FILM REVIEW: JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

In the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard made a series of politically explosive films exploring how the tenants of Mao and Socialism informed the counter-cultural movement of the time period. This was best exemplified in his films La Chinoise, Sympathy for the Devil, and Weekend, which were both celebrations of the youth revolutionary movement of the time, as well as cautionary tales of the dangers of extreme radicalism. Shaka King's incendiary and powerful film Judas the Black Messiah (2021) continues Godard's tradition of exploring the youth revolutionary culture, but does it from the lens of modern day societal issues which mirrored the turbulent 1960s.

Judas and the Black Messiah, as the title implies, takes the Biblical tale of Judas Iscariot and his betrayal of the original revolutionary (Jesus Christ), and transposes it to the 1960s. The film is a tense exploration of the true story of William O'Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), a memer of the Black Panther party who also worked for the FBI as an informant on the party's actions. After infiltrating the Black Panthers, O'Neal rises up in the ranks to become a Security Captain, where he works closely to ensure the safety of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party. Judas and the Black Messiah explores the close relationship between Hampton and O'Neal, as well as O'Neal's partnership with Special Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), who works as his liasion with the FBI.

What makes Judas and the Black Messiah such a powerful film is the careful time King takes to develop the parallel relationships O'Neal has with both Hampton and Mitchell. King skillfully reveals how O'Neal is gradually drawn into the fight for racial and societal justice that Hampton and the Black Panthers stand for, while at the same time doing his part to bring down the party through his undercover work with Mitchell and the FBI. The central character of O'Neal is a morally conflicted figure, as he is working in tandem with the FBI to bring down the party which he most indentifies with as an African-American in the 1960s. It is this central schism of identity which provides much of the tension and power of the events that unfold in Judas and the Black Messiah.

Like Godard's political films from the French New Wave period, King couches his exploration of a revolutionary movement through a specific cinematic genre. Godard's counter-cultural films mixed genres like the musical, the gangster film, and documentary elements. Judas and the Black Messiah examines O'Neal's plight through the filter of film noirs from the 1950s, like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Heat. Like these films, King shows the corruption of law enforcement, and how his protagonist is both working for and fighting against these institutions. Much of Judas and the Black Messiah is filmed at night time in dark shadows, making it visually resemble a classic 1950s film noir as well. The opening interrogation scene itself, when O'Neal first meets Mitchell in a shadowy police station, is staged like something straight out of a Howard Hawks' crime film. 

On an aesthetic level, King also films much of Judas and the Black Messiah with close-ups of his actor's faces, focusing quietly on their facial features and emotions. This recalls Godard's similar close-ups in films like Vivre sa vie and Masculin Feminin; like these films, King uses the camera to carefully capture and focus on naturalistic reactions from his actors, allowing them to give full-bodied, genuine performances.

In addition to his homage to classic noir films and The French New Wave, King also presents a three dimensional portrait of Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers that shows how they were driven by a genuine concern for societal and racial justice. While many associate the Black Panthers with being gun-totting, violent militants, King shows how the Panthers worked to improve and help out their communities, such as with their free lunch programs for inner-city youth, and their attempts to provide better education and access to resources for those in need.

As Hampton explains early in the film, the reason why the Black Panthers arm themselves with weapons is because they are essentially at war with a society that uses unjustified violence against those it wishes to oppress. King also shows how this oppression wasn't just against African-Americans, but against all races and subclasses within society. Eventually, Judas the Black Messiah shows how Hampton formed a Rainbow Coalition with both Latino and White people who wanted to fight back against systematic racism and subjugation. The enemy in this case was not only Capitalism (a common Godardian target), but the police force itself, which was responsible for the murder of so many innocent African-American lives. King also shows how the malevolent sway of the police extends well into higher echelons of government, all the way up to Hoover and the FBI. 

And this brings Judas and the Black Messiah back to its central subject of law enforcement, and O'Neals complex relationship with this institution. Noir films were often about corrupt members of the police force, and King takes this cinematic trope and insightfully updates it to the plight of African-Americans in both the 1960s (the time period of Judas and the Black Messiah), and into the modern time period when police brutality targated at Black people is still prevalent. In this way, Judas and the Black Messiah's exploration of the eventual murder of Fred Hampton at the hands of the police in the 1960s is a dark mirror of similar recent events in American history, such as the murder of George Floyd and the countless other innocent African-Americans who are shot down by law enforcement every year. As King's profoundly unsettling film reveals, no matter how far our society claims to have advanced towards racial justice, we still have a long way to go.  

FILM REVIEW: ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE

When one watches a Zack Snyder film, you have to know what to expect as a viewer. You're not going to be seeing an intense Martin Scorsese-like drama about sin and redemption, or a Godardian critique of capitalist society, Instead, as exemplified in previous Snyder films like Sucker Punch, Man of Steel, and 300, you're going to get lots of moody slow-motion scenes of characters brooding, accompanied by melodic rock ballads, violent, bloody action set pieces, lots of rain and sometimes snow, and a color palette that is oftentimes washed-out and grayish in tone. In other words, a Snyder film is primarily a visual and auditory visceral experience, rather than necessarily a film filled with themes and deep insights on society which you can write a graduate school thesis on. Snyder is an instinctual, visual artist whose films need to be felt and experienced to fully appreciate them, rather than trying to seek out complex, thematic layers of meaning. The new four hour version of Justice League is perhaps the ultimate example of a Snyder film, exhibiting all the faults and strengths of Snyder as a unique and compelling visual artist.

Based on the DC Comics series of the same name, Justice League (2021) focuses on the iconic superhero team of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Superman (Henry Cavill), and Batman (Ben Affleck), as well as the lesser known but equally important characters of Cyborg (Ray Fisher), Flash (Ezra Miller), and Aquaman (Jason Momoa). Picking up right after Snyder's previous Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), Justice League opens up with Superman still deceased, and Batman going on a global quest to recruit teammates to take on and stop the nefarious Darkseid (Ray Porter), who is searching for three boxes of ancient origin which can destroy the world. Eventually, Batman is able to recruit the aforementioned superheroes, and the rest of Justice League deals with their efforts to seek out and destroy Darkseid.

I'm sure a comic book enthusiast can go into more details about the deeper thematic and plot dynamics of Justice League, but what makes the film interesting is Snyder's distinct visual stamp. Justice League is a big film with a capital B, from its marathon-like running time, to its labyrinthine cast of DC comics superheroes and villains, and mostly, its enduringly earnest and at times heart on its sleeve tone. Whatever critiques one may have about Snyder's films as being at times overly concerned with the visual aspects to the expense of subtext, one can't deny the genuine passion and heart that Snyder commits into all his projects, and Justice League is no exception.

With a massive four hour running time, Justice League seethes with Snyder's almost boyish sense of wonder and joy at his source material. This is best exemplified in an early scene where Flash rescues Iris West (Kiersey Clemons) as she is about to get hit by a truck. Snyder films this scene as one of his trademark slow-motion sequences, as we watch Flash leap through the air towards Iris, as hot dogs float all around them and the dream-like "Song to the Siren" plays in the background. For a brief moment, right before tragedy seems to be about to strike, we see Flash exchange a look of newfound love with Iris. This brief glance could only have been revealed through slow-motion, as it occurs during a rapidly out of control accident, and Snyder's combination of visual and auditory cues results in an almost transcendent moment of pure innocent beauty in the midst of chaos.

There are many other similarly blissful moments spread throughout Justice League, including another sequence with Flash near the climax as he makes one final, exhilarating sprint towards potentially saving the world, while remembering his promise to his father to redeem himself, as well as a montage sequence with Cyborg as he uses his powers to help out a struggling mother and child. Although it has its share of large action set pieces, all of which are expertly staged and stomach-churningly intense at times, it is these quieter moments of human connection that make Justice League more than just another generic superhero, blockbuster. 

With a length of four hours, Snyder is able to flesh out the back stories of each of his protagonists in more detail than he could if he was confined to a traditional two, or even three hour, theatrical feature runtime. Snyder presents an almost encyclopedic collection of DC comics characters in Justice League by introducing many other heroes and villains throughout the film, including a mini-story arc for Atom (Kai Zheng) and brief appearances from the Martian Manhunter (Harry Lennix). The result is an epic, meta-mythological exploration (at one point, Snyder even introduces Zeus as a character) of the super hero genre as pop cultural ethos. 

Martin Scorsese has rightfully criticized the glut of superhero films, many of which feel like carbon copies of each other, almost as if they were assembly-line products coming out of a factory. However, this new cut of Justice League feels like a much more personal and visually distinct project than other more generic comic book films. Although at times the constant flow of painterly-like compositions can be overwhelming and even exhausting, Snyder has crafted a film that is a genuine work of art, one where you can feel his passion and commitment in every single wildly creative frame. 

FILM REVIEW: NOMADLAND

The concept of outsiders traveling away from the confines of mainstream society has been explored in cinema and literature before, from Agnes Vardas' Vagabond to Jack Keruoc's On the Road and its film adaptation by Walter Salles. Chloe Zhao's Nomadland (2020) continues this tradition, but does so from a unique perspective-- instead of the brashful youth from previous road films, Nomadland's protagonist is a wise elderly person. Zhao's moving film is a gentle, elegiac exploration of a whole generation of Americans who take on an itinerant lifestyle to deal with grief brought on by personal and societal issues.

Nomadland itself doesn't conform to traditional norms of cinematic narrative structure. Rather, Zhao unfolds her narrative in a quiet, meditative manner, letting the scenes play out naturally and without any intrusive John Williams' like music. When music does make its way into the film, it's done so in a subtle manner, fading serenly into the background like the pastoral, natural scenery that Zhao's camera unobstusively takes in. Zhao adapated Nomadland from a book by Jessica Bruder, which is the story of an elderly woman named Fern (Frances McDormand) who takes on a nomadic life on the road after the death of her husband.

Although Zhao herself is ethnically Chinese, Nomadland is an exploration of the American phenomenon of the CamperForce, a group of older, impoverished Americans working for Amazon warehouses. These elders aren't tied down to one location for their residence, and instead lead a roving lifestyle traveling from one location to another in RVs and vans. Although Frances McDormand is an established Hollywood actress, she completely embodies the more humble traits of her character, and blends seamlessly with the other mostly non-professional actors in Nomadland. Indeed, Zhao films Nomadland in an unobtrusive manner, letting her scenes play out naturally and giving her actors the space to fully inhabit their roles.

Much of Nomadland consists of Zhao's documentary-like explorations of the nomadic lifestyle of the CamperForce segment of American society, as we hear the stories of the lives of various elders and what drove them to abandon a more sedentary existence. Although there is much natural beauty in this roaming way of life, as the camera frames its various characters against the breathtaking scenery of the American Midwest, Zhao also explores the deeper grief and loneliness which is very much at the root of the CamperForce generation. This brings us to the question of what would draw a filmmaker from a Chinese background to explore such a particularly American lifestyle?

In Asian culture, there is much reverence for elders, as we respect the wisdom and knowledge they have gained throughout their lives. Many older Asians spend their lives surrounded by their family members, and they aren't thrown into isolation in senior housing in their golden years. Instead, it's common for older people in Asia to live with their adult children, or if they don't, then they are regularly visited by family members who take care of them on a regular basis. In the United States, when Americans become elders, they are often left to survive on their own without any family support. Thus, they feel isolated from both their own families and society.

It is this sense of dislocation which have led some American elders to seek out a sense of community with those of their own age in the CamperForce lifestyle which Nomadland explores. Because they are estranged from their own families and don't have a regular home they can reside in, the elders in Nomadland go on the road and are forced to travel and fend for themselves in a wider society which neglects them. It is this very Amerian concept of abandoning its elders that Zhao, an Asian filmmaker from a culture which actually looks after its older population, so sensitively explores in Nomadland.

Indeed, throughout Nomadland, Zhao uses her camera to portray the tragic stories of older Americans who have been let down by a society that should be taking care of them, as in the shock one character feels when she finds out how little money she receives from her Social Security fund. Another character finds out she has only a few months left to live, so without any family to turn to, she spends the remainder of her life traveling by herself. Essentially, Nomadland is Zhao's way of paying respect to and honoring the lives of a whole segment of the American population that has been thrown to the side as being disposable.

Near the last act of Nomadland, Zhao introduces the estranged son of one of the CamperForce members, and offers a story of redemption through the life of one particular family. This segment is a guidepost of sorts for Zhao to show how it's not too late for American society to change, as the son makes an effort to reach out to and take care of the elderly father who he has been distant towards for so long. If one family can change their ways and once again take care of an older American, then so can our whole society. This is a seemingly simple moral lesson, but one that makes Nomadland such an important and immensely moving film.

    

FILM REVIEW: RED POST ON ESCHER STREET

Before he was a prolific and widely celebrated filmmaker, Sion Sono was a member of the avant-garde, public street performance art group Tokyo Gagaga, where he protested against all forms of authoritarian control. This rebellious spirit never completely left Sono when he began making films, and throughout his career he has experienced his fair share of artistic struggles against the conventions of the Japanese mainstream film industry. Although the majority of his films have been passion projects that fully displayed his singular voice as an artist, Sono has had to fight against producers who tried to streamline his vision. Sono explores this eternal conflict between art and commerce in his film Red Post on Escher Street (2020), resulting in one of his most personal and emotionally raw films.

With its kaleidoscopic and wide-ranging portrait of a vast array of characters involved in the making of a film, Red Post on Escher Street recalls the ensemble films of Robert Altman, but filtered through Sono's exuberant and wild worldview. As the film begins, Sono introduces his eclectic cast of characters who are auditioning for the lead roles in a new film by the fictional film director Tadashi Kobayashi (Tatsuhiro Yamaoka). Kobayashi opens the casting call for his film to amateur performers, and Sono delves into the backstory of each of the apiring actors who attend the audition. Things get complicated in Red Post on Escher Street after Kobayashi finally chooses the lead actresses for his film in the form of Yasuko Yabuki and Kiroko, but his producer forces him to replace them with popular and physically attractive, but less talented actresses.

It is interesting to note that the actors themselves in Red Post on Escher Street are also non-professional thespians participating in an acting workshop. Sono shot the entirety of the film in only eight days as a training exercise for his actors, and he is able to elicit naturalistic performances from them. In fact, some of the performances are more authentic and heartfelt than the work of more established professional actors. 

It is this turning point in the film that reveals the ultimate theme of Red Post on Escher Street-- the desire for artistic freedom in a world dominated by conformity to mainstream edicts. The last act of the film, as Kobayashi begins to unravel while he struggles to film his project with his unwanted leads, contains some of Sono's most breathtakingly liberating cinema. The film set itself becomes a microcosm of the wider society at large, as Kobayashi is forced by those above him to focus on the bland actresses in front of him, while he is more interested in the less outwardly appealing, but unqiue extras at the margins of his camera's frame. While the film shoot descends into frenzied chaos, it is within this anarchic environment that Kobayashi is able to finally unleash his long repressed yearning for complete and total liberation as an artist.

Red Post on Escher Street culminates with the protagonist running away from authoritarian control and towards what he perceives to be a symbol of his freedom. Love Exposure, Himizu, and Why Don't You Play In Hell? all culminated in a similar scene of the lead rapidly sprinting away from authority and towards an unknown future, but Red Post on Escher Street is Sono's first film which shows the protagonist actually running back to that which he was escaping from, and finally asserting his control over his oppressors. Perhaps after all these years of struggling to maintain control over his art, Sono has finally regained the passion which he has longed for throughout his career with the making of Red Post on Escher Street.

Indeed, Sono films Red Post on Escher Street with an almost newfound sense of freedom, as each frame feels as loose and energetic as some of Sono's earlier, equally liberating films like Love Exposure, Strange Circus, and Guilty of Romance. Unlike those films, however, Red Post on Escher Street is almost completely devoid of any sense of nihilism and despair. Instead, for the first time Sono embues his work with a comforting mood of ebullience. There is still a hint of darkness with the troubling incest theme of Yasuko's story, and the suggestion that she may be homicidal, but overall Red Post on Escher Street is a surprisingly optimistic story about celebrating the power of those at the margins of society.   

While the literal meaning of the film's title refers to an actual red mailbox located at Escher Street where the actresses mail off their audition applications, Sono is also alluding to the graphic artist M.C. Escher with the constantly intertwining narrative of Red Post on Escher Street. Like Escher's portraits of asymmetrical objects that are continuously merging and receding from each other, Sono intricately interweaves his multiple narratives by going backwards and forwards in time, and replaying certain scenes to view them from alternate perspectives. This is a method which Sono has employed before, most noteably in Love Exposure, and it is a way for Sono to further deconstruct and find ways to break apart traditional narrative structure in innovative ways. It's always refreshing when an artist such as Sono is able to find his voice again after struggling for years with more mainstream projects, and Red Post on Escher Street is one of Sono's most artistically accomplished and exhilarating works in years.   

BEST FILMS OF THE 2000s

The best way to appreciate the lasting power of a film is to see if it withstands the test of time. With that being said, now that more then a decade has passed since the first decade of the twenty-first century, here are my choices for the best films of the 2000s:

1. Love Exposure (Sion Sono)

With Love Exposure, Sion Sono reached a delirious peak in his already electic career. While his previous films such as Strange Circus and Suicice Club delved in the nihilistic realm of brutal degradation, Love Exposure was his first original film to offer a glimpse of hope in the essential benevolence of human nature. Over its almost four hour runtime, Love Exposure careens wildly from one genre to another, and the viewer can feel the passion of Sono in every single frame of this stunning masterpiece.  

2. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)

2046 is the culmination of Wong Kar-wai's fruitful collaboration with the cinematographer Christopher Doyle. With its labyrinthian plot and aesthetically astonishing set pieces and lighting, 2046 takes all the thematic and visual elements that Wong and Doyle have been working on and honing in their previous films together, and brings it to a masterful level of cinematic brillance. In a way, 2046 plays like a greatest hits collection on Wong's prior films, but it works on its own as a singular vision and meditation on the elusive search for human connection that pervades all of existence.    

3. Devils on the Doorstep (Jiang Wen)

In mainland China, Jiang Wen is a very popular and successful actor, but he has also had an equally impressive career as a filmmaker. His film Devils on the Doorstep is a Fellini-esque dark comedy that was controversial in China due to what was deemed as its too lenient portrayal of the Japanese occupiers in World War II China. However, Wen didn't set out to make a one-sided propaganda war film depicting the Japanese side as cartoonish villains; instead he created a complex and caustic satire of the follies of war during a turbulent time in China's history.

4. Election/Triad Election (Johnnie To)

Although they were released as two separate films, Johnnie To's Election and Triad Election actually comprise a single, epic portrayal of the rise and fall of a Hong Kong Triad empire. In a sense, Election/Triad Election are the Hong Kong equivalent of the Godfather films, as it is the muti-generational story of the intricate power struggles within a mafia clan, and their legal and illegal business dealings. To has created a sweeping, gritty and realistic gangster epic that is not only about action set pieces and elaborate shoot-outs, but about the actual human components of a mafia family and their personal and intimate lives throughout the years.

5. Munich (Steven Spielberg)

Steven Spielberg is best as an instinctive filmmaker dealing with subject matters of primal urges, and this is reflected perfectly in the astonishingly effective thriller Munich. Taking a balanced perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Munich moves at a breakneck pace through an at times unreletingly grim story of bloody vengeance. The violence in Munich is shocking and visceral, and Spielberg portrays each death in the film in such a horrific manner to show how ultimately futile the cycle of revenge-based violence is.

6. Summer Palace (Lou Ye)

Lou Ye's Summer Palace reminds one of Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as both films are about how devastating historical events affect the lives of a close-knit group of friends and lovers. Summer Palace deals specifically with a group of young revolutionaries whose lives are torn apart after the infamous Tiananmen Square protests of the late 1980s. Like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which dealt with the late 1960s Prague Spring protests, Summer Palalce is a sweeping and powerfully moving portrait of how a single historical event permanently altered the lives of a whole generation. Lou Ye depicts the more optimistic and ebullient pre-Tinanmen Square protest lives of the group of young college students, and fills the screen with scenes of lively political discourse and amorous sexual experimentation. Then, the rest of Summer Palace follows these same students as they struggle to adjust to life in China in the subsequent 1990s and into the 2000s; although they have aged at this point, they still never forgot the youthful idealism that permeated their brighter, more hopeful years.

7. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson)

It might not be a perfect film as at times one gets the sense that Wes Anderson struggled to portray on-screen his intended vision, but The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is perhaps Anderson's most ambitious and visually complex film so far. Its rogues' gallery of eccentric characters and outlaws, along with the various cladestine societies that they belong to, recalls the equally creatively labyrinthian narratives of Thomas Pynchon. It is this shaggy, filled to the brim quality that makes The Life Aquatic such an endearing and admirably Byzantine work of art.

8. On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate (Hong Sang-soo)

Early in his career, Hong Sang-soo was still experimenting with the cinematic medium to explore how best to implement his improvisational style of filmmaking. His first triumph in finding his voice with was the alternately hilarious and emotionally wrenching On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate. Like Hong's later films, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate deals with the eternally complicated amorous relationships between women and men. Although he would go on to make even more accomplished films, On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate is still one of Hong's best films because it perfectly depicts the pathos and humor inherent within the drama of humans yearning to connect with each other, but never quite being able to do so. 

9. The Aviator (Martin Scorsese)

Although it's not as highly regarded as his other films, The Aviator is one of Martin Scorsese's most ambitous and dramatically complex films. Not only is The Aviator a portrait of the legendary businessman/filmmaker Howard Hughes, but it also an incisive portrait of mental disorder. From the beginning of the film, when we see Hughes reminiscing about his mother lecturing him about the importance of cleaning himself, to the end when Hughes is isolated in a screening room entrapped by his mental obsessions, Scorsese incisively shows how genius and insanity are intricately linked. On one level, The Aviator is a celebration of the glories of classic Hollywood, as it explores Hughes' various business dealings and his involvement in the film industry of the 1940s. But, on a darker and more dramatically wrenching level, The Aviator explores how Hughes was ultimately unable to overcome his rapidly deteriorating mental condition. This culminates in one of Scorsese's most haunting conclusions to any of his films, as we see Hughe staring uneasily at himself in a mirror, finally realizing that he is unable to conquer his own sanity.

10. Les Destinees sentimentales (Olivier Assayas)

Olivier Assayas is rightly celebrated for his more well-known experimental explorations of cinema, such as Carlos, Irma Vep, and Clouds of Sils Maria, but one of his more traditionally constructed films, Les Destinees sentimentales, is also one of his most dramatically effective and powerful films. Based on a novel by Jacques Cardonne, Les Destinees sentimentales is an epic depiction of the life of a Protestant minister who leaves his wife and career behind to seek a passionate relationship with another woman. What makes Les Destinees sentimentales such a powerful film is Assayas' focus on the everyday details of daily existence, as he focuses on the simple joy and sometimes heartbreak of the relationship between the former minister and his new lover. The film covers a vast expanse of time, and by the end of the film, Assayas has engulfed us completely in his old fashioned, but emotionally resonant film, recalling classic epic films that took their time to tell their story. 

FILM REVIEW: PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND

 

Sion Sono is one of the most original and exciting filmmakers still working, creating such astonishing masterpieces as Love Exposure, Why Don't You Play in Hell?, and Tokyo Tribe. With Prisoners of the Ghostland, Sono has made his first primarly English language film, and the results are mixed to say the least. At first glance, the unhinged energy of Nicolas Cage and the manic stylings of Sono would seem to be the perfect match. However, something seems to have gotten lost in translation on the way from pre-production to the actual production of Prisoners of the Ghostland, as Cage and his English speaking counterpart actors stumble through the film looking mostly confused. Also, the script for Prisoners of the Ghostland is a cliche-filled mess, with one-dimensional character tropes like the villanious Western town governor/sheriff, the silent and noble samurai, and Cage's troubled Western cowboy with a heart of gold.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is a genre mash-up of Eastern and Western tropes such as the samurai film and the Western, but enfused through an uninspired script about a character known only as Hero (Nicolas Cage) who has to rescue the adopted daughter (Sofia Boutella) of a crooked Western town's governor (Bill Moseley) from a post-apocalyptic, nuclear devastated wasteland. Although this premise sounds promising, Prisoners of the Ghostland is filled with awkwardly staged scenes that veer into the unintentionally hilarious stage. At one point, Cage is supposed to be giving a Spartacus-like rallying cry to his "troops" to rise up against the corrupt governor character, but Sono reduces his inspiring speech to only a few embarrasingly ambigious words. This could be Sono playing with genre tropes and making a commentary on the ridiculousness of classic Hollywood studio films, but it comes more across as Cage not knowing what he's supposed to be saying. Maybe Sono is making a parody of machismo in traditional Western films, but he does so in such an obvious and one-dimensional manner, with less subtley and finesse as he did parodying Japanese samurai and mafia films in better films like Why Don't You Play in Hell? and Cold Fish.   

However, not all of Prisoners of the Ghostland is an unmitigated disaster. Sono is still able to instill some of his own unique vision into the film, as in the elaborate production design. He infuses the film's mise en scene with an at times visually astounding mixture of Japanese kabukai style backdrops, post-apocalyptic steampunk cities, and neon-lit landscapes that recall the elaborate backgrounds from Tokyo Tribe. It is also worth noting that the scenes which work best in Prisoners of the Ghostland are the scenes not involving any dialogue, where Sono has to convey his message through visuals and non-verbal cues, such as the chillingly effective flashback sequences where Hero is haunted by the spectre of a boy who was the victim of the film's opening bank robbery sequence.

However, once the English language dialogue begins, Sono is in less sure footing. Dialogue sequences that would be otherwise bitingly hilarious in Sono's Japanese films just come across as gratingly unfunny, and at times Cage's scenery chewing feels more like Nicholas Cage being himself rather than him channeling anything unique about his on-screen character. The other English language leads don't fare any better, as they ramble through their scenes with all the subtlety of soap opera stars. To be fair, Sono doesn't have much to work with as the script for Prisoners of the Ghostland is filled with genre clices, and no matter how many astounding visuals Sono throws at the screen, it can't cover up the mediocirty of his source material.

While earlier works from Sono such as Tokyo Tribe and Tokyo Vampire Hotel built up to exhilaratingly choreographed fight sequences, the last act of Prisoners of the Ghostland is embarrasingly anemic. We see samurais thrust at each other flimsily and gunslingers do their best to enfuse menace into their pistol battles, but it all comes acress like a cheap, high school production of a Sion Sono film. By the time the Hero character has his final battle with the main samurai character of the film, the fight is so anti-climactic and poorly staged that one gets the sense that Sono had given up at that point, and just wanted to end the production so he could go work on something better.

Every great filmmaker has stumbled a few times throughout their careers, as Scorsese did with films like New York, New York, Gangs of New York, and Shutter Island, so Prisoners of the Ghostland is by no means a career ending film for Sono. Perhaps Sono made Prisoners of the Ghostland as a calling card film for the American film industry, as it's his first film funded by a Hollywood production company with mostly English speaking leads. If this is indeed the case, one can only hope that Sono will have a better script to work with next time; one that will give Sono the chance to display to Western audiences the truly unqiue talent that he truly is. In the meantime, it would be a tragedy if most Western audiences only know Sono through Prisoners of the Ghostland, as they will be missing out on a treasure trove of cinematic masterworks.

 

FILM REVIEW: MANK

At first glance, David Fincher would seem like an odd choice to direct Mank (2020), a biopic about Herman J. Mankiewicz and the events that led to him writing the script for Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane. After all, Fincher is primarly known for making dark and violent thrillers that explore serial killers, psychopaths, and criminal deviants. Some may say that Fincher made Mank to pay tribute to the memory of his father, Jack Fincher, a screenwriter and journalist who wrote the script for Mank back in the 1990s. This may be true, but upon closer inspection, Mank also fits neatly into Fincher's explorations into the darker side of human nature. Now, instead of telling the story of a serial killer, Fincher is exploring the sociopathic behavior of the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s, a system that brutally manipulated its artists to conform to the demands of capitalism. With Mank, Fincher has created a brillaintly evocative portrait of the all encompassing power struggle in Hollywood between art and commerce.

Mank alternates between the early 1930s, when Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) worked as a screenwriter for Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) at MGM, and the early 1940s, when Orson Welles (Tom Burke) hired Mankiewicz to write the script for Citizen Kane for his independent production company RKO Pictures. The film shows how during both time periods, Mankiewicz struggled with alcoholism and his own personal demons, which often got in the way of his work as a screenwriter. As portrayed by Gary Oldman in an astonishingly powerful performance, Fincher shows Mankiewicz as a fiercly independent and outspoken artist whose mercurial personality led to him eventually being ostracized from Hollywood, and into the employ of the equally strident Welles.

Some have accussed Mank of supporting Pauline Kael's assertion that Mankiewicz deserved sole credit for the writing of Citizen Kane over Welles. However, Fincher doesn't portray in-depth the extended period when Mankiewicz and Welles fought over writing credit. He briefly alludes to this issue at the end of the film, with an audio clip of Orson Welles actually acknowledging Mankiewicz's contribution to writing the script for Citizen Kane. Instead, Fincher focuses primarly on Mankiewicz's career at MGM in the 1930s before he even wrote Citizen Kane. The 1940s period when Mankiewicz is actually writing the script for Citizen Kane is just the framing story device for Mank, and Welles himself only has a few scenes in the film. 

What Mank is really about is the insidious nature of Hollywood in the 1930s, and how the greed and corruption of the studio system drove Mankiewicz away from it, and into the more independent arms of Orson Welles and RKO Pictures in the early 1940s. Fincher shows how the ruthless newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) had a stranglehold over MGM and its studio heads Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley). Mayer is portrayed as a smooth talking, heartless businessman who feels no qualms about slashing the payroll of his employees in order to maximize his own personal wealth. Behind the funding for Mayer's and Thalberg's films is the financial backing of Hearst, who is revealed as being more interested in showing off his vast wealth and pleasing his mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) then in the actual art of filmmaking.

Indeed, the subject of greed over humanity is explored throughout Mank, as best exemplified with its subplot about the socialist writer Upton Sinclair's (Bill Nye) campaign for California governor against the Mayer/Thalberg backed Republican candidate Frank Merriam. Throughout Mank, Thalberg and Hearst continuously mock Sinclair as an unrealistic "Utopian socialist" whose policies to redistribue wealth to alleviate poverty would lead to what they viewed as a Communist takeover of California, and result in the loss of their vast fortune. Interestingly enough, these similar arguments about socialism versus capitalism have been seen played out in the 2020 Presidential Election. Fincher portrays Mankiewicz as sympathizing with Sinclair's more altruistic form of governance, resulting in him having further conflicts with the wealth accumulating philosophies of Mayer and Thalberg. Fincher pits his protagonist Mankiewicz squarely against this capitalist, profit driven machine, ultimately inspiring him to write the script for Citizen Kane as an attack against Hearst and everything that he stood for.

On an aesthetic level, Fincher films Mank in gorgeous black and white, and uses various filters and effects, such as a muffled audio soundtrack, scratches on the film stock, and film reel change markers, to replicate the look and feel of a classic Hollywood film. Also, the acting and dialogue is portrayed in a sometimes exaggerated and heightened style to resemble classic 1930s/1940s Hollywood studio films such as Design For Living and Woman of the Year. There's an especially amazing sequence when Mankiewicz takes a walk with Davies through Hearst's animal-filled garden, as they exchange a rapid fire dialogue exchange that recalls Howard Hawks' screwball comedy His Girl Friday.

The last act of Mank, which takes place at a costume party dinner hosted by Hearst in his mansion, is just as astonishing and frightening as any scene from one of Fincher's thrillers. Now, instead of his protagonist confronting a serial killer, Fincher has his main character take on the equally heartless and immoral Hearst. Although he doesn't physically murder anyone like Fincher's previous gallery of sociopathic villains, Hearst is portrayed as a master manipulator whose lust for power and control leads to death and destruction. Charles Dance gives a quietly chilling performance as Hearst that recalls John Huston's similarly startling character in Chinatown. When Hearst guides Mankiewicz out of his mansion after the costume party, telling him the story of the monkey organ grinder, Fincher and Dance masterfully create a sense of impending and all-consuming dread.

With Mank, Fincher has moved beyond the killers and social deviants of his previous films like Fight Club, Seven, and Zodiac, and instead broadened his examination of the evils of human nature onto the macro scale of Hollywood and the capitalist system that it feeds off of. It's no coincidence that Fincher alludes to Welles' production of Heart of Darkness early in Mank, as he is interested in revealing the dark, beating pulse of a film industry that values commerce over all else. 

Just as studios like MGM in the 1930s relied on merciless businessman like Hearst to bankroll their films, many modern studios are similarly run by executives who use power and domination as measuring sticks for success. Although he is a troubled, imperfect protagnoist, due to his struggles with alcoholism and his abrasive personality, Mankiewicz is ultimately portrayed by Fincher as a heroic figure who was punished by Hollywood for taking on a system that needed to be changed. Mank is Fincher's homage to iconoclasts, such as Mankeiwicz and Welles, who had the courage to create art not for the purpose of making a buck, but for expressing their own unique voices.