Films: Buddy / Buena Vista Social Club / Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure et al

Films I have recently watched:
(Please note: films that I have watched that are part of the Melbourne International Film Festival have been prefaced with MIFF)

Buddy starring Rene Russo. I found this film to be bizarre. Based on a true story it tells the tale of a rich eccentric animal lover Gertrude Lintz who adopted animals including chimpanzees. The Buddy in the title was an orphaned baby gorilla who grew into a huge problem. The character as portrayed in this film is shown as having a very real love of animals and a sincere concern for their welfare. When watching this film it is also important to bear in mind how grim zoos were earlier this century. By taking orphaned animals back to her mansion and extensive gardens Lintz was trying hard to give them a better life than a small concrete cage in a city zoo would have afforded them. However, she obviously had unfulfilled maternal instincts because her treatment of her apes was very strange. They were dressed in children’s clothes, taught to walk upright and eat using human plates and implements and in all respects were trained to, well, ‘ape’ humans in their behaviour. Although I never doubted Lintz’s motivations I actually found watching all this to be a little distressing. Not surprisingly, Buddy finds the pressure to be human too much to bear and cracks it. Because of his enormous size and strength he is a real danger to Lintz and her household. Lintz resolves her problem; I was relieved to see, by sponsoring a huge gorilla enclosure at a zoo where Buddy is sent to live with some happy new Gorilla friends. I found myself hoping that the real life Lintz had learnt her lesson from this and put her resources into caring for animals in a more appropriate manner.

Buena Vista Social Club. Hats off to Ry Cooder and collaborators for going to Cuba and rediscovering this bunch of aging musicians, recording them and organizing live performances and this film. The elderly singers and musos are still capable of performing their music with oomph, and this film is crammed with charm and personality. It reveals a lot not only about Cuban musicians and music but also about Cuban social culture in general. In my book that makes it historically as well as musically important.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. A silly plot and 80s teen idiom have been cleverly worked into a very funny script. The likeable star actors deliver their lines with a breezy charm.

The Sting starring Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Robert Shaw. Deservedly popular movie about grifters taking down a mobster. The plot is clever, the acting is assured and expert, the direction is tight and the music is glorious.

MIFF United Red Army, Japan, 2008, directed by Koji Wakamatsu. This was one tough film. As the MIFF programme puts it Wakamatsu “reconstructs a shocking episode in the bloody history of Japanese radical extremism.” To my mind this film was structured in 3 parts. The first has a lot of documentary footage accompanied by a voiceover informing the audience of historical facts surrounding the rise of left wing student politics and terrorist groups in Japan in the 60s and 70s. Interspersed with this are brief acted scenes that introduce us to some of the characters that will feature in the story to follow. The documentary elements in this film were important for me because, although I was vaguely aware that there was a communist group active in Japan at this time, I had no idea just how extreme their activities were (bombings, hijackings, armed robbery and assault) or how widespread and violent student and working class protests were at the time. What follows this extended introductory section is a detailed account of a descent into the heart of darkness, and I think for the audience to understand something of the characters’ actions we have to understand how disengaged many young people felt from Japanese mainstream society.

In the second part of the film (which occupies perhaps half the screen time of this 2 ½ hour long film) any documentary footage ceases and the actors take over the telling of the story. The United Red Army takes to the hills – literally. A small group of young people construct camps in remote mountain sites where they can hide from the police, train themselves in the use of weapons and combat and refine their already extreme and hardline communist ideology. What follows is harrowing. Cut off from society, and made desperate by the external pressures of being on the run and living in hard conditions and the internal pressures of manifesting communist ideology in every word thought and deed, these young people degenerate. Normal standards of morality are suspended, as they demand of each other answers to ideological conundrums that no one can ever be reasonably expected to understand or answer. The more ‘alpha’ members of the group dominate and manipulate the others with a hypocrisy and cruelty that is sickening to watch. Many group members are murdered in a purge facilitated by the group leaders and the director shows these unfortunates beaten to death in explicit detail again and again. I was fascinated that this small group of people (maybe 30 in total?) talk themselves into a state where it seems necessary to them to carry out an internal purge as an expression of their adherence to their political ideals – it seems to be a microcosmic parallel of the macrocosmic purges of Stalin and Mao.

The third part of this film shows the final demise of the group. As the violence from the internal purges mounts some members of the group escape. The rest of the group, fearing that they will be betrayed to the police, decides to leave their hideout. Some are arrested and a last group of 5 take over an inn, barricade themselves inside with the innkeeper’s wife as hostage and spend some days withstanding a police siege before they are finally taken into custody. What was interesting to me about this last stage of the film when I watched it was the sadness I felt for these last 5 as well as an interest, bordering on concern, I felt for their fate. This was interesting because when I was watching them beat their comrades to death in the second part of the film I hated them for it. By the end of the film, as much as I deplored their activities, I was viewing them as lost youth and the waste of their young lives saddened me as much as the deaths of the other young people they had tortured to death.

This was a long film and every second of its screen time was relentless in depicting some form of moral or spiritual or ideological lack, confusion, and desperation. It was grim. But this film works because it does have a humane and moral center – I think the people who made this film wants you to see this kind of brutality as sickening and wants you to understand the danger of extremism. Personally, I hate watching the realistic kind of brutality that we see so much of in this film. Why did I sit through it? The director (supported by a good ensemble cast) did a brilliant job. My need to know what was going to happen to these people, and what the end of the story would be outstripped my need to have a fun and safe experience as an audience goer. I take my hat off to Wakamatsu for being able to do this.

Also:
Yakuza Eiga
Still Walking

I heartily recommend checking out Intelliblog as Nicholas may have posted a film review recently. Also check out The Galloping Skirt for Boo's description of the cinematic nerd. It's a scream. Both blogs are here on blogger