The Screengrab : world trade center

Reviews By Request: Shotgun Stories (2007, Jeff Nichols)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Now that I’ve caught up with just about all of the major 2008 releases I’ve really wanted to, we’ll be going back to the old alternating-weeks format of Reviews By Request and Yesterday’s Hits starting next week. So, as before, I’ll be polling you folks to determine the first of two Oscar-themed Reviews By Request columns, which will run in two weeks. To vote, see the poll at the end of this review.

One of the better surprises among last week’s Oscar nominations was Michael Shannon’s nomination for best supporting actor in Revolutionary Road. Shannon has been acting in movies for well over a decade, but he first made an impression on me in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, in which his frayed-nerve intensity provided that ponderous film its only sign of life. Since then, Shannon has given vivid performances in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and William Friedkin’s Bug, which along with Revolutionary Road have turned him into Hollywood’s go-to character actor for playing hyper-focused crazies. Shannon’s character in Jeff Nichols’ revenge drama Shotgun Stories might seem on paper to be another unhinged role, but in his capable hands it instead becomes his deepest and most complex performance.

Shannon plays Son, the eldest of three brothers living in a small southern town. Shannon’s character’s name is not a nickname, but rather the legacy of a drunken, uncaring father (his brothers are named Kid and Boy). That he wasn’t named Sue is no doubt of small consolation to Son, whose father left them “in the care of a hateful woman” only to sober up, find Jesus, start a second family and become an all-around productive member of the community. It’s at his father’s funeral that the story is set in motion, when Son and his brothers show up and speak out against the man who abandoned them. Son’s act of spitting on his father’s casket causes the long-simmering resentments between the father’s two families to escalate into an all-out feud.

Normally, the revenge movie isn’t one of my favorite genres, because most movies of the type either emphasize violent action in a way that makes me feel vaguely unclean, or engage in so much hand-wringing that the ethics overwhelm the storytelling. With Shotgun Stories, Nichols avoids falling into either trap. This isn’t a pumped-up thrill ride, but neither is it a pious anti-revenge screed. Instead, it’s a sad, low-key story of two families whose mutual hatred for each other overwhelms their better judgments. Making the story especially tragic is that those who fueled the hatred (the deceased father and the two mothers) don’t bloody their hands from the violence- it’s their sons who suffer from their parents’ misdeeds. As Son tells his mother, “you’ve taught us to hate those boys, and we do. And now it’s come to this.”

Key to the movie’s effect is its setting, an “empty-ass town” with few opportunities available to its residents. In its feel for small-town life, Shotgun Stories owes a debt to filmmakers like David Gordon Green, who executive-produced. Son and Kid work together in a fish hatchery, Boy coaches a youth basketball team, and Son’s hopes of bettering himself hinge on his perfecting a technique to scam the local casino. Son’s wife Annie has moved out of the house with their son, but it’s clear that she still loves Son despite all the disappointment she feels for him. There are moments of happiness to be found in these people’s lives, but this happiness is either fleeting (as when Boy rigs up a blender to his car battery so he can fix margaritas while watching the sun set) or bittersweet due to the difficulties they face. It’s telling that Kid is reluctant to propose marriage to his longtime girlfriend not because he doesn’t love her, but because he’ll have a hard time affording a ring and a place of their own.

In short, these aren’t the stone-cold killers who usually inhabit movies of this sort, so when the violence begins, it doesn’t play out quite the way we expect. At one point, a character purchases a shotgun to use against an enemy, only to realize that he needs lessons in how to assemble and use it. And rather than emphasizing the violence, Nichols focuses on its horrible aftermath, the irreparable damage it causes. For example, Nichols cuts away from a brutal fight that kills one brother on each side, lingering instead on a scene in which both families gather in the hospital, staring each other down from opposite ends of a long hallway.

And in the middle of it, there’s Shannon’s performance, almost certainly the best he’s given to date. It’s been said that intelligence is the ability to hold opposing viewpoints simultaneously, and much of Shannon’s talent is his ability to convey seemingly contradictory impulses in his character. On the one hand, he wants to protect his family and uphold its honor; on the other, he wants to prove to his wife that he can care for her. In theory, these two impulses aren’t so different (they’re simply different facets of his need to do the right thing), but in practice it’s much more complicated. It’s a burden that weighs heavily on Son, and what makes Shannon’s performance such a marvel is that he’s able to convey this burden with a minimum of dialogue or affect, and without resorting to actorly histrionics. With his other notable performances and now Shotgun Stories, Michael Shannon is quickly becoming one of my favorite character actors, and the news that he’s playing the lead role in an upcoming Werner Herzog film is very, very good news indeed.

As you’re all aware, the Oscar ceremony will be airing later this month, and in anticipation of the Academy Awards, I’ll be running special Oscar-themed features over the next four weeks. For my next Reviews By Request column, I’m asking you to choose from five Oscar-nominated favorites, none of which I’ve seen all the way through. So, which will it be?

Which should I write about next? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. See you in two weeks!

Trailer Review: W.

Paul Clark — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Once again, Oliver Stone finds himself faced with the same questions that accompanied his previous film, World Trade Center- is it too soon to make a movie that dramatizes an American tragedy? Okay, settle down folks, I'm just kidding. And so, it seems, is Stone, making a movie about a boozing, tomcatting son of privilege who somehow rose to the highest office in the land. More than ever, the film feels like something of a put-on, what with George H.W. Bush threatening his son with an ass-whuppin’. But at the same time, I’m intrigued as to what the hell Stone is going to do with this. At the very least, it should prove to be a million miles removed from the stately apologia that was Nixon, to say nothing of his pious WTC.

DVD Digest for May 20, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: a crush of Blu-Rays from Paramount overwhelms the new crop of regular DVD releases, which is good news for you Blu-Ray fans, not so much for the rest of us. Time to trade up, I guess…

In the middle of the Format Wars of 2008, Paramount’s home video division made the decision to switch their loyalty to HD-DVD, thereby stopping all production on upcoming Blu-Ray releases and pulling current ones from the market. But now that HD-DVD has gone all Betamax on us, Paramount has decided to dump all of their previously-released Blu-Rays back into stores, along with some new releases. Check out this list of new Paramount Blu-Rays, in alphabetical order: Aeon Flux, Babel, Bee Movie, Black Snake Moan, Blades of Glory, Coming to America, Disturbia, Dreamgirls, Face/Off (Special Edition), Flags of Our Fathers, Four Brothers, Mission: Impossible III, Next, Shooter, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sleepy Hollow, Trading Places, The Untouchables, The Warriors, We Were Soldiers, and World Trade Center. I’m sure most of you can find at least a handful of titles in there that strike your fancy. And if not, you’ll just have to content yourself in the fact that Criterion Blu-Rays are only five months away.

Meanwhile, in non-Blu-Ray news, this week brings the release of the latest in George A. Romero’s Dead saga, Diary of the Dead (Weinstein), Nicolas Cage in National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Buena Vista, available in single-disc, double-disc, and Blu-Ray), the Happy Madison production Strange Wilderness (Paramount), and the anime epic Vexille (FUNimation Entertainment).

A handful of classics hit the market this week as well, my favorite being The Muppet Show Season 3 (Buena Vista), a season that included such memorable guests as Danny Kaye, Gilda Radner, Sylvester Stallone, Alice Cooper, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Harry Belafonte. Also of note is James Stewart: The Western Collection (Universal), featuring new DVD editions of Destry Rides Again, Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Far Country, The Night Passage, and The Rare Breed. And MGM releases three comedies from their vaults- If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?- no doubt to use their long-ass titles in an attempt to piggyback on the inevitable boffo box-office of this weekend’s similarly verbosely-titled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Finally, a handful of non-Paramount Blu-Rays hit stores this week: Anger Management and V for Vendetta. So that's cool, I guess.

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Man on Wire"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire may not be the best movie in the Tribeca Film Festival--it feels a little drawn-out at 94 minutes, and it includes "dramatic reconstructions" that, mixed in with home movies and news footage, create confusion about whether what we're seeing is real or staged--but it's easy to see why it belongs in the Tribeca Film Festival. As everyone knows, the festival was created in the wake of, and as a response to, the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the movie is about one of the few moments in the WTC's history that can only be called likable: the day of August 7, 1974, when Philippe Petit, a self-taught wire walker and master of other carny skills, such as picking pockets, managed to hang a wire between the two towers and perform on it, some 1300 feet above the ground. Interviewed in the movie along with his various accomplices, Petit, who couldn't be more elfinly French if he were played by Dominique Pinon, says that he knew that he had to do it when he first learned of the WTC's construction, years before the buildings were finished; while he was working the kinks out of his plan, he warmed up by performing similar illegal wire walks above Notre Dame Cathedral and Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Marsh's film, which is an entertaining curio, builds up to the triumphant big moment by letting the principles lay out how the scheme came together. (For Petit, getting out on that wire was nothing compared to smuggling his equipment into the building and up onto a high floor so that the wire itself could be set in place.) It can't be said that the movie does much for the legend of the American can-do spirit; of the three Americans in in the plot, one of them panicked and bailed at a crucial moment and another was summarily dispensed by Petit for turning up at a planning session while stoned. (Asked about it now, the man says, "I smoked pot every day for thirty-five years. I don't know why I wouldn't have smoked it that day.") As for the third local member of the team, the "inside man" Barry Greenhouse, his mustache alone is cause to suspect that he's really a Martian who took a job working in an office on the 82nd floor of Tower Two just to make ends meet. For New York audiences, the real star of the movie will be the cop who turns up in news footage at the end to explain it all to the TV cameras in an accent that would bring tears to Clifford Odets's eyes and with the kind of phrasing that you only encounter when a New York cop decides to get all precise on your ass. Calling Petit "a wire dancer" because "you couldn't really call him a wire walker" based on what he saw him doing out there, the cop says that it was explained to Petit's partner in crime that if he didn't come inside, "we were gonna get a helicopter out there and pluck him" off the wire, whereupon the accomplice began to "shout at him in French," which made perfect sense when you think about it, "seeing as how he's from France."

Akira Kurosawa Drops the Bomb

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows that Godzilla was, in its original context, a metaphor for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and by now a number of commentators have made the leap of seeing Cloverfield, whose advance publicity cited the veteran thunder lizard as some kind of role model, as either addressing or exploiting the memory of 9/11. Actually, American filmmakers have been trying, in one way or another, to deal with 9/11 in movies ranging from Oliver Stone's World Trade Center to Spielberg's The War of the Worlds to such indies as The Great New Wonderful. And Japanese filmmakers, including some of the greatest, took their best shot at dealing with the bomb and its aftermath, often in movies without rubber monster suits. Writing in Slate, Fred Kaplan argues that "If someone should feel compelled to make a film about 9/11 — specifically, about the social and psychic toll that the attacks have and haven't taken — a good model would be Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, a relatively little-known film by perhaps the most revered of all Japanese filmmakers that's just been issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. The movie stars Toshiro Mifune as an industrialist who becomes obsessed with protecting himself from the bomb and from radioactive fallout. His solution is to sell his company and move himself and his entire family to Brazil — a plan that inspires his three sons to try to get him declared nuts so that they won't lose their share of the family business. (Kurosawa often openly ransacked Shakespeare for his movies, and this thread of the plot suggests King Lear turned inside out for the nuclear age.)

The punchline is that Mifune's character really does go mad and winds up being institutionalized — in response to the shattering realization that even exile to Brazil wouldn't be enough to ensure his safety in the event of a nuclear war. The punchline to the punchline is that, in Kurosawa's vision of "a world in which the most dreadful dangers are shrugged off as routine", the man locked up as crazy is the only one who seems to have trouble simply adjusting to the ever-present danger of being wiped out at the touch of a button. ("Sirens wail in the background all through this film; it's not clear what kinds of sirens [police, ambulance, air-raid drills?], and nobody pays attention anyway." This is, as Kaplan points out, "a rather unsubtle message, but Kurosawa compensates with an understated visual style. According to his autobiography, he started using three cameras around this time, letting them all roll while the actors played the whole scene as if in a stage play, then choosing the best angles in the editing room. It gives the film a documentary feel — many scenes are shot from behind the characters — as if we're peeking in on a slice of life." It also captures something that Kurosawa himself must have felt to the marrow — though he may never have addressed the subject again so explicitly, he was playing with images of nuclear devastation as late as thirty-five years later, in the 1990 Dreams. As it happened, the idea of a man set apart from his society because of his inability to deal with the thought of its destruction turned out to be a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself. Made in 1955, it not only bombed in Japan but didn't play in the American until it was shown at the 1963 New York Film Festival; it received limited U.S. theatrical release in 1967. It was issued on VHS back in 2001, but at no point has it ever — you'll excuse the expression — set the world on fire.

Stone vs. Iran, Round 2

Peter Smith — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

You really have to hand it to Oliver Stone; whatever you might think of the quality of his movies, he sure does know how to rile people. He virtually invented Vietnam revisionism with Platoon, pissing off all the people who wanted to buy into the Rambo vision of a mighty America sold out by craven politicians; he irritated pretty much everybody with JFK and was practically elevated to Satanhood with Natural Born Killers; he drove conservatives batty with his sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro in Comandante; and his World Trade Center irked people of every political stripe. After returning to Vietnam for Pinkville (a dramatic retelling of the My Lai massacre), his next rumored project will be a documentary biography, in the Comandante mode, of the hugely controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It’s a move likely to enrage conservatives in the U.S., but right-wingers in Iran are already furious — they’ve hated Stone since he directed Alexander, a film about the Macedonian emperor who is reviled by Persians as a hated conquerer. As the Guardian reports, conservative newspapers in Tehran are already going buggy at the idea of their beloved leader being immortalized on film by a man who already directed The Doors, a film about "one of America's perverted and half-mad singers; someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so." (The article also provides a helpful side-by-side comparison of the careers of Ahmadindejad and Jim Morrison.) — Leonard Pierce