Born Into Brothels...or why I feel guilty about being white

I am a nerd. I like documentaries. I will watch documentaries about spelling bees, people who play Scrabble, fast food, former cannibals, Wisconsin filmmakers...pretty much anything. Except for penguins. I really have no desire to watch a documentary about penguins.

Last night I saw Born Into Brothels, which won the Oscar for best documentary last year, and which I've been meaning to see for a while. The basic premise is this: a New York photographer lives among the brothels in Calcutta to photograph the women who work there. She is affected by all the children she meets in the brothels and teaches them photography. Not the lightest subject matter. So I was surprised when I picked up the movie and the jacket features a picture of eight children grinning from ear to ear, and the boldfaced quote "Uplifting!" Maybe this won't be so bad. Maybe the children will be able to overcome their situations and class structure and their upbringings and all become famous New York photographers themselves! Not so much...

This film was anything but uplifting. These children live in squalor, their mothers work as prostitutes and their fathers are either abusive, addicted to drugs, or not in the picture at all, and they can't even get into school because their parents are criminals. The film itself is beautiful, as are the photographs taken by the kids. But their stories are heartbreaking, and I'm not sure how much really gets resolved. At the end of the film, there are updates as to what the kids are doing, and only two of them were even in school. So much for uplifting. There is a more recent update (three years after the film was taken) which is more uplifting (most of the children end up in some sort of school, no one is a prostitute, and the kid with the most talent has been accepted to a prestigious high school in the US), but this was still anything but a feel good movie.

There's been a lot of interesting controversy surrounding the film. Several people claim that the kids were actually worse off for haivng participated in the project (I'm not sure what the arguments for this are), and others resent the "great white hero" coming in to save the poor children with her Western values. My view is that whether or not the filmmaker had any right to meddle with the children's lives, she did try to help the children (getting them into school, introducing them to photography), and I don't think she did it (at least not as her primary purpose) for fame. And according to their own comments, these children did want to get out and have better lives.

This was an interesting and beautiful film, but don't let the "Uplifting!" fool you. It's sad. And even if the outcome for these eight children might have been upfliting, there are countless others for which it won't be.

Cube Zero...or as I like to call it, Cube Cubed

Ahh, Cube. How I've missed your incoherent and torturous ways. Shine your light on me and open my eyes to the mysteries of Cube and Cube 2: Hypercube!

Cube Zero is the prequel to the other two Cube movies, and we actually find out what the cube is (or maybe they told us before and I just wasn't paying attention). Bacially the cube is a military experiment (more fun than Abu Ghraib!). What exactly they're trying to learn, I'm not sure, but suppposedly the people in the cube are people that have been sentenced to death who are given a choice between death and being put in the cube (so basically a choice between death and a worse death). The guinea pigs' memories are erased, then they're set free to run willy nilly through the cube.

Cube Zero returns to the simple tortures of Cube: acid, decapitating wires, and biological agents. None of that weird ass Hypercube shit. We meet another group of people who trapped in the cube: a blonde woman who is looking for her daughter who may or may not have signed a release form, another angry black man who wants to kill everyone, a fat man who bites it in several fashions (a biological agent which I thought was the start of a zombie movie, getting thrown down a hole into another cube, and eventually having his head explode from sound waves). One of the tech guys on the outside decides he loves the blonde woman and must go save her, so he enters the cube to help her. This prompts one of the higher ups, a man with a diamond or a laser beam or something for an eye, to come to the basement and eliminate the guy who went in the cube, but his coworker starts sabotaging the cube which will provide them with just enough time to escape. But wait, the angry black man was in the military, which means that he has a biochip in his brain that can be used to turn him evil (you can tell he's evil because his eyes turn green) and kill the tech guy and his newfound love before they escape. Blonde girl rushes in and saves the day just as he's about to squash tech guy by delivering a swift kick to the angry black man's nuts. Apparently the pain inhibitors don't cover testicles. Tech guy and blonde girl escape from the cube, which is apparently under water. They run through the forest, where tech guy is caught, but blonde girl escapes. Tech guy is sentenced to death, and what do you know, he's going to be put back into the cube because he signed a release form a long time ago. We end seeing a new set of people in the cube, including an autistic boy, which leaves us where Cube picks up.

While I was watching Cube Zero, I kept thinking that it had a bit of a Jean Pierre Jeunet-ish feel, and then in the commentary, the director said he wanted Cube Zero to have more of a City of Lost Children feel than a Cube 2 feel. Other tidbits learned from The Making of Cube Zero: Cube Zero is really about religion and authority (when one of the people made it out of the cube, he's asked if he believes in God, and when he says no (they all say no), he's set on fire); all of the actors have stories of how they almost died in the cube (how's that for ironic); there is a Cube mythology, and everyone involved in the film has a different idea of what the cube "means" (except for the guy who played the tech guy, who, and I love him for this, "just thinks the cube is pretty".

The special features also included a music video of a band playing a heavy metal song inside the cube, interspersed with scenes of people dying in the movie. Apparently the producers of the dvd thought they were as bad as I did, since they didn't even bother to include the name of the band or the song with the video.

Layer Cake

I wasn't expecting to, but I actually enjoyed Layer Cake. I'm not one much for drugs and guns, but this was actually entertaining. I didn't really have any thoughts one way or the other on Daniel Craig before seeing this movie. When I first saw him, I thought "This guy might be the next Bond? Whaaa??" But after seeing Layer Cake, I can see the appeal. He's not the most handsome guy on first glance, but he's got the quiet sophistication thing going on. He definitely grew on me (and can I just say that he and Sienna Miller together were quite hot, even though her role was completely superfluous outside providing the movie's obligatory T&A). But the movie was interesting, and not too overly violent, and I thought the ending was great (though pretty much everyone on IMDB disagrees with me).

Oldboy, or why you should never see anything with the "Quentin Tarantino seal of approval"

So I watched Oldboy, a South Korean film, and now I want to scratch my eyes out, which I'm surprised wasn't actually a scene in the movie. Once you get past the terrible dubbing (worst voice acting ever, and the girl sounds like anime), there's a plethora of craptastic filmmaking to enjoy. The basic plot is this: a man gets abducted and is imprisoned in a private prison for 15 years. He doesn't know who who's holding him, or why he's being imprisoned. After 15 years he's let go, then spends his time seeking revenge and trying to find out why he was imprisoned. Along this journey we see a human sized ant riding the subway, extractions of teeth, someone cutting out their own tongue, and various other severed body parts. Oh, and did I mention there's incest? Lots and lots of incest. The only upside is that the person who reviewed the movie on IMDB hated it as much as I did and didn't go the Primer route of "this movie sucked...therefore it must be brilliant!" My recommendation is if you want to watch a gory revenge film, stick with Kill Bill. It's a whole lot more interesting (but no incest).

Broken Flowers - semi-spoilers, not that you're ever going to see this

Broken Flowers....what went wrong?

Mistake #1: Going to see a movie in the theater.

I thought I'd be alright since I wasn't seeing Land of the Dead or The Day After Tomorrow, but apparently my boycott of movie theaters should have been a blanket one. I was the only person in the theater under 60, which meant no annoying teenagers texting each other during the movie, but presented a whole new set of problems. The man behind me snored (I wanted to sleep during the beginning too), while the woman next to me kept telling he friend that she didn't understand why everyone was laughing. Then there was the woman in the front who I'm sure thought she was whispering, but sounded like she was trying to talk to those of us in the back personally. Of course there was the insanely large amount of ads and crappy previews (and even a special note from Paul Reiser and Peter Falk imploring me to see their upcoming movie at an AMC theater). No more movies in theaters. And I mean it.

Mistake #2 (and it's a big one): Jim Jarmusch.

Jim Jarmusch used up all of his strikes (and then some) with Coffee and Cigarettes. What a waste of time that was. This isn't to say that Broken Flowers was anywhere near as bad as Coffee and Cigarettes (because really, what could be?), but the name alone should have told me to have lowered expectations. I think it's time to get my vision checked. With all the red flags I've been missing, I wonder if I'm starting to go colorblind.

Mistake #3: Putting too much stock into Bill Murray.

Strike 1 was The Life Aquatic, and Broken Flowers is strike two. Why do I get the feeling that Murray's direction for this movie was "Remember Lost in Translation? Yeah, do that again." Murray played pretty much the same role he did in Lost, with the melancholy, and the blank look followed by a deadpan remark. Murray didn't do a bad job, he just did the same job. And I don't buy him as a Don Juan with all these young women still throwing themselves at him. Bill Murray the actor, maybe, but not Bill Murray as the regular guy.

Broken Flowers wasn't terrible, it just wasn't great. It was really slow in the beginning, but it did eventually have its moments - some funny ones involving his exes or his neighbor, and one very surprising one involving a teenager named Lolita. I get the ending, and that the movie is supposed to be about the journey and not the destination, but it still felt a bit unfulfilling. I like it a little better the more I think about it, but the overall feeling I got from this movie was just sort of blah. Maybe I would have liked it better had I not spent $9 on it. Paying full price for movies sucks, but I figured using a college ID from a school in Virginia during the middle of the school year might raise a few eyebrows (why I have that much faith in the 16 year olds that sell tickets, I don't know).

Primer

Next stop on a week of crap was the movie Primer. It won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the girl at Blockbuster recommended it (which I should know by now is a red flag that I should immediately put it back and vacate the store). The plot sounded interesting - two engineers create a time machine, then go back in time and screw with each other's knowledge, but the movie turned out to be a mess. The first half is all science jumbo that is just boring to listen to. Then they finally get their machine working, and they go back several hours to make money in the stock market. Then the film just goes loopy and there's something about copies of themselves, and one of the guys may or may not have gone bad, and I'm not really sure what happened after that. I jumped on IMDB after that, and this is the actual quote from the review: "There's one thing I can guarantee all viewers who sit down to watch 'Primer' - you will be confused. At most, I probably understood about a quarter of this insanely convoluted film, the zero-budget debut of filmmaker Shane Carruth. However, despite the fact that it doesn't make a great deal of sense, it could be one of the best American films of the year." So you won't understand a thing that happens, but that's because the movie is brilliant, not stupid. Obviously if you don't like the movie there's a flaw with you, not the movie. This is the same The Emperor Has No Clothes feeling I got from I Heart Huckabees. For Huckabees, it was throw around the word metaphysical and the movie becomes brilliant, not unfunny and painful to sit through. For Primer, apparently since it's convoluted and incomprehensible, that makes it one of the best films of the year. The other draw of this film was that it was made for only $7000, even though it doesn't really look low budget. I should have learned my lesson about films with gimmicks after seeing Russian Ark.