“The nipples! Oh god, the nipples! I just have to touch the nipples!”

Would that it were so sequitur.

Maybe the fault is mine. Maybe I just don’t “get” the Coen Brothers’ vision of the world’s randomness and disjointedness, but here’s another of their writer-director efforts where I just can’t see the point, unless it’s to make George Clooney look like a lovable buffoon again. Or to watch Channing Tatum dance. In both instances, the crotches of our pants suffer intolerable cruelty.

HAIL, CAESAR! seems to be aiming at THE BIG LEBOWSKI but steps off the bus somewhere at BURN AFTER READING.

Set in the 1950s, HAIL, CAESAR! follows one flustered day in the life of movie producer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), as he attempts to keep Capital Studios humming with forward momentum, amidst meeting with religious leaders who all disagree on the essence of The Christ, oversees a big budget musical (featuring Channing Tatum) about sailors lamenting they’re not going to see a dame for months, arranges an unwed female star to adopt her own baby to avoid scandal (Scarlett Johansson), drops off ransom money for the kidnapping of the studio’s prime star (George Clooney), replaces a serious actor with a rodeo cowboy (Alden Ehrenreich) to the chagrin of that film’s director (Ralph Fiennes), and fends off interviews with twin harpie reporters (Tilda Swinton as both Thacker sisters).

The misrepresentative trailer pushes the Baird Whitlock (Clooney) kidnapping angle, because he’s the most recognizable face, but the film is actually about Eddie Mannix, and the kidnapping is one small thing he must deal with in a day brimming with Hollywood dramedy.

Movie is a hodge-podge of intertwining throughlines that create entertaining vignettes, but when we pull back to examine the grand picture, we are lost amongst plot threads that don’t connect in any satisfying manner. For example, the Whitlock kidnapping is carried out by a cabal of communist writers (headed by Max Baker), seeking ransom (that they consider payback) because they are sick of big studios taking their work, not crediting them and not paying them appropriately. Eddie Mannix pays the ransom. And the bag of money promptly falls into the sea accidentally and is lost. The writers watch it sink with a sigh. End of thread. Viewers say Wha–?

Further, Whitlock suffers Stockholm Syndrome, in which he ends up siding with his kidnappers on communistic principles, espousing those views excitedly to Eddie Mannix upon his return, who divests Whitlock of his red leanings simply by slapping him across the face many times. Any further developments on infiltration subplots or, at the very least, comedic insubordination, is simply nixed when Whitlock walks out the door, apparently cured of communism by slapping. Viewers say Whaaa–?

Cowboy Hobie Doyle (Ehrenreich) is rumored to be sweet on a young dancer. They are seen together in public by the gossip columnist Thacker – then Hobie leaves the restaurant alone, following the kidnapper’s ransom and – young dancer just disappears from the film, her plot thread dropped. By now, we’re wondering whether the script consultant was ever consulted at all.

“The nipples! Oh god, the nipples! I just have to touch the nipples!”

But all these plot threads are red herrings. No character develops past their comedic introduction. Because all their threads run through Eddie Mannix, who has the only arc, as he wrestles with the decision to continue in the capricious movie business that he apparently loves, or accept a job offer by Lockheed with better pay, hours and security. The Lockheed rep, practically begging for Eddie’s “fixer” skills in their company, inadvertently insults Eddie when he calls the film industry “make-believe,” portending Eddie’s ultimate decision… As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, the filmmakers seem to have written this “moral struggle” into Eddie’s character to add at least one dimension to this pretty shallow dark comedy.

Cameos: Christopher Lambert as a playboy director who is married; Jonah Hill as a fall guy with strong arms who is bonded; Frances McDormand as a chain-smoking editor who shouldn’t wear scarves; Clancy Brown as a centurion at the foot of the crucifix.

HAIL, CAESAR! refers to the film Whitlock is in the midst of making, about his centurion character meeting The Christ. (A funny point that Clooney is never out of his centurion garb the whole movie.) It’s BEN-HUR meets THE ROBE. And as he has been empowered to do in all his past partnerships with the Coens, Clooney gets to overact to his heart’s content, which he embraces with an ex-communicated nun’s fervor.

Narrated by the familiar voice of Dumbledore (Michael Gambon), HAIL, CAESAR! is brimming with meta references; we are constantly being made aware of the edges of the movie frame, with actors breaking character, equipment showing, slates, daily rushes, director asides (“Squint against the grandeur!”), and director Fiennes trying to demonstrate to American cowboy Ehrenreich how to speak (“Would that it were so simple”) in a hilarious depiction of the disparity between American drawlers and English Actors with verbal skills.

If you are old enough to remember the Hollywood studio system of the 40s and 50s, this roman a clef might hold some resonance for you, as I’m sure all these vignettes depict people who once were giants in the film industry. But most people old enough to remember “that Hollywood” are suffering from the dementia “that Hollywood” gave them, and the rest of the viewing public didn’t know there’d be a test or we would have studied.

Would that it were so simple.

In the end, Eddie decides to skip the more lucrative, sensible, steady – boring – job offer, and continue to manage the non-sequitur crises of his day with a spring in his step. It is, after all, only make-believe. And that’s entertainment. And entertaining.

END

Noah’s Ark and Lang’s Metropolis on a Midnight Express.

SNOWPIERCER will make you question your place in society, the innate class system that drives humankind, and the ultimate meaning of freedom. It will also make you question what the hell Chris Evans is doing actually Acting and not just flexing his bulge-ceps to score all-American hooers.

Evans is Curtis, a “Tail-Sectioner” in a mighty world-girdling train called the Snowpiercer, a long great rolling joke that is a metaphor for human society; a perpetual-motion juggernaut created to house the last of mankind, after a chemical to curb global warming backfired and froze the planet to death. (Typical! Humans!) Like a shark, Snowpiercer constantly needs to move forward to process the perpetual ice for sustenance, and makes one revolution of the globe every year.

Geeks come running for the delicious taste of Soylent Green!

Tail Sectioners are clothed in rags, eat rubbery protein blocks and are covered in poo, overseen by armed guards. It’s Orwell’s 1984 on steel wheels. The further up the train you go, we are told, the more luxurious the living conditions, therefore the engine itself is regarded/indoctrinated as “the Sacred Engine.” A Yorkshire-accented man-woman named Mason (Tilda Swinton) lectures on the “eternal preordained order prescribed by the Sacred Engine: all things in their place, all passengers in their section,” calling the Tail Sectioners “feet,” adding “when the foot seeks the place of the head, a sacred line is crossed.” Unbeknownst to her, that’s exactly what the Tailers are planning to do…

SNOWPIERCER has been called the “horizontal METROPOLIS” but there’s a slight difference. In Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, each segment of society did not know how the other segments operated; the leaders were inept at the workers’ jobs (as proven by Boy Romney trying to perform a worker’s job and failing) and the workers did not know how to rebel effectively (as proven by Metropolis exploding when they rebelled by ceasing to maintain their machines); “Head and hands want to join together but don’t have the heart to do it.” (Reminds us of SNOWPIERCER’s foot and head analogy…) But in the Snowpiercer (based on a French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette) the leader, known as Wilford, has specifically created the class system from the front to the back of the train, and has been a worker on his own train (as proven by his muscle-memory hand movements), sadly aware that this class system is the only way humanity can co-exist and survive.

He’s right. In METROPOLIS, the separation that the class system caused was the big bowl of wrong; it wasn’t the system itself. In SNOWPIERCER, in the face of extinction, we see that mankind needs the system to survive.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is not the message of SNOWPIERCER – the message is actually the opposite – that mankind should NOT be stultified with a class system and all people should be equal and free. But that point is made in the worst of ways, which we shall discuss later, complete with spoilers…

Poor Jamie Bell – since his breakout role in BILLY ELLIOTT, the poor boy always seems to be playing second fiddle. He’s Edgar, Curtis’s boy wonder.

The woman from THE HELP helps (Octavia Spencer). I find it slightly offensive (but mostly funny) how during the revolt, when the Tailers are shouting, “I’m sick of these protein bars!” the white folk shout, “We want real food!” and she shouts, “We want chicken!” Really? They made the black lady shout chicken? Louisiana fry with cornbread and grits?

Ewen Bremner is a Tailer, whose son is taken for the Engine (as many people are taken mysteriously from time to time), and he suffers a disturbing fate for resisting – his arm frozen solid and broken off!

Luke Pasqualino is a badass Tailer; Vlad Ivanov is an even badder-ass Enforcer.

And John Hurt, direct from his poo-decor totalitarian apartment in Orwell’s 1984, is the tacit leader of the Tail; missing limbs and youth, he keeps prompting the hesitant Curtis to rise to the occasion, “I am but a shadow of my former shadow.” And his name is – get this! – Gilliam. (As in Terry, the Python prince of dystopian futures?)

Kang-ho Song is Nam the Keymaster and Ah-sung Ko is his daughter Yona. They initially help the Tailers in return for the drug “kronole,” but Nam has another agenda, as we constantly see him preparing his daughter in subtle ways for life beyond the engine.

It’s beautifully shot in ocher grays, with gunslinger direction and whipcrack action pieces, with a casual futuristic élan that doesn’t need explanation, yet there are admittedly a few faults and plot holes, because movie is not literal, but a surreal parable. (We see rows of cooked chickens and sides of beef – but where are the cars that house the live cows and chickens?)

Despite the American and European presence, keep in mind this is a South Korean production, helmed by director Joon-ho Bong (or Bong Joon-ho; I guess it depends which hemisphere you’re standing upside down in), who also co-wrote with Kelly Masterson, so there is a disturbing sense of disorientation built into the way the film is shot, the nonchalant gore, the offhanded swearing, plot points that blindside us, sacrifices that shock us (“You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best.” What a line!), and the arthouse shots that drive us to delve deeper than the dustups.

”The Last Supper” by Ken Shabby.

At first SNOWPIERCER is about the battle of the breakout; as the journey progresses, it becomes allegorical, and as our heroes near the Engine, a startling revelation looms…

A horrifying moment as a gate is opened to reveal a carriage packed with burly warriors, all wielding axes and dressed in black hoods. This must be the Republican car. An American movie would have launched into action that hurts our eyes with cam-shake, but these hooded thugs first soundlessly pass around a big fish that they take turns gutting with their axes… Why are they faceless soldiers? Because they’re truly faceless soldiers doing the Sacred Engine’s bidding. Mason at their head, decreeing, “Exactly 76 percent of you will die.” (This percentage formulation is all part of the grand scheme explained later.) The incongruity when they pass the annual mark and everyone stops battling to wish each other Happy New Year…

We follow through the sauna car, the greenhouse car, the aquarium car, the opium den car, the Duran Duran car (where everyone is a New Romantic in an ecstasy nightclub) – “the train is the world” – the propaganda car aka the school car – and we are slyly fed exposition on the origin of the Snowpiercer and Wilford its creator, in the form of a school lesson video. Where we realize the most disturbing propaganda of all issues from the mouths of babes who are born into it: “I heard all Tail Sectioners were lazy dogs and drink their own shit.”

We find Wilford isolated in the Sacred Engine (with a chunky bimbo as his bottom bitch – nice work for a chick whom we wouldn’t look at twice). And Wilford is Christof! As he did in THE TRUMAN SHOW, Ed Harris runs the place like an absent-minded pajama god. But he’s every bit as conniving as Christof, and irony descends on us like a dog in heat in these climactic payoffs as one horrifying revelation after another…

It is here that Curtis must become a true hero or a part of the machine – and to become hero, he must become machine! – by thrusting his arm into the cogs to sacrifice it…as Gilliam’s arm was sacrificed for another more dire reason decades ago… We will never see Chris Evans more alive than in this role where he immerses himself in revenge, guilt, regret, torment, redemption; all his sins coming together to either crucify or free him.

Wilford simultaneously cajoles and grooms Curtis: “You need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear and chaos and horror in order to keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we need to invent it.” (From The Book Of Cheney, Verse 9.) Wilford reminds Curtis that people in their “preordained places” all add up to humanity. Curtis shoots him down with “That’s what people in the best places say of people in the worst places.” Sounds heroic but the truth is, Wilford’s right: humanity is at its optimum efficiency when the majority are herded like sheep.

That’s not the movie’s message though, and a big explosion punctuates what the writers are trying to say… that you need to destroy one closed system to start an open system; that mankind are better than class systems, that the rich need not feed off the poor for humankind to survive; that a true leader of men should not be clinical but compassionate… There are worthy elements to all those messages – but what happens in the movie also sends the opposite message.

ACTION: The people who are trying to escape the system – Curtis’s rebels – blow up the train, causing an avalanche that destroys the whole train, killing everyone onboard. Two survivors – a young woman and boy – climb from the wreckage to see, on a faraway ridge, a polar bear looking back at them. Cut to black.

REACTION: Trying to make a better world and killing everything was exactly what the scientists did with the global warming chemical! Noble sentiments – but inept execution. Destroying the train also destroyed all the resources that the next generation might have used for survival. The message of the movie then seems to be: in trying to make a better world, Mankind will always fuck up because hey, it’s Mankind. Noble sentiment, inept execution.

2ND REACTION: The people onboard the train were indoctrinated that all life was dead on the surface. Seeing the polar bear meant life survived, and is survivable, on the outside.  If it was a squirrel or a caribou, we’d receive the correct message, but when it’s an apex predator… the message that life exists outside the train is surely secondary to the fact it’s a polar bear! And I think it looked straight at us!

3RD REACTION: Run!

END

Got Rights?

Life really did begin at 40 for Harvey Milk.

Unfortunately, it ended at 48.

MILK follows the short, comet-across-the-skies career of Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the first gay official elected to public office in the Close-minded United Hypocrite States of America.

We meet Milk in the waning hours of his 39th birthday, picking up a stranger (James Franco as Scott Smith). Breakneck pacing, we see the new couple open a camera store in San Francisco’s Castro Street, a gay-tolerant neighborhood with the odd dissenter doing the usual “Man’s Law and God’s Law” rant.

Milk, who gave good megaphone, came of age in an era when police clashes with homosexuals was at its height, the late 60s.

Through a series of homophobic public incidents, the bearded and pony-tailed Milk finds his life’s calling in his early 40s, as a gay community activist – the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street.” After realizing his popularity in a local election, which he loses, he eschews the Haight-Ashbury look for the clean-shaven, three-piece suit, white-collar criminal look.

And is elected San Francisco City Supervisor in 1978.

Milk constantly butts heads with fellow politician, Dan White (Josh Brolin) over gay rights, leading us to believe that White is either Republican or secretly wants to tap Milk’s ass.

The Cuke of Tolerance

After Scott Smith has enough of the megaphoning and politics and leaves Milk, Jack Lira (Diego Luna) becomes Milk’s high maintenance bitch. Emile Hirsch (who Penn directed in INTO THE WILD, 2007) is Cleve Jones, a high-level organizer and seemingly Milk’s successor to the megaphone.

Milk’s major success stories are crammed into montages – boycotting Coors, stepping in dogshit (uh, passing a law to clean up after dogs) and passing a gay rights bill, as well as constantly campaigning for gay rights against the close-minded douchebags in power.

Affecting the local politics, the national voice: singer and god-whore, Anita Bryant leads a startlingly-white organized campaign against homosexuality, claiming she can’t read the bible with gays around. Not surprisingly, America listens.

Eventually, Dan White can’t keep it in his pants any longer and, using a gun in lieu of a dick, pumps Milk full of hot lead.

Harvey Milk (1930-1978).

No compelling reasons are shown on how White the Politician tipped into the frame of mind to become White the Assassin – I think we can all agree every politician is a latent felon. White would be released after five years in prison, on the “Twinkie Defense,” his lawyers arguing that overeating junk food made him premeditate murder.

Makes you wanna shoot someone, doesn’t it?

Sean Penn loses himself completely in the character of Harvey Milk; from his body language to his speech inflections, his gaiety is flawless, and we cannot see one trace of the barnstorming politician and roaring public speaker he played as Huey Long in ALL THE KING’S MEN (2006). Matter of fact, the performances of all these straight men is invisible – they do not over-fruit it, yet give every indication they crave meat in the seat. In 2009, after the lauded BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005) audiences won’t stand for anything less.

Ironically, I suspect that from this point, there will be less tolerance for “brave” yet timid films like PHILADELPHIA (1993), which brought the issue of homosexual AIDS into A-List cinema (ten years too late, I might add), yet with nil chemistry and minimal necking between the leading man and his lover (Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas).

In MILK, it is heartening to see a film where men kissing seems as natural and emotionally satisfying as seeing any hetero couple making out. These actors are so committed, we never question how challenging it might have been for them to imbue their intimate moments with such passion.

Jerry Falwell spinning in his septic grave.

All “serious” films about gay rights in America seem to be regarded by straight tolerant people and the gay community with the same sanctity that anti-gay fundamentalists regard holy writ against homosexuality. Truthfully, there should be nothing special about these movies – or about these people, as brave as they might have been. All those protests and riots that America endured during the 60s and 70s does not reflect the braveness of the rioters or the dissenters, as much as the ignorance of American society. It needed to be told truths already outlined in its Constitution, yet that were obscured by malefactors; it needed to be wounded by its own kind to heal itself.

As politicians have realized in 2009, “gay” is now only an issue with voters over thirty. A new breed of hippie (as in “hip”) has been birthed, a new movement of dissenters and anti-authoritarians who couldn’t give a Brokeback over whether people are gay or straight or anywhere in between.

They’re called kids – ironically, the demographic that anti-gay people are trying to protect from gays. In reality, they’re trying to protect THEMSELVES from the kids who are going to vote them out of power some day. That day cannot come soon enough…

The world is becoming smoother and rounder – like a gay guy after an exhilarating body-shave – not so much because tolerance is being learned, but because IN-tolerance is being taught less.

Milk saw something deeper than ephemeral personal gain in holding political office, “I’m not a candidate. I’m part of a movement. The Movement is the candidate.”

Lesson learned. Apply to wound.

END