Kingsman: The Secret Service

Michael Vaughn’s Kingsman:The Secret Service is like The Shining meets Pygmalion. The movie which lies firmly in the tradition of Tarantino’s meta cinema features a millenarian mogul, Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson). who frequently threatens that the outcome of what we’re watching is “not going to be that kind of movie.” Jackson’s persona references Pulp Fiction in that the character he played in both films has an inclination for Big Macs. Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is the movie’s Galethea who will be transformed from a tough growing up in council housing into a slick and impregnable secret agent by a Bond rip off (Colin Firth). In terms of the theme of transformation, La Femme Nikita, Pretty Woman and Trading Places are all referenced in the movie, which could also be subtitled Film History 101. The crazed Jack Nicholson character of The Shining hatcheting through a door is played by a mother trying to murder her 4 year old. All the agents in the super secret society of the film’s title whose offices occupy the backrooms of a Saville Road tailor shop are named after the Knights of the Round Table, Galahad (Firth), Arthur (Michael Caine), Merlin  (Mark Strong) and Launcelot (Jack Davenport). Eggsy is given a shoe with a spike like the one Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) sported in From Russia With Love, though that’s nothing compared to the murderous Oscar Pistorius blades sported by Valentino’s side kick Gazelle, (Sofia Boutella). Without giving away the plot we can reveal that the Queen of Sweden will allow Eggy to fuck her in the ass if he saves the world. To take offense at either the film’s violence or silliness simply misses the wonderful pointlessness of it all.

The Act of Killing

In The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer has assembled a group of thugs who were instrumental in the murder of over one million suspected Communists when the Sukarno government was overthrown in l965. It’s a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in reverse, to the extent that the perpetrators proudly boast about their crimes. Anwar Congo and Herman Koto who play themselves in the film would also be wonderful casting choices for an Indonesian production of The Threepenny Opera, (despite the fact that Congo’s face bears a disconcerting resemblance to one of the most peaceful politicians of all time, Nelson Mandela). These goons freely admit the Communists weren’t the cruel ones and proceed to demonstrate their torture techniques, one of which is garroting with a wire, preferred because there’s nothing the victim can do to loosen the pressure, even in the unlikely case that his or her hands were free. Gangster, Congo explains means free man and he is revered as a force behind the still feared paramilitary Pemuda Pancasila Youth, which is still active today. Where the provenance of terrorism usually comes from training camps, Congo and Soto are in love with Hollywood and claim to have learned their sadism from Brando, Pacino and John Wayne. Imagine movie characters from Quentin Tarantino’s Resevoir Dogs (with its famed torture scene) or Pulp Fiction running a real country and you get some insight into The Act of Killing. Is it a documentary? Hard to say. In fact, it’s a reenactment and as such it’s easy to see Congo and Koto would be willing to cooperate. By reenacting atrocities so brazenly, Oppenheimer’s cast are sending out a message. Yet there are times when the film is gets ahead of itself. A group of villagers playing their parts—as the victims or rape and torture—can’t stop crying even after their scene ends and when Congo plays the subject of an interrogation, who is accused of trying to ban Hollywood films, he seems to be caught up short. He has to stop. As brazen as he is, he’s the one character who admits to being haunted by nightmares. He’s also plainly capable of compartmentalizing with the help of alcohol, marijuana and ecstasy. The Act of Killing is a little like using the Nuremberg trials as a casting couch for The Producers. Say instead of sentencing Goring, Bormann or Hess you offered to make them film stars. Oppenheimer has inadvertently created a new form which we might term real cinema verite. He isn’t using non actors to play roles, as in The Battle of Algiers. He’s using real war criminals who still inspire fear. Read the film’s final credit sequence (as the director instructs in his prologue to the film). Half of the names read ‘anonymous.”

Django Unchained

In Django Unchained, Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) is a German dentist who has become a bounty hunter. Bounty hunting Schultz explains to Django (Jamie Foxx), the slave he frees, is a little like slavery in that you pay money for flesh. The logic will recall the disquisition on the burger known as the Royale in Pulp Fiction. We right away know that we are in a parallel universe due to the absence of the usual parameters of good and evil that characterize the Western genre. This absence of the categorical imperative, of a Kantian moral imperative, is what many people find so disconcerting about Tarantino in general and this movie in particular. Spike Lee has refused to see it telling VibeTV that to do so would be “disrespectful to my ancestors." “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western,” Lee commented on Twitter. “It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them."  In Django, the camera lingers on blood shooting across sparkling cotton fields, on beer suds combed off of a mug, on the masks of a bunch of proto Klansmen (uproariously fighting over the eyeholes obscuring their vision). The desecrated antebellum houses are a mixture of Tara and Wes Anderson style magical realism. Spielberg’s Lincoln deals with a similar universe, but it’s light years away. Lincoln is about slavery and Django is about film. Schultz, who travels around the West and South, with a big tooth (which is actually a safe) hanging from the top of his wagon is really a stand in for Tarantino (who plays a cameo in the film). Though Schultz speaks English, he speaks in arch tones using words like “caterwauling” and “aficionado” which might as well be another language to the cowboys. Similarly, Tarantino is employing the language of post-modernism, forever estheticizing, in a guiltless and value free way, as he ventures into the hinterlands of cowboy and civil war mythology. One anomalie is the romance between Django and his wife, Broomhilde (Kerry Washington), a German speaking slave. It’s curiously believable and almost moving when Django dynamites Kevin Candle’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) plantation, Candyland, and rides off to freedom with the woman he loves.

Seven Psychopaths

David Fincher’s Seven dealt with the Seven Deadly sins. Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths deals with a hard drinking Irish writer named “Marty” (Colin Farrell) in search of a movie. If Marty is an alter ego for Mr. McDonagh then the seven psychopaths created by the writer, which include a serial murderer who leaves the Queen of Diamonds at the scene of his crimes and a Quaker, are a little like Pirandello’s Six Characters only this time they are sorely in search of a director. Still the movie is significant if for no other reason than the debt it owes to a series of predecessors from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the Coen brothers No Country for Old Men and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. McDonagh’s movie estheticizes violence, along with everything in creation including the act of filmmaking itself. Amongst the many curiosities is a dognapper played by Christopher Walken who feigns reticence when grateful owners reward him for returning their pets (and whose comic exploits might hearken back to Ace Ventura). Walken who wears a cravat which covers the huge scar around his neck explains the nature of the garment to a mobster (Woody Harrelson) who has just murdered his black wife in a digression that recalls Tarantino’s famed “Royale With Cheese”sequence. The movie also includes a Vietnamese veteran whose family has been murdered at My Lai  and whose vengeance involves turning a hooker into an unwilling suicide bomber. And then there is the bizarre logic. Psychopath number one attacks Gandhi’s statement “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” by saying “no it doesn’t there’ll be one guy left with an eye.” “The Spanish have bullfighters, the French Cheese and the Irish have drinking” is one explanation offered for Marty’s drunken muddle, though it might not explain how his creator went astray.

The Big Heat

The Big Heat, which was recently revived as part of the Fritz Lang series at Film Forum, is the prototypic film noir, almost an essay in the genre, using actors—Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin, Gloria Grahame—whose personas perfectly embody the Pulcinellas and Harlequins of this sour commedia dell’arte. The self-consciousness of the form, and the way in which it footnotes its own provenance and lays the path for posterity, with cops and villains out of central casting, is key to understanding the film’s conviction. Quentin Tarantino is a master of this cinematic music in the meta film noirs he creates in movies like Pulp Fiction, which by the way have no monopoly on either humor or grotesquery, as evidenced in Lang’s effort. A B-girl named Lucy Chapman (Deborah Green) is burned with cigarettes, tortured and murdered. Gloria Grahame’s character Debby Marsh has half of her face burned off and gets her vengeance by reciprocating the favor on her thug lover Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). But there is no shortage of one-liners, sometimes of an uproarious nature, amidst the bleak landscape. Walking into Glenn Ford’s hotel room, Grahame comments, “Say, I like this, early nothing,” and says that her scar-face is “not so bad…it’s only on one side” and that now she can look at the world “sideways.” Grahame actually acts as the soothsayer, the drunken Tiresias of the film, popping out with aphorisms while defying gravitas. Of course the greatest influence on Fritz Lang’s work in The Big Heat is Lang himself. You don’t have the shadows of M; in fact, the film, and in particular a timeless scene in a nightclub called The Retreat where mobsters hang out, is full of light. But it’s a glaring light, the cosmopolitan light of Metropolis, which is recalled in one character's soliloquy, set against an iconic cityscape of towering skyscrapers that juxtapose cozy images of corruption with the juggernaut of impersonality.