KEKEXILI: MOUNTAIN PATROL – Moral quicksand

Kekexili (the title has been reversed in the English version to put the more comprehensible Mountain Patrol first) is the story of a rural Tibetan militia formed to fight poachers and preserve local wildlife. Shooting in cinema verite style, from the perspective of a Chinese journalist reporting on the group, director Chuan Yu creates a grim and ambiguous morality tale that stays well within the grey areas of human nature. The militia, and their fierce leader Ri Tai, are admirable in many ways, and it is easy to respect what they are trying to do. However, it quickly becomes clear that the men are deeply compromised individuals, and that the moral line between them and poachers is not as clear as it first appears.

Kekexili is not a perfect movie by any means, but it is a very, very good one. The largely non-professional cast acquits itself well, but the real star of the film is the landscape, simultaneously beautiful and terrible. At any given moment, the hostile environment poses more of a danger to the militia than the ever-present threat of the poachers. Chuan Yu demonstrates this in by far the most grueling and horrifying quicksand scene ever committed to film. Like the rest of the film, it is genuinely moving – Kekexili has more emotional effect through its understated stoicism than any ten melodramas could.

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DOUBLE INDEMNITY – Back in print in a new special edition

Double Indemnity has been discussed so many times, by so many people, that there’s really little more to say. Yet I think the recent mini-wave of revisionism aimed in its direction recently is unwarranted and needs to be addressed. Sure, Billy Wilder was more of a literary than a visual director. Yes, despite some effective shots and good chiaroscuro atmosphere, it doesn’t have the cinematographical panache of a Touch of Evil or Kiss Me Deadly. However, film noir was always as much about dialogue and attitude as it was about shadows and lighting, and they don’t come much sharper than Double Indemnity.

With an assist from Raymond Chandler, the philosophical godfather of noir, Wilder put together a script that practically crackles. Wilder pulled the inner sleaze out of most of his cast, though he allowed cynical but honorable Edward G. Robinson to rise above the action. Wilder exploited a potential for nastiness he saw below the innocuous surface of Fred MacMurray, much as Sergio Leone would later cast Henry Fonda against type as a cold-eyed villain in Once Upon a Time in the West. Even the film’s most “innocent” character, young Lola Dietrichson, is obviously no wide-eyed babe, though she poses as one.

Double Indemnity is one of the bleakest of black comedies, and the crown of Billy Wilder’s marvelous career. Universal’s new special edition may not be the definitive set I was hoping for, but it’ll do for now.

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THE TICK – the greatest superhero cartoon of all time finally on DVD

Ben Edlund’s giant blue superhero, The Tick - a childlike innocent with the muscles of a Sherman tank (not to mention nigh-invulnerability), and his former-accountant sidekick, Arthur - have gone through many incarnations over the years. The original comic book, a masterpiece of deadpan, absurd humor, led to an animated Saturday morning cartoon which ran for several successful seasons. Eventually there was also a live action show featuring Seinfeld’s Patrick Warburton. Unfortunately, this intermittently brilliant show suffered heavily from the “should have been perfect” casting of Warburton, whose laconic style undercut the very essence of The Tick, boundless enthusiasm.

However, in all the ways that the live-action show failed, the cartoon was an unmitigated success. While the original comic focused more on the Tick trying to function in a world that was not prepared for him (and on ninjas, of course), in the animated show The Tick’s id reigned supreme. Finally he could tangle with the adversaries he always deserved, like plant supremacist and opera-lover El Seed, The Breadmaster and his assistant Buttery Pat, and, of course, Multiple Santa. Every week, assisted by Arthur and his friends American Maid, Batman-parody Die Fledermaus, and Sewer Urchin, The Tick would deliver a smackdown to the extremely silly forces of evil, tangle with menaces like the Mad Science Convention (“Room Temperature Fire!”) and a rogue Soviet moustache, and cause massive amounts of property damage.

It has a superhero with ultra-powerful sneezes named the Gesund-Titan. Need I say more?

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The third and final season of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Let’s face it – Arrested Development is the true heir to Seinfeld. This ensemble comedy was the funniest thing on the air for the last several years, and took the one-camera, no-laugh–track sitcom format to heights that even greats like The Office and The Job could not reach. The cast, of course, was impeccable. As funny as Jason Bateman, Jeffrey Tambor, Portia de Rossi, David Cross, Michael Cera and the rest were, I have to single out Jessica Walter as the drunken, manipulative mother. She may be the most terrifying mother figure since Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, and is certainly the most hilarious.

Season 3 had a number of highlights before closing out the series in grand fashion. An extended Charlize Theron guest appearance may not always have worked, but most everything else did. Plots reached unheard of levels of convolution and outrageousness. In an episode on par with classics like The Contest episode of Seinfeld, convict father George Bluth assembles a jetpack, aspiring actor/therapist Tobias is confused when the FBI asks him to be a mole, and Michael shows off a model development to Japanese investors. The result – a full-blown kaiju battle, complete with stomped houses and a panicked Japanese crowd. In another, Tobias brags about how he was both “an analyst and a therapist. The world’s first analrapist.”

Why did Arrested Development die? Was it to smart for its audience, as many theorized? Maybe. More likely, it was too self-referential for its own good. Arrested Development’s stock of running jokes and unparalleled continuity made the show a wonder for regular viewers, but somewhat impenetrable for those who had not been following from the beginning. I wouldn’t have it any other way, but understanding even half of the jokes would be a daunting task for a new viewer without watching the previous seasons on DVD. Good thing they’re all available now, from the first episode to the final, satisfying conclusion.

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OTHER RELEASES OF INTEREST

First up, Criterion is releasing two social comedies this week – one from Italy and one from the US. Director Pietro Germi’s follow-up to the tremendous success of his Divorce – Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned operates in the same arena, the social and sexual foibles of Sicily. From Noah Baumbach, co-scripter of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, comes Kicking and Screaming, a comedy about another distinct subset of humanity, the over-educated, under-matured American male.

Panik House is releasing two films from one of the few filmmakers I can affectionately refer to as a twisted weirdo, Teruo Ishii. Both feature darlings of the Japanese independent film scene - Tadanobu Asano in Screwed and Shinya Tsukamoto in Blind Beast v. Killer Dwarf. Meanwhile Panik House’s sister company CasaNegra continues to release beautifully restored horror films from the golden age of Mexican cinema, in this case the wacky Brainiac and gothic horror film The Black Pit of Dr. M.

Finally, Ronin Entertainment, a new, classy division of Brentwood, releases three Sonny Chiba starrers in the Sonny Chiba Action Pack – the live-action Golgo 13 film, Virus, and Bullet Train (the premise of which was later ripped off by Speed)

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© David Austin