FILM REVIEW: CITIZEN KOCH By: Faiz No comments

A scene from Citizen Koch.

To divide they spend

By John Esther

Since the birth of this nation, the rich have held great sway over our government. If it were not for the people participating in the democratic process, namely voting, there would be no stopping the rich from infiltrating every aspect of government – starting with the campaign process. 

However, that changed in 2010 with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens vs. United. A backhanded ruling engineered by the rich neoconservatives, the ruling essentially diluted the influence of working classes in the political process by equating unlimited and often undisclosed campaign contributions with free speech. 

Embolden by the new ruling, billionaires such as Charles and David Koch (AKA the Koch bros.) started this new weapon in class warfare against the working classes in Wisconsin with the 2010 election of Governor Scott Walker, a staunch Republican fixing to dismantle the unions in his state. As a result, a recall movement is born in 2011. People realize the importance of unions. 

Then the Americans for Prosperity from Virginia steps in, becoming Walker’s biggest donor while recruiting Teabagger dupes to back a policy clearly against their best self-interests. Meanwhile Republican members of public unions begin to question his and her longstanding beliefs regarding the GOP just like former Louisiana governor and US Congressman Buddy Roemer did as he ran a different kind of campaign during last year’s Republican primaries. 

Capturing this whirlwind of activity leading up to the historical failure in 2012 to recall Walker, co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Trouble the Water) cohesively illustrate what happens when the bad financial powers-that-be cannot be stopped. 

FILM FEATURE: SIGHTSEERS AT THE ARENA CINEMA By: Faiz No comments

Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) in Sightseers.

The new look

By Ed Rampell

The recent hacking to death of an off-duty English soldier by Islamist zealots in broad daylight in London chips away at that British reserve and the thin veneer of the Brits’ renowned stiff upper lip. Now comes the U.K. indie film, Sightseers, which is a sort of demented On the Road meets Thelma and Louise meets Bonnie and Clyde, with a dash of Manson tribe sprinkled on top for good measure.

Kill List's Alice Lowe and Steve Oram co-star as the thirty-something losers from Losersville, Tina and Chris, in this road trip-cum-black comedy gone horribly wrong, which the actors also co-wrote with Amy Jump.

It's England’s Midlands: Tina lives at home with her ailing, overbearing, over possessive mother and has earned degrees in canine psychology that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. (Aidst the gallows humor dogs play a fairly important role.) Tina embarks on an ill-advised week-long jaunt through the Midlands with Chris -- whom Tina seems to barely know -- in his “caravan” (that’s trailer, to we Yanks). We find out along the way that the bearded Chris, who has a bald spot, has been “made redundant."

At first they are hot to trot for one another as the couple drives about the Midlands, which includes some spectacularly dramatic scenery that mirrors the mood of this movie and its gloomy characters who are a sort of Heathcliff and Cathy gone off the rails. A series of seemingly trivial incidents set Chris, and then Tina off, as they embark on an odyssey that becomes a killing spree in this Ben Wheatley-directed movie. The authorities (who, as usual, are clueless -- no Sherlocks they) can’t make heads or tails out of the unfolding mayhem, which may be because it seems to have no rhyme or reason. As their crimes escalate the couple’s sexual ardor for one another inversely perversely cools -- very Freudian (Sigmund ended up in England, by the way).

Making a personal appearance at Arena Cinema, where Sightseers has an exclusive run through May 30, a rather fetching Lowe spoke about the film. In discussing Sightseers, which alternates between the bone chilling and the hilarious, Lowe cast some light on the filmmakers’ intent. Class envy is one of the elements that fuels the rampage of the couple, neither of whom have a full-time job in Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity-wracked not-so-Great Britain. In lieu of the fulfillment that worthwhile work and a full family and social life could provide them, running amok gives Tina and Chris kicks and thrills. They can’t get no satisfaction, so they turn to senseless crime.

Holding a meat-cleaver dripping with blood, one of the extremist fanatics who sliced and diced that British soldier was ready for his close-up. He melodramatically declared right into a camera lens: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone." (Bin Laden also said similar things like “if you leave us alone we’ll leave you alone.”) One wonders if the Western imperial powers, which are endlessly sticking their noses where they don’t belong into other people’s business, are listening? Probably not, so the tit-for-tat goes on in a vicious cycle of ceaseless violence.

Tina and Christian are not fundamentalists but, similarly, are the West’s powers-that-be listening to the restiveness of their own rootless  generation spawned by austerity? From the indignados of Spain to the Greek rioters to the 2011 English looters to America’s occupiers and so on, to quote Arthur Miller’s plaintive plea regarding in Death of a Salesman “attention must be paid.”

Like the fading Willy Loman attention must be paid to the Lowe woman and Oram man in Sightseers. This low-budget indie was actually released in the U.K. last November. In a sense, it is a motion picture prophecy of the brutal, senseless street carving of that British drummer, as it taps into the zeitgeist of a troubled nation roiling beneath the surface, as cutbacks, unemployment and more wreaks havoc.


Sightseers runs through May 30 at the Arena Cinema, 1625 N. Las Palmas Ave., Hollywood, CA. For more info see: http://www.arenascreen.com/.

 

 

 

FILM REVIEW: TOTAL RECALL By: Faiz No comments

Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell) in Total Recall.

Dismembering the way we were

By Don Simpson

It has been a very long time since I have watched Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall, primarily because I find any film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger to be overwhelmingly unwatchable. So, as a fan of Philip K. Dick's source short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," I was actually kind of excited when I first heard that Len Wiseman was adapting the same Dick short story. Okay, "excited" might be too strong of a word -- I hated Wiseman's embarrassingly flawed Live Free or Die Hard and I am not a fan of his underwhelming Underworld franchise -- but at least Schwarzenegger was not going to be in this adaptation. At least Colin Farrell seemed to be a somewhat legitimate choice for the leading role, so this adaptation had that going for it. Of course, by naming his new film Total Recall, Wiseman does risk the assumption that this is a remake. Like I said, it has been a long time since I have watched Verhoeven's Total Recall, but if my memory serves me correctly, Wiseman's interpretation is drastically different. Wiseman's film is also drastically different from Dick's short story. Unfortunately, it still does not come anywhere near the same intellectual levels of complexity as Dick's short story.

Douglas Quaid (Farrell) lives in a futuristic world in which the tyrannical ruling elite live on one side of the world and the working class lives on the other; the rest of the world is a vast post-apocalyptic wasteland. Every day, Douglas must travel via a tunnel through the center of the Earth to work on an assembly line in a factory in which a robot army is being constructed for the ruling elite. Douglas' wife, Lori (Kate Beckinsale), is a police officer. Together they are cogs in the tyrannical machine, helping the elite become richer while their own lives on the other side of the world are far from idyllic.

There is no escape for Douglas. There is no room for upward mobility; he and Lori will never live on the other side of the world. Douglas needs something to free him from his lackluster life so he turns to REKALL, a company that implants false memories into its clients allowing them to fantasize of a better life. Today we use cinema and television to escape reality, in the future we will use implanted memories. Sounds great, huh? Yeah, not so much.

Douglas' visit to REKALL unleashes a whole mess of shit. From that moment onward, he finds himself tirelessly running and fighting for the remainder of the film. Wiseman kicks everything into overdrive, leaving the story's inherent politics and philosophy in the dust. Suddenly, Total Recall turns into just another mindless action flick and once again Dick's heady original content is tossed aside for good old fashioned escapist entertainment.