refugees from Central America swarming the US border. That's weird! That makes Putin gobbling up Ukraine almost pale in comparison, way beyond the pale. And remember Ebola, aka 'Apocalypse Now'? Then there's Malaysian Airlines' MH370 and MH17, the one lost in water, the other lost in war. 

War! ISIS! ISIL! And the pseudo sorta' Islamic State! Just when you thought that Netanyahu could 'mow the lawn' of the Mideast with Palestinian bodies, accomplished with impunity and consummate skill, a group of jihadis decide to form a new state in their midst with a ragtag gang of hell-bent misfits armed with sharpened knives and blood in their eyes. But the weirdest part of 2014 had to be the movie 'The Interview'. Remember that, the Seth Rogen farce starring him and James Franco in character as television personalities assigned to interview (and assassinate) North Korean leader Kim Jong-un? 

I finally got around to seeing 'The Interview' this week. It's a farce, all right, and if I were a dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy fanatic, then I would have to conclude that the North Korean threat of terrorism against the producers and distributors of this movie surely must've been factory-made PR to boost sales of what is otherwise one of the worst movies every made. Save yourself the streaming fee (this year's Oscar picks are all available on Netflix DVD by now BTW; streamers can wait).

WHO NEEDS HOLLYWOOD? NOT CAIRO FILM FESTIVAL INSH’ALLAH

Cairo International Film Festival is the kind of film festival that I like, the kind where you can watch a lot of cutting-edge films- cheap. While many other film festivals concentrate on traipsing in some Holly Woodstars for a photo-op, while sending you to one end of town for this film, another side of town for that, Cairo concentrates its films on just three central venues running simultaneously and continuously, some films playing at multiple venues at different times, so you don’t miss much unless you want to. I’m good for two feature films a day- and that’s what they are, the idea of ‘art film’ or anything less than ninety minutes relegated to the catch-all ‘experimental’ dust-bin somewhere else, as if God invented moving pictures to go on big-ass spools or nothing at all. Tell it to YouTube. Most Indian films don’t even run over two hours anymore, so pervasive is the Hollywood format, India being the country most represented here, in addition to the Arab countries combined. Except for ‘Amelia’ and ‘The Soloist’ Hollywood is not represented at all, and ‘Amelia’ is Indian-born Mira Nair’s film. Jim Jarmush’s latest film ‘The Limits of Control’ is here, but he’s hardly Hollywood. The only thing missing is festivity (‘festival’ right?), which only comes from large crowds in a centralized location… but good price will suffice. Literature is sparse, so I have no idea who won what.

Okay, in Hollywood fashion, I’ll cut to the chase scene- expect more ‘Slumdogs,’ and expect them to be made by real live Indians, not British interpreters. They’re prolific, and they’re good. Some are regional, but most come from the Bollywood system, which itself is in a process of change. The ubiquitous song-and-dance number is rapidly becoming an MTV-style number to the point that the whole film almost becomes an extension of that. Thus it’s as if in Hollywood, instead of MTV becoming advertising trailers for feature films, feature films themselves are becoming collections of MTV-style dance numbers. Some films overdo this dangerously, such as ‘Summer 2007’, a film with an important message that almost gets lost in all the glitz and glissade. That message is about the serial suicides of farmers, particularly in Maharashtra state of India, coincidentally (or not?) the state of which Mumbai (Bombay) itself is the capital. It’s a problem elsewhere in India also, and is a phenomenon without precedent in my study of world history. These deaths occur as a result of the crushing poverty and debt of the rural agricultural population, a kind of slavery to which there is only one way out apparently.

‘Summer 2007’ could be considered a ‘masala’ film I suppose, and you gotta’ love any film that opens with a dealer-like joint-smoking scene, then follows the rich-kid medical students to their classroom, where our hero immediately shows off his Alpha-male behavior and ‘party hearty’ attitude toward life. ‘Easy Rider’ does ‘Scrubs’ maybe, or ‘Animal House’? That and more as the hero ruffles political feathers by running for class president as a joke, then volunteers (with his friends) for rural service to escape the political problems and to get a posting close to the resorts of Goa. Instead they land in a whirl of rural politics and almost get killed in the process, instead finding that their own inherited wealth comes from the same degenerate system of corruption and exploitation as the disgusting one they’ve stumbled upon, one that leads to land expropriation and worse, mass suicides. The film ultimately fails by trying to accomplish too much, running almost two and a half hours and interrupting the narrative flow with repeated MTV-style filler. Re-edit the film and you’ve got a powerful film and Hollywood contender there. ‘The Damned Rain’ deals with the same problem more directly and from the farmer’s point of view, the endlessly downward spiral of poverty and debt from which there is no escape except death.

Many of the Indian films deal with these and other social problems, including the Muslim/Hindu social divide of ‘Gulabi Talkies’, a nice film that plods along a little too slow for its own good. ‘The Man beyond the Bridge’ tells a touching tale of unlikely love and social rejection when a man falls in love with a mentally challenged woman, good story. ‘Haat the Weekly Bazaar’ deals with polygamy and the local Rajasthani practice of parading a woman through town naked if she cannot afford to pay compensation to her husband for a divorce of her choosing, though nothing is expected of the husband, even when he has multiple wives. There are more fundamental issues at stake here, also. The line that “the only independent woman is a prostitute” in Indian society says more than many tome-length treatises on either side of the political fence ever could. You can’t help but cheer at the end when all the town’s women strip down to bras to show solidarity with their beleaguered colleague. Lord help us males when women finally realize it only takes one male to fertilize a hundred females, and that the rest of us are little more than dead weight, our legendary muscles useless in a high-tech society. The Dash Riprock-style penniless consort of our heroine is great comic relief here, too. But all these movies deal with the psychological suffocation and economic exploitation of village society, particularly in India, but it could apply elsewhere, also. Unfortunately very few of these movies show that city life is hardly the easy solution.

The film ‘New York’ follows the Indian diaspora overseas, and attempts to tackle the terrorism issue. It tells the tale of an all-American Indian Muslim who is mistakenly jailed after 9-11, and who subsequently becomes a terrorist as a result. As realistic as that part of the premiss is, the part where the FBI frames his long-lost best friend in order to enlist him to spy on the suspected terrorist is pushing it. And while anti-terrorist actions and rhetoric have certainly unwittingly created many terrorists in the process- a worthy message btw- to reduce our villain’s actions to one of revenge on the FBI to restore his dignity is a bit of an over-simplification of a complex issue. Dignity is certainly an issue I’m sure, but I imagine most ‘terrorists’ think a whole lot more about Israel than they do the FBI. Thus for all its pretensions and Hollywood-style savvy, its high concept fails by the very flaws in that concept.

The film that scores big on my list, though, is a non-Bollywood-style film called ‘Kanchivaram’, a ‘Communist film’ in which a silk-weaver is persecuted for trying to better living conditions for his fellow weavers at the same time that he himself is resorting to thievery to keep a boastful promise that he never should have made in the first place. Director S. Priyadarshan creates moody Bunuelian images that manage to be both lush and stark at the same time, all in a context that conjures up the best of Italian neo-realism, a tale of remembrance, as the main character returns home on parole to deal with his daughter’s sudden paralysis. I couldn’t give away the ending if I wanted to. You wouldn’t ‘get it.’ The one musical number in the film hypnotically re-inforces, rather than distracts from, the narrative flow. Catch it if you can.

Cairo International Film Festival had more than Indian films of course, but those were what caught my attention the most, as remaining faithful to their native realities while striving for universality in their narratives. The Arab films I saw were of mixed quality, ‘Pomegranates and Myrrh’ maybe the best, a very realistic ‘terrorism’ film about Palestinians whose land is in the process of being expropriated for new settlements by Israelis, and whose heir apparent is jailed for assault in the process. But the secondary theme is one of my favorites, i.e. love in the ruins. ‘Season of the Machouichi’ is a period piece about wrestlers fighting for the hand of a woman, the style going back even further than the 1900’s setting, exaggerated and stagey. ‘Casanegra’ goes into the dark seamy underbelly of Casablanca, but almost goes too far, depicting a place far more sinister than anything I can remember, almost ‘Mean Streets’ in its rudeness and barbarity, but significant shock value for an Arab Muslim film about an Arab Muslim place to an Arab Muslim audience, more like a Mexico to Europe’s US than a member of the Islamic Brotherhood.

Beside the Arab and Indian films, there were an assortment of other nationalities, particularly East European and East Asian. The one that stands out to me is ‘Twilight Dancing’ by Joshua Tong, a film with absolutely no dialogue that attempts to tell a story, through pictures, of an old man and a young attractive deaf girl with a problematic life. Parallels to ‘The Bow’ are obvious and likewise the meaning is as elusive as the images are attractive. Whether he succeeds or not is an open question, but the movie is certainly worth watching. Considering that Tong’s own written explanations reveal things that I couldn’t surmise visually, I’d say let’s keep language for the time being, uh huh.

It’s a whole new world out there, cinematically speaking. The golden age of Hollywood indie films has been supplanted by indie films from the rest of the world. Hollywood is left with its action movies, high-tech thrillers, and high-budget epics. Unfortunately these aren’t always the best movies. But it’ll survive. Meanwhile let’s feast on what the rest of the world has to offer. It’s a big world out there. Go see it.

The Elephant King

There's a movie making the festival rounds this year called “The Elephant King” and it’s about, you guessed it, Thailand. I don’t know if it played the Bangkok Film Festival last July or not, but it should have. There’s nothing wrong with sneaking a peek at yourself through someone else’s mirror. I saw the film at the Huntington Beach Film Festival in August and, seeing Thais speaking Thai in the trailer, assumed it was a Thai film, part of the burgeoning film industry here, growing up and ‘going inter’, in search of more mature markets for more mature films. This gender-bending ‘new wave’ was pioneered by Apichatpong Weerasetthakul with ‘Sut Pralat’ (‘Tropical Malady’) which was well received in overseas festivals, including gay and lesbian ones. This new genre, including ‘Ma Nakorn’, ‘Fa Talai Jon’ and others, specialize in bold, almost surrealistically garish colors, absurd plots and irrational characters, kind of an Asian magic farce genre in comparison to Latin American magic realism. But ‘Elephant King’ is not like that. It’s not even Thai. It’s gritty, realistic, and heterosexual, with all the betrayal, confusion, and hurt that that implies. In short, it’s about me, and my first year in Thailand, and presumably that of many others, something I always thought could hardly be explained, much less filmed. But first-feature writer and director Seth Grossman has done it. Perhaps I should explain to the uninitiated.

Thailand is weird, wacky, and wonderful, just how much so depending on your own individual circumstances. Things are fairly predictable for younger foreigners here, travelers and NGO workers, doing a stint, having fun, then moving on or going home. It's probably even more so for older male foreigners, taking Thai wives, and enjoying those golden years with the help of Viagra and alcohol, older Budweiser. It’s that vast middle ground in between where things get unpredictable and sometimes turbulent, both for the Thais and the foreigners involved. Many a Thai woman aged 25 and up finds herself dumped by her Thai husband for a younger woman, and left with kids to feed. Many a Western man approaching middle age finds himself divorced, bankrupt, or unemployed, frustrated and fed up with ‘the West’ and looking for alternatives. This is fertile ground for drama, both real and imagined. Sometimes it even works, and the Western guy finds himself reborn in the matrix that is Thailand, or the Thai woman finds herself recast in a new role in some foreign country. Sometimes it doesn’t, usually because the guy forgot the most basic rule: never mix alcohol and women. Many basic rules are broken in ‘The Elephant King’ and the results are tragic, just like real life sometimes.

More than two cultures, ‘Elephant King’ is really a story of two brothers, one younger and weaker, over-sensitive and slightly suicidal, one older and aggressive, over-confident and insensitive. Of course there’s a woman planted squarely in the middle of this mismatch, and of course she’s got a Thai male friend on the side, a love triangle gone rhomboid gone rumpus. There’s even a real elephant for comic relief. Care to guess who gets the girl? I ain’t tellin’. That’s not really the point, anyway. The point is: how do you know what’s real in a world where emotion is currency, and how can you truly find another when it’s so hard to even find yourself? Nothing is resolved, of course, so the writer/director turns out to be the most honest person in the story. The film works visually as well, ‘taking advantage of seedy Thai locales’ (Variety), such as a certain ‘bar beer center’ and a certain ‘warm wet massage’ parlor, all in Chiang Mai, my old stomping grounds. I even know some of the extras. It’s not an all-star cast, mostly unknown except for Ellen Burstyn, who plays the brothers’ mother, unless you count Joe Cummings, Mr. L.P. Guidebook himself, who does a quick drug deal for the cameras when he wasn’t busy being local production coordinator. Being a former film student myself and currently co-producing a festival back in the US, I can be a pretty harsh critic, fully expecting to snicker silently in the back row as the homies got their kicks touring the seamy tourist underbelly of Chiang Mai (of course the really seamy Thai underbelly is out at Santitham), but I didn’t. I got jealous. Seth Grossman told the story I’ve long wanted to tell, but found it too difficult, maybe because I was too close to it. Writer/director Grossman must have spent some time in Chiang Mai to achieve that level of realism, but I doubt that he spent ten years.

Try to find this movie if you can. Considering that it debuted at Tribeca over a year ago, it should either be finding its way into theaters or DVD store by now, though it’s likely ‘too artsy for the mall, too mainstreams for the art houses’ (Variety again). Somebody could probably make a buck packaging it for Thai audiences, though; hhhmmm…..