Search davidnmeyer.com
Netflix Recommendations
Film Review Cloud
13 Tzameti A Prophet Afghanistan Alan Sharp Aldous Huxley Aldrich Alex Garland Alphaville Altman Anthony Mann AntiChrist Antonioni Assazyez Baader Meinhof Badlands Baumbach Belmondo Ben Foster Bergman Best Films of 2008 Best Films of 2009m Jia Zhang-ke Best Films of 2010 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls Bielinksy Big Dead Place Bill Pullman Billy Name Binoche Black Narcissus Blleder Blue Crush Bob Dylan Boetticher Bone Tomahawk Breillat Bresson Brick Brisseau Bruce Surtees Bullwinkle Carlos Casino Royale Celine and Julie Go Boating Chabrol Chaplin Charlie Haden Cherry Jones Chris Pine Claire Denis Clint Eastwood Coen Brothers Criterion Da Vinci Code Daisies Dante Spinotti Dassin David Watkins David Wilentz Days of Heaven Deadwood Dean & Britta Death Proof Deborah Kerr Delon Delueze Denis Johnson Dennis Wilson Derek Jarman District 9 Don Cherry Douglas Sirk Dreyer Driver Dumot Dunst DW Griffith Eastwood El Aura Elizabeth Olsen Elliot Gould Emeric Pressburger Errol Morris Ex Machina Exiled Exodus Exterminating Angels Fata Morgana Fiennes Film Forum Fish Tank Fistful of Dollars For a Few Dollars More Freddy Herko French Frtiz Lang Gaby Rogers Galaxie 500 Gary Cooper Ghost Town Gil Birmingham Godard Gomorrah Greenberg Greta Gerwig Grizzly Man Guadagnino Gus Van Zant Hackman Hank Williams Hara Kiri Help Me Eros Henry Fonda Herzog HHelp Me Eros Hitchcock; Vanity Fair Hong Sang-soo Hudson Hawk I Am Love I Know Where I'm Going ImamuraTarantino In Bruges In The Loop Insomnia Isabelle Huppert Jar City jazz Jeff Bridges Jennifer Warren Jimmy Stewart Joanna Hogg John Ford John Glynn John Woo Johnny To Jose Giovanni Jude Law Julia Ormond Kael Kang-sheng Lee Ken Russell Kiiyoshi Kurosawa Kill! Kiss Me Deadly Kristen Stewart Kubrick Kwaidan LA LOI Lance Rocke Lars Trier Laurie Bird Layer Cake Le Mepris Le Samourai Lebanon Lee J. Cobb Lenny Bruce Lessons of Darkness Lester Bangs Let The Right One In Linda Haynes Linda Linda Linda Lino Ventura Lou Reed Lumet Maddie Hasson Maïwenn Malick Marc Abraham Marcel Ophuls Margaret Qualley Margot at the Wedding Marina Vlady Masculin feminin Mastroianni Mayersberg; Croupier McCabe & Mrs. Miller Mechanic Meeker Melancholia Melville Memories of Murder Michael Blodgett Michael Caine Michael Mann Michael Powell Michael Shannon Michele Morgan Miroslav Slaboshptskiy Miyazaki Monica Vitti Montand Monte Hellman Mopar Mungiu Nicholas Ray Nicholas Winding Refn Nico Night and the City Night Moves Nolte Nuri Bilge Ceylan Oliver Reed Olivier Assayas Ornette Coleman Oscar Isaacs OSS 117 Lost in Rio Pale Flower Paranoid Park Paris Passion of Joan of Arc Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid Paul Schrader Paul Verhoeven Pecinpah Penn Pierrot le fou Police Adjective Polisse Preston Sturges Pulp Fiction Pusher Pusher II Pusher III Radu Jude Raoul Coutard Raw Deal Raymond Chandler Red Riding Red Shoes Refn Restrepo Richard III Rififi Rivette Robert Altman Robert Graves Robert Hossein Robert Stone Robin Hood robots Rock Hudson Rodney Crowell Rohmer Romania Russ Myer Sailor Suit & Macine Gun Sam Raimi Samuel Fuller Samurai Rebellion Samurai Spy
Books By David N Meyer
  • Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music
    Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music
    by David N. Meyer
  • The 100 Best Films to Rent You've Never Heard Of: Hidden Treasures, Neglected Classics, and Hits From By-Gone Eras
    The 100 Best Films to Rent You've Never Heard Of: Hidden Treasures, Neglected Classics, and Hits From By-Gone Eras
    by David N. Meyer
  • A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Renter's Guide to Film Noir
    A Girl and a Gun: The Complete Renter's Guide to Film Noir
    by David N. Meyer
Social Links
Login

Entries in Tears of the Black Tiger (1)

Friday
Dec012006

!Filmed In Lugubrivision! Casino Royale / Tears of the Black Tiger

!FILMED IN LUGUBRIVISION!

Casino Royale

Sean Connery was cool and sadistic. Roger Moore was a smirking impotent alcoholic in a hairpiece. Moore’s casting function was to reassure the producers—who were in Moore’s demographic—that smirking impotent alcoholics in hairpieces could still get laid. His cultural function was to convince First World audiences that old white men could still kick the ass of uppity colonials. Moore never seemed to take on a European: Indians, Africans and darker-skinned South Americans were his preferred targets.

Lonesome Cowboys from Tears of the Black Tiger

After the dead space filled by the robotic Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan marked Bond’s return to a pre-middle age schmoove and to actual competence in the world. Brosnan could shoot a gun, drive a car, wear clothes and, unlike Roger Moore, it was not inconceivable that someone might actually want to fuck him. But Brosnan’s quote charm close quote pulled a heavy load of ironic self-comment. He radiated a 90’s post-modern ‘look at me playing Bond’ vibe. That damaged the franchise in a subtle way, by suggesting that we were all in on a joke, a piquant nostalgia groping for cred. A little ironic distance is fine, but smarmy self-regard is deeply unsatisfying. Bond may be an anachronism, but you don’t have to remind me all the time. I don’t want commentary, I want to escape.

Now Bond’s sincere once more. Daniel Craig is cool and thuggy. He suggests a Connery-sadism: he likes to hurt people. But any connection to Craig as a hero—and the film’s utility as escape—gets wrecked at the outset. Throwing back to the Moore era, Craig chases a black man, an African, through an African construction site filled with Africans. Craig chase the guy relentlessly; the chase scatters damage and African lives indiscriminately. Bodies fly from scaffolding, bulldozers smash buildings, construction workers minding their own business get blown to smithereens, just so one hyper-determined European can nab an African fugitive. The message is clear: when white folks have policy goals, the Third World will just have to bear the consequences.

Franchise-institutionalized racism aside, how dumb can you get? Why wipe out any sympathy for your protagonist from the entire urban market and half the world’s audience? At the close of the sequence, Bond shoots the unarmed black man dead and blows up an African embassy. The disheartening underlying message and the disheartening text (racist chase scenes with no visible plot point) start things off so wrong. How does that sequence, with so many black bodies scattered about, play at any Magic Johnson multi-plex? How is any non-white audience supposed to root for Bond after that?

2001’s thriller Training Day found a solution to this problem that was nothing short of racial/showbiz political genius. Denzel Washington’s a bad guy; he has to go down. The likely candidate to do him is good cop Ethan Hawke. Now, in Hollywood power-karma, no way is Denzel going to allow himself to be offed on-screen by a lightweight like Hawke. And Hawke has a parallel dilemma—he doesn’t want to be branded to African-American audiences as the white boy who killed Denzel. Yet, as the film built to its climax, there seemed nobody else for the job. The meta-suspense of this issue was far more gripping than the text-suspense of the plot.

The solution? The good old reliable Russian Mafia. While technically white, Russian Gangsters 1) wear black balaclavas so their literal racial identity is never confirmed; 2) have no stake in America’s cultural race-wars and are thus more like evil space-aliens 3) are regarded as such super bad-asses that being killed by them brings Denzel no loss of cred.

Why couldn’t the Bond folks have followed Training Day’s fine example and availed themselves of Russian Gangsters, Serbian Flesh-Peddlers or Rogue IRAkillers?

Another curiously misguided motif is the animated opening credits (and, by the way, it’s axiomatic: any film with animated opening credits is not worth seeing. Walk out as soon as they begin to roll.) As whatever lugubrious incomprehensible song played (who would have believed that we’d look back on Live and Let Die as a high-water mark?) the animation always featured hot sort of naked girls in profile. Now it’s shadow-figure guys kung-fuing. Why? We’ll see plenty of kung-fu in the movie. During the credits, we want nipples.

Bond girls were, in the old days, modeled on Vegas show-girls: illiterate, big glittery horsy eyes, garish features (aquiline noses like Pinocchio, giant or prominent tits, rounded asses with gravity systems of their own) and the inability to speak an English sentence as a human being might. They were like ponies on a rotating stand—pinups that moved. The Brosnan era brought a classier level of jiggle interest: woman who could walk & talk simultaneously (while, like Brosnan, somehow commenting on their role as a Bond Girl). Casino returns dishearteningly to girls so plastic and lame that the audience laughed when the first one showed up in a bikini on a horse, desperately thrusting her pelvis while hanging on for dear life. Casting Eva Green as the romantic lead only underscores the problem. The only emotion she communicates is a narcissism so uncut there’s no problem believing she’s French.

It all plays so tired and pointless. The Bourne franchise demonstrates that spy-thrillers can be smart and even authentic in their human relations. Bond is an icon and human—tough duty for any screenwriter. It ain’t necessary to put him in Chekhov. But even Bond can’t come alive if he’s buried in every dead cliché from the past.

Leone-Sirk-O-Rama (In Thai) 
Tears of the Black Tiger

Seeing films from a culture I know nothing about brings an enlightening freedom from meaning. There are moments in Black Tiger that seem screamingly camp, but for all I know of Thai filmic/cultural conventions, they might be butcher than Steven Seagal. Originally released in 2000, and now distributed domestically by Magnolia Films, Tiger harkens to the recent screening at the Japan Society ofSailor Suit and Machine Gun (covered in last month’s Rail). It’s so weird, deranged and sincere that it makes a mockery of films that strive for strangeness (like, say, Takashi Miike’s later work or anything made by David Lynch in the last twenty years).

I’d like to give you a plot summary, but I have no idea what actually happened. There’s a guy named Dum who’s both the fastest gun in the jungle (and dresses like Lash Larue) and a Rock Hudson-like heartthrob who can’t have the rich girl he loves. Or, maybe he does get her in one plot and gets killed before he can in another. Dum has a worst enemy/best friend who’s the second fastest gun in the jungle (and dresses like Tom Mix). It’s difficult to tell from one scene to the next whether Dum’s friend is helping him or about to kill him or both.

There’s a gang of bandits, a corrupt police captain and something about Dum getting kicked out of university, going home and finding his family murdered. The story flashes forward and back; Dum sometimes stands arms akimbo before a lurid neon sky like a Douglas Sirk finale and sometimes blasts twenty villains out of tree-tops and barn-windows with his totally inappropriate World War I six-gun. He does trick shots, too, and the director stops the film and offers us slo-mo replay of the best. After Dum shoots, we get mad super-close-ups of steam rising from his smoking-hot gun. It’s Thai, so if there’s a metaphoric resonance in that shot beyond what a dumb Westerner might assume, I can’t suss it. In other words, if the gun represents more than a dick, its meaning/significance/whatever beats me. This is true of almost all the symbolism in the film; it’s so juvenile it’s profound.

If Ken Russell re-made Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys with Nicholas Ray on acid and Busby Berkeley, the result might be Tears of the Black Tiger. The style, setting, dialogue and action combine West Side Story hyper-stylized movements,Rebel Without a Cause Technicolor wide-screen adolescent longing, Sergio Leone close-ups and music, manga frame-composition, hallucinogenic colors turned up to eleven and an amphetamine camp surrealism that’s all the more dislocating and hypnotic for its utter conviction.

The chaos of the story-line reflects the director’s passion for the Western film motifs he celebrates even as he eviscerates them. Because everything is so stylized, the most powerful emotion that comes through is the director’s joy in making the film. And no matter how anarchic the plot, that joy keeps you riveted. It looks amazing, every second , and is as sweet as it is fun.