We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is

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There are a large number of people who will go to see Under the Skin simply because they heard that there was a great deal of nudity in it. Of particular importance, Scarlett Johansson, the famous and curvaceous blonde actress many men (and women) fantasize about, is particularly naked, the first time she was gone full frontal on film. This is of note, I guess, because, especially in the United State, nudity is taboo and actresses who are willing to be nude on film are often looked down upon (while actors who do it are considered brave). Johansson did not go nude for a blockbuster Hollywood film, but, rather, for art, which should get her a pass from our nation of prudes. I have a feeling that the pervs that go to see Under the Skin won’t give it a pass, because they will likely be mystified – unless the pervs enjoy difficult, ponderous art films. I’m not a perv, but I do love that type of film, and director Jonathan Glazer has made an indelible, hypnotic masterpiece of an art film with Under the Skin.

The film begins with a clear signal that the viewer is not going to be coddled as they are with populist Hollywood movies. After spare white credits, the screen in black for a long moment as a low drone sounds. Finally a white dot appears, then a bright star, then swirling colors and abstract images while the soundtrack crackles and beeps and Scarlett Johansson’s voice is heard making various phonetic sounds: e, ah, oh, and so on. This goes on for a while, and it’s as beautiful as it is perplexing. Finally, we see the dark (Scottish, as it turns out) countryside and a speeding motorcycle turning through a curvy road. The cyclist stops, run downs an embankment, and then returns, a dead woman flung over his shoulder. He puts the body in the back of a parked white van and zooms away. Suddenly, we see a vast space of white light; a naked woman (Johansson) pulls the clothes off of the dead woman and dresses herself in them.

Next, we watch her driving the van around Edinburgh, stalking men. After she finds a man who is alone, has no one expecting him and no family, she seduces him. Each time, she drives him to an abandoned building, which she enters first. As he follows her, they are both suddenly in a space as black as the clothes-change space was white. She undresses, beckoning to the man, and he walks towards her, removing his clothes, piece by a piece. When he is completely naked (and often erect), the blackness envelops him until he is gone. She puts her clothes back on and looks for another man.

We assume she’s not human, but we don’t know what she is. We are never told why she is killing these men, how she is doing it, who the helpful motorcyclist is, or why she expresses no emotion as the men (or any others) die. However, something does happen to her after she picks up a disfigured man with plans to send him, like the others, to the black goo. (That man is played by Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis, which causes non-cancerous tumors to grow on his face.) She seems to develop introspection, and this leads her deep into the Scottish countryside, the motorcyclist in pursuit.

If all of this sounds rather odd, it is. That the film offers no explanation as to the motivation or origin of Johannson’s character or her motorcyclist pal and barely provides signals of her transformation in the third act. The audience needs to do a lot of work to piece things together, and this is often the hallmark of what we call “art films.” Sometimes, I think, this abstraction becomes pretentious, but other times, like in Under the Skin, the abstraction is what makes the art. I don’t think too many people would argue that any semi-skilled actress could have done Johansson’s part, but Johansson’s fame was needed to bring in audiences. Once there, they can witness Glazer’s sublime use of the Scottish landscapes, Mica Levi’s truly haunting score, and our own expectations of science fiction to create one of the most original major films in some time.

Under the Skin
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Written by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Adam Pearson, and Michael Moreland
Rated R

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Jude Law, naked and sweaty

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The first two minutes of Dom Hemingway is perhaps the most thrilling film scene I’ve seen in several months. As the titular character, Jude Law – beefed up, with mutton chops and his natural receding hairline – stands naked and sweaty, only his head and torso visible for those two minutes while he gives a fierce, bombastic, shockingly poetic monologue about the wondrous nature of his cock. Two minutes is not a very long time in our real world, but on film, it can seem like an eternity, but not here. Law becomes more ecstatic as he comes closer to orgasm; this ode to his cock explodes as a fellow prison inmate is giving him a blowjob. It’s fabulous (if filthy) writing and a fabulous performance, and when Law is peeling the paint off the walls with his intense recital of writer-director Richard Shepard’s monologues, the film is mesmerizing. But the plot does not live up to the promise of the many great individual scenes.

Dom is a British career criminal who is released from prison shortly after his cock talk. He had refused to testify against his boss, so instead of a plea-bargained three years, he served 12. During that time, his wife left him for another man and then died of cancer. His daughter grew up and has erased him from her life. Despite the joy of his released, he is very, very angry, and he hopes this disaster will be tempered by finally receiving not just payment for the safe cracking that got him sent to jail but also a deserved gift for his time and troubles. So, after beating his ex-wife’s new husband to a pulp and then drinking and whoring for three days, he and his best friend — the effete, constantly eyebrow-raised Dickie (Richard E. Grant, most recently of Girls) – take the train to the south of France to meet Dom’s former boss, Mr. Fontaine (Demian Bichir, Oscar nominated for A Better Life).

The visit both goes much worse and much better and then much worse than anyone could have expected. Afterwards, Dom needs the help of his daughter Evelyn (Emilia Clarke, the Khalisi in Game of Thrones), who has married and had a child with Senegalese man named Hugh (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, from the British sci-fi show Misfits). She is not impressed with her father, who appears drunk and bloody on her doorstep. Dom is often drunk and bloody, and parenting is not one of Dom’s natural gifts, unlike safe-cracking. He’s a bit rusty with that, too, and the gangster son (Jumayn Hunter) of one of his old enemies decides to use that rust to screw Dom over.

As you can see, the plot is very complex, and that usually that can work in a novel, but rarely on screen. (I was actually surprised that Shepard didn’t adapt Dom Hemingway from a book.) In a film, the constant turns and misdirections make for a convoluted story. It’s is also a bit tonally confusing. The bloody, somewhat slapstick crime story feels like it came from a Guy Ritchie film like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, while the family drama about regret and redemption seem to have been culled from something like Love Actually. Merged together, the film doesn’t jell. That said, Shepard writes coke and alcohol-fueled monologues as well as he directs tense and hilarious testosterone-soaked scenes. Even if he doesn’t pull it all together as well as, say, Quentin Tarentino and Danny Boyle can with similar material, Dom Hemingway is a lot fun.

Most of this, of course, is because Jude Law gives his best performance in more than ten years and the funniest of his career. He put on thirty pounds (drinking ten cokes a day), and it looks very, very good on his familiar lither frame. Luckily for us, he’s naked for a couple rather long scenes. But it’s his spitting, throbbing, screaming explosion of a performance that really matters and makes Dom Hemingway well worth watching.

Dom Hemingway
Written and directed by Richard Shepard
Starring Jude Law, Richard E. Grant, and Emilia Clarke
Rated R

 

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Interior. Leather Bar. is not a documentary (Spoiler!)

I kept wondering if James Franco and Travis Mathews’s odd faux documentary Interior. Leather Bar. would ever make it to San Diego, and that’s moot since it’s now available on demand at Vimeo.com. The idea for the film is brilliantly titillating. Rumor has it that 40 minutes of graphic sex in a gay leather bar were shot and cut for the infamous 1980 Al Pacino thriller Cruising, and Franco and Mathews (the writer and director of art-porn sensation I Want Your Love) have decided to recreate those scenes and make a documentary about that re-creation.

We watch as they discuss the idea with Val Lauren, who they cast as the Al Pacino role, and we watch as the extras are given motivation and direction. We watch Lauren, who is almost aggressively heterosexual, fret about what this film will do for his fledgling career, and we watch as everyone says over and over again that they’re only on set because of how much they love and respect Franco. And then we watch as they all watch the extras have sex – very graphic sex – for scenes that would be totally strange non sequiturs in Williams Friedkin’s gritty, somewhat unnerving original film.

When I saw the movie a few months ago in Los Angeles, I was delighted by it because it was, in the end, a cruel bait-and-switch. I laughed at the irritation of the audience because they were expecting something else. They were expecting what the film purports to be, a documentary about the making of something fascinating and lost to the homophobia of the late 1970s. (Spoiler alert!)

And, honestly, I wish they had made that movie, because it would have been fascinating and much more entertaining. And they would have at least made an attempt to ask Friedkin, who is still alive and making movies, and what actually is true about the rumors. But Franco and Mathews instead made a fictional, narrative film about making such a documentary. Everything was scripted (or at least ad-libbed with fictional goals in mind) and, eventually, it rings rather false.

For some reason, the audience is meant to sympathize with Lauren and his plight, to feel for his clear discomfort with gay sex and to learn, along with him, about where that discomfort comes from and how it hurts gay men. I felt as if Franco and Mathews had a conversation about queer theory and film psychology while very high and came up with this weird experiment in audience expectations. The problem with that is I cannot imagine that any more than a tiny fraction of the audience for Interior. Leather Bar. will be straight men, who are the only people I can imagine who could identify with Lauren’s portrayal of a more homophobic version of himself.

Interior. Leather Bar.
Directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews
Written by Travis Mathews
Starring Val Lauren, Christian Patrick, and James Franco
On demand at Vimeo.com

 

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Five words: “Tilda Swinton plays a vampire.”

For a good number of people, I could convince them to see a movie with a review one sentence long: “Tilda Swinton plays a vampire.”

Though she’s been starring in films for nearly three decades – her first role was in Derek Jarman’s queer masterpiece Caravaggio in 1986 – it has only been since she was perfectly cast as the White Witch in Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 2005 and then won an Oscar two years later for Michael Clayton that she became truly famous. She is strikingly tall, archly beautiful, and she has an acting talent as nuanced and mannered at Cate Blanchett’s. But she has a taste for much weirder roles, as the title character in Sally Potter’s transgender classic Orlando, the 83-year-old Madame D. in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or as both David Bowie’s wife and as David Bowie himself in David Bowie’s video for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight).” And then there was her art project in 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; she slept in a glass box as museumgoers watched. She has developed such a cult following as an icon of artful oddness that the utterings of the parody Twitter account @NotTildaSwinton seem believable: “A mission for you. Go outside, hold an animal to your breast. That is real warmth, not the glow of your screen. I typed this on a rabbit.”

In Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Swinton plays Eve, an achingly-sweet, centuries-old aesthete who happens to be a vampire. Her similarly afflicted husband Adam, played by Tom Hiddleston (who is Loki in the Thor films and The Avengers), is a glum musical genius who hides from the world, composing from afar, talking to no one but a clueless hired hand (Anton Yelchin) and his wife, but to her only over Skype. She lives in Tangiers, along with her friend Kit Marlowe (yes, that one, played by John Hurt), and Adam lives in a particularly dilapidated section of Detroit. She decides to come to him after he expresses more suicidally depressive thoughts about the weight of the world. During her visit, as they discuss history and art and their love, Eve’s crass and silly sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) arrives, and she creates situations that force this short story in the lives of Adam and Eve to climax in hunger and, of course, blood.

Unlike most vampire films, which tend to have outrageously high stakes involving the end of the world or at least the ends of the main characters, Only Lovers Left Alive is a slow, thoughtful, often hilarious character study. Jim Jarmusch has been making such films since the early 1980s, and he has been able to bring in talents similarly idiosyncratic to Swinton’s, with Tom Waits in Down by Law, Johnny Depp in Dead Man, and Bill Murray in Broken Flowers. Hiddleston is wonderful in the movie, bitterly funny and in awe of his wife, but Swinton is loving, beating, glorious heart of the film. She is heroically generous, kind, and wise. And as someone who once dreamt of being an aesthete himself, I fell in love with her Eve as she packed dozens of aging, yellowing books for her trip to Detroit.

Detroit itself is an uncredited member of the cast. Adam has sequestered himself in a crumbling mansion in a barely lit part of America’s most embarrassing failure, and he takes Eve for long drives through the deserted streets, guiding the tour with achingly sad stories about the once epically beautiful buildings that are now car parks and ruins. It is a symbol for Adam’s sadness about the world and what the zombies – his terms for humans – have done to it. Or, Adam and Eve’s relationship and Eve’s desire to keep living and loving forever is a metaphor for the hope for Detroit’s (America’s?) future. Or it’s both. Jarmusch, who grew up in the similarly sad Akron, has made a movie about the undead that it actually about living.

Only Left Lovers Left Alive

Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch
Starring Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska
Rated R
Opens at Landmark Hillcrest on April 25

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Captain America vs. the NSA

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I am a member of the strong minority that believes that Captain America: The First Avenger is the best of the recent crop of Marvel movies. Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is great fun, but the Captain America story is much more emotionally rich. During World War II, an incredibly scrawny, sickly Steve Rogers tries over and over again to enlist in army, but he’s repeatedly rejected. Finally, his verve and bravery catch the eye of the right general, and he’s injected with a serum, bombarded with a lot of electricity, and he grows a foot and some absurd muscles. He becomes Captain America and leads a special team of heroes and spies to fight the Nazis and an evil offshoot called HYDRA. During a major battle, the Captain is in a plane that crashes into the Arctic Ocean. He is thought dead for 70 years, but then his body is found in a block of ice and – because it’s a comic book world – thawed and brought back to life.

The sequel, the fun and surprisingly political thrill-ride Captain America: The Winter Soldier, takes place in the present day. Now, the Captain (Chris Evans, a fine, if not terribly exciting, square jawed hero) is a member of the superhero team the Avengers and he works for SHIELD, the Marvel Universe’s combo of the CIA, NSA, and every New World Order black helicopter fantasy. Unlike his extremely cynical boss Nick Fury (the increasingly creaky Samuel L. Jackson), the Captain still embodies the World War II morality, in which the ends justifies the means, but only if the end is “freedom.” He’s appalled that SHIELD will be creating a massive flying machines to take out threats before they fulfill their nefarious goals. Fury counters, saying, “SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we’d like to be!” The Captain: “This isn’t freedom. This is fear.”

The Captain, of course, is both right and prescient, because Fury doesn’t realize that SHIELD has been infiltrated by HYDRA, whose goal is not to just take out plotting terrorists but anyone in the world who is capable of disrupting the perfect orderly world they want to create. Using three airborne aircraft carriers – think boxier versions of Imperial Star Destroyers from Star Wars – they plans to slaughter 20 million potential. Led by the dastardly Secretary Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford, doing evil just fine), HYDRA first must get rid of Fury, the Captain, his new sidekick the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and Black Widow, better down as Agent Romanov (Scarlett Johansson, having the time of her life). HYDRA’s greatest asset is a mysterious superhuman assassin known as the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan); he has big guns, a mechanical arm, no fear, and a shocking secret identity.

The requisite fight scenes are surprisingly well choreographed and thrilling, especially since the directors, Joe and Anthony Rosso, have never directed anything but sitcoms. I loved the Captain’s physically impossible acrobatic slugfests with the Winter Soldier, and Agent Romanov kicks a great deal of ass while becoming late-night fantasy fodder for a lot of straight fanboys and lesbian fangirls. The Russos also do a laudable job with the extensive CGI, which is as clear as Whedon’s and James Cameron’s and thankfully not in 3D.

This is the first Marvel film since X-Men United (2003) that makes a political point, and it’s first ever to make that point explicitly. The second X-Men compared the plight of mutants with that of real-world gays and lesbians, though only metaphorically. The Winter Solider, however, is an explicit attack on the American government’s security overreach, tapping phones, tracking Internet usage, and watching everyone on video. The argument is the Captain’s: This is not the freedom we fought for. There’s a certain irony here, of course, since like all of the big movie studios, Disney, which owns Marvel, is part of the problem, pushing for more restrictive copyright laws that will be used to throttle the free flow of information and to track anonymous file sharers they claim are eating at Disney’s enormous profits. That said, I was impressed that Marvel made a superhero film that is also an old-style spy thriller, complete with a critique of the methods of war. Well, some of the methods. Killing is pretty much okay, and the body count in The Winter Soldier is so high as to be uncountable.

Captain America: The Winter Solider
Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo
Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
Starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, and Samuel L. Jackson
Rated PG-13 for tons of violence

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