Fighting in the War Room, Ep. 1 - May 2008

This is the first of what will be a monthly web-exclusive series from FilmMonitor.org. Each month the editors of Film Monitor will sit down and discuss various cinematic topics in hopes that something worthwhile and/or entertaining will be said. In this installment, Francis Colo, R. M. Crossin, and Joseph Ross meet at Film Monitor headquarters in Montrose to thresh out their thoughts on the films of 2008 thus far. Before proceedings can begin Crossin turns his chair around so he can straddle the back of the seat.

Joseph Ross: Should we sit like that?
R. M. Crossin: Not unless your name is Rory.
JR: Or Dwayne Wayne.
RC: (Laughs) So we’re here to talk about our most anticipated films of the summer?
Francis Colo: Of the next four months.
RC: And our favorite films of the year so far?
FC: Have you watched many films this year?
JR: Other than Iron Man.
RC: Yes. I actually haven’t seen Iron Man.
JR: Really?
RC: Believe it.
JR: I don’t believe it.
FC: I guess most of the movies I’ve liked so far are actually left over from last year. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was definitely my favorite movie of last year.
RC: That’s something we can all agree on. What we don’t agree on is what year it’s from.
JR: Pretty much any foreign film is going to be from the previous year by the time we get it here.
FC: Another film I really liked is The Counterfeiters.
RC: Tell us about that because our readers might not know, and I know I don’t know about it.
FC: The Counterfeiters is an Austrian film about these Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp who were forced to make counterfeit American bank notes and British Pounds during World War II as a Nazi scheme to destabilize their economies. I thought it would be good, but it was even better than I expected. It was very gritty and the camera work was really good.
RC: Was it a documentary?
FC: It’s a fictionalized account of something that actually happened.
JR: I thought it was also very good - definitely one of my top films of the year, but the musical choice was really bad. It varied between totally out of place to completely inappropriate at some points. Not offensive really, but very poorly chosen.
FC: It’s definitely worth watching anyway. It’s one of the most entertaining Holocaust movies, I would say. Most Holocaust movies are downers. This one is a downer too, but it makes you want to see more.
JR: But did you think the music was bad?
FC: I didn’t pay too much attention to the music but I feel some of it was a little over-dramatic. I guess it was trying to fit the period.
RC: Was it as bad as the music in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead? Because that was so out-of-place.
FC: (Laughs) No.
JR: Basically they used Jewish music from the period, a lot of which was really upbeat, and it really doesn’t fit with the themes of the movie. It was either that music or really overly dramatic strings that are a very weird contrast. It just doesn’t fit. The music is either too happy or it’s trying to force the drama, and in both instances it’s unnecessary. But the cinematography and the acting were very good.
FC: Very good.
RC: Should we be on the lookout for this director? What else has he directed?
FC: He directed another WWII movie with Matt LeBlanc, Joey from Friends, in it. It was a bomb, so this was a resurrection for him.
RC: It’s nice to see a director can bounce back from working with a member of the Friends cast.
FC: Let’s not blame it on Joey.
JR: His budget was clearly lower than the last movie he made but it worked.
RC: It seems like sometimes when directors are limited by their budget it brings out the best in them.
JR: That’s what the point of Dogme95 was in a way - if you limit yourself it forces you to be more creative. And I think because of the lower budget on The Counterfeiters the camera work is really great - all handheld - and it really worked well.
FC: So what’s your favorite movie so far this year?
JR: My Brother is an Only Child, which neither of you has seen. It’s about two brothers growing up in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in Italy who both feel like they need to change the way things are going in their country, but set out to do that in different ways. One becomes a Communist and the other a Fascist but they find out that family is really important even though they differ in their political views. It’s told from the viewpoint of the Fascist brother, but the Communists are generally portrayed as the more sympathetic group. It’s a really powerful movie.
FC: Did you like it because you’re a Commie?
JR: I could definitely relate to the Communist brother.
RC: I’ll have to say at the top of my list is 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which really disturbed me. It’s definitely not a “date movie.” In fact it’s about as far on the opposite end of the spectrum as you could imagine.
JR: Which is why I’m wondering why you took me on a date to see it. I guess you didn’t know beforehand.
RC: (Laughs) It’s very stark and the takes are really long, and as a result of that the actors really have to step up their game, and I feel like they really rise to the challenge. It shows these two young women’s determination to follow though with this abortion, basically at any cost. I think it’s interesting that the term ‘abortion’ isn’t even used for a good portion of the film. You don’t necessarily know what’s going on at first. It’s really ambiguous. I’m not really doing it justice.
JR: That was definitely the best movie of last year. I think it’s one of the best films in a long time, so it’s hard to do it justice.
FC: The last frame of the film when Otilia looks right into the camera - it was a very powerful moment for me.
RC: Also at the top of my list is Paranoid Park, directed by Gus van Sant, which I was pretty impressed with. I didn’t necessarily know what to think going in because I hated his film that was loosely based on Kurt Cobain’s “last days.” It was awful, but I like and respect van Sant and I like Nirvana a lot so I thought it had all the ingredients of a good movie.
FC: Let’s not talk about that.
RC: Anyway, Paranoid Park impressed me.
FC: (To readers) Read the article in issue number two.
RC: Right, I’ll cop out on that one, but Young@Heart I really thought would be a novelty - old people singing rock songs, but it was really touching. I’m not the kind of guy that will cry at the drop of a hat but I’ll admit that that movie brought a tear to my eye. I like how it challenged a lot of the stereotypes about old people, and it was nice to see that. Society is always emphasizing youth and saying things are over when you reach a certain age, and the subjects of the movie really prove a lot of those stereotypes wrong. It was very ‘punk rock.’
FC: Are you done?
RC: I’ll just say that Shine a Light is one film I regret not seeing in theaters. One of the reasons I didn’t see it contradicts what I just said about Young@Heart, about getting older. It’s a documentary about the Rolling Stones but they’re old. I thought, ‘well, these guys are past their prime,’ and I didn’t want to pay ten bucks if I wasn’t going to like it, but I definitely want to see that on DVD.
JR: Since we’re talking about movies we missed in theaters but look forward to seeing on DVD, I really wish I had seen The Band’s Visit. Did either of you see it?
FC: No, but it’s about a Muslim Egyptian police band that gets lost in an Israeli town.
JR: They get off at the wrong bus stop or something?
FC: It’s supposed to be a comedy.
JR: The opposite of Paradise Now.
RC: What made you want to see that?
JR: I don’t know. I think the poster looked interesting. Back in the day, before the internet, movie posters were the primary way of marketing a movie. It still works sometimes, for me anyway.
RC: I think it’s an overlooked art form now. You can do so much with them, but some look really tossed off. The ones that really catch my eye are the ones that are mysterious or enigmatic, that don’t reveal everything and make you wonder, ‘what’s that about?’
JR: It’s a neglected art form, but I feel like there are still some really good ones out there. One thing that really bothers me is that the people making the DVD covers never use the poster artwork. Bad Education, for example, had a really great poster, but the DVD cover is horrible. That happens a lot.
RC: Is that a contractual thing?
JR: I don’t know. Maybe they feel that the way to sell a DVD is different than selling a ticket to a movie in a theater. They feel like it must have the actors’ faces on the cover, whereas a poster doesn’t necessarily have to. There Will Be Blood just had a cross on it, but of course the DVD cover had to have Daniel Day-Lewis.
RC: It was very minimal.
JR: But it leaves you wondering which is great. The font was perfect.
FC: It looked like a gangster movie.
RC: It could have been a gangster movie, a Tupac documentary or something.
FC: The font on the poster for The Year My Parents Went on Vacation looked like an old-school soccer jersey and the movie is about a boy in the summer of 1970 when Brazil is in the World Cup - it’s a Brazilian movie - and the boy wants to see the World Cup with his parents, but they told him they were on vacation. They were actually left-wing students and professors who were running away from the government, so they dropped him off at his grandfather’s home in a Jewish neighborhood in Sao Paulo. I think the font really captured the time period.

RC: I feel kind of like a mainstream whore saying this, but I genuinely am interested in this new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, by Christopher Nolan. I like when a franchise can retain the same director and the same major players, and I was impressed with the first one, and with the exception of Katie Holmes, I think the whole cast did a good job. I’m glad Maggie Gyllenhaal is replacing her and I think it’s going to be really weird seeing Heath Ledger on screen, knowing that it’s the last completed film he was in.
FC: You don’t have to be ashamed of wanting to see a mainstream movie. I want to see it just because Heath Ledger is in it.
RC: Just because of that?
FC: He’s phenomenal in the trailer. His performance looks very promising. He has a terrifying presence in the trailer that I think is very different than Jack Nicholson.
JR: Heath Ledger looks genuinely crazy in this, like a psychopath.
RC: For me Jack Nicholson’s performance in the 1989 Batman movie was enjoyable, but I think what they’re trying to do with this one, even though it’s based on a comic book, is make it a little bit more realistic and believable.
FC: He reminds me of Brandon Lee in The Crow a little bit.
RC: Well, not just visually, but they’re both based on comic books, they’re both pretty dark-toned, and they’re both going to be released after the actors died. They were both young guys with a lot of potential - you could argue about Brandon Lee on that. I’ve really been impressed with Christopher Nolan’s films so far. There’s a lot of moral ambiguity in them, and I’m hoping he continues in that tradition.

JR: My most anticipated film of the year is Standard Operating Procedure because, really, anytime Errol Morris makes a movie it’s something to look forward to. In my opinion he’s the greatest American director making movies right now.
RC: Wow, that’s a bold statement. I thought you were going to say the greatest documentary filmmaker.
FC: I think a lot of people would agree with you on that.
JR: He’s the only documentarian that I know of that you can watch one of his films, and just by the look of it you can tell it’s an Errol Morris movie.
RC: Right, in two minutes or less.
JR: You can tell just by the cinematography, the framing of the shots. I think he’s got his own visual style and that’s something not many documentary filmmakers have.
RC: It’s hard to infuse your own individual style in that type of filmmaking.
FC: I agree with that but at the same time I think that to be a great filmmaker doesn’t mean that you have to have a distinctive visual style. Quentin Tarantino has a distinctive style.
JR: You’re saying that just because someone has a distinctive style doesn’t make them a great director?
FC: Yeah. It depends on how you view filmmaking. I’m sure people who align with the ‘auteur theory’ would be more into a visual style, but some people feel like it’s a distraction. Billy Wilder was against that. Louis Malle doesn’t really have a distinctive style either, but I agree that what Errol Morris has achieved with documentaries is very rare and unmatched by most people.
RC: And yet he remains to mainstream filmgoers relatively unknown.
JR: Even to people who watch documentaries. The movie is about the Abu-Ghraib prison photo scandal. It’s interesting because he generally picks subjects that are not well known, or not known at all - just random people. Like Vernon, FL, which focuses on people he found in a small town in Florida, or Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. The Fog of War was different because it was about Robert McNamara, a person that many people are already familiar with, but he managed to tell a story that not many people knew. Nobody’s heard from him in years.
RC: It showed him from a different angle, where he’d previously been demonized.
JR: Right, and when I heard his next film would be about Abu-Ghraib it seemed like a departure that he would make a movie about such a well-known topic - everyone knows of it, but when you really start to think about it, not many people know the actual story of what happened there. They know of the scandal and they know about the photos, but they don’t know the story behind them. They know about the lies and the cover-up, but the story of the people who took the pictures hasn’t been told yet. So, Francis, what’s your most anticipated film of the year?
FC: There’s a Wong Kar-Wai film that was released a few years ago, Ashes of Time. I know Sony bought the rights to it and is re-mastering it.
JR: For DVD?
FC: I think there’s a chance that they may want to release it in theaters. Right now any copy you can find in North America on DVD is super crappy. It’s one of the worst DVDs you can find. Before Chungking Express he was making a martial arts epic. He normally doesn’t make genre movies, but Ashes of Time is in a martial-arts setting but there is not a lot of fighting in it. The focus is on a relationship. The imagery is great - the usual Christopher Doyle cinematography.
RC: He also did Paranoid Park.
FC: Yeah, and his usual actors, Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung from Happy Together. It was one of the biggest flops of his career because the movie took a long time to make and it made very little money in return. It took him more than a year just to edit the movie and he filmed it in the desert, which was a pain in the ass. The movie was so frustrating that he decided to make Chungking Express to get away from Ashes of Time. So I’d like to see that one the big screen.
RC: Did he finish the film and then make Chungking or did he take a break and film Chungking in the interim?
FC: I think he finished shooting the movie but he wasn’t done editing it. What he did with Chungking Express was he wrote it during the day and shot it at night.
RC: So it was much more free and spontaneous. Sounds like kind of a 180.
FC: Right, and Chungking Express put him on the map while Ashes of Time was sort of forgotten by people. My Blueberry Nights was disappointing, but I’m looking forward to Ashes of Time. That reminds me, Criterion Collection is actually going to release Chungking Express later this year.
JR: They’re also releasing Bottle Rocket, which has been on the rumor list for years and has finally been confirmed.
RC: We all love Wes Anderson and Bottle Rocket has so much quotable dialogue (Mimics Dignan’s famous bird-call).
JR: So, what do you guys think about Mister Lonely? It’s about a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, who befriends Marilyn Monroe, played by Samantha Morton.
FC: I thought Michael Jackson would be interested in Shirley Temple.
JR: Exactly, Marilyn Monroe’s daughter is a Shirley Temple impersonator, and I think we’ll find out in the movie that his love interest is actually Shirley Temple.
FC: Or maybe there will be an Emmanuel Lewis impersonator there.
RC: Or a Macaulay Culkin.

This is followed by Francis Colo imitating Macaulay Culkin’s scream from Home Alone, putting both hands to his cheeks. At this point the meeting is officially adjourned.