God Bless America: "Sermon" on the Mount

God Bless America

Written and Directed By: Bobcat Goldthwait

Starring: Joel Murray and Tara Lynn Barr

Director of Photography: Bradley Stonesifer, Editors: David Hopper and Jason Stewart, Production Designer: Natalie Sanfilippo, Original Music: Matt Kollar

            The success of Bobcat Goldthwait has rested on one essential fixture in his comedy: as much as you might find him offensive and vile, he is a “truth teller,” as the kids like to say. His comedy and his films might be over-the-top fantasies that ignore real world consequences, but they are fantasies that we are all supposed to hold deep within our repressed hearts. Consider that during the first five minutes of God Bless America, his latest and most direct polemic rant against American culture, the protagonist has a dream where he murders a loud, constantly crying, and ugly baby. Goldthwait assumes that all of us secretly want to murder that baby as well, along with many other dumb, awful Americans that populate our culture.

            Goldthwait has some truth in God Bless America, but it’s been diluted and packaged in such an odd package that never seems to congeal. There’s promise to his work, the same way Shakes the Clown begins as a seriously dark look into comedy and alcoholism, but he gives up on making a bolder statement for making an easy and not particularly clever one. Add to that the violent fantasies God Bless America indulges, and Goldthwait’s nihilism isn’t just lacking in profundity, it’s making those he holds upright seem just as misguided.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: A Twisted Hero for Twisted Times

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Directed By: David Fincher

Written By: Steve Zallian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson

Starring: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright

Director of Photography: Jeff Cronenweth, Editors: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, Production Designer: Donald Graham Burt, Original Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Rated: R for hard violence, rape, and all the other stuff to support your anti-holiday cheer.

            The pitch-perfect sequence in David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is also one of the most unmemorable sequences in the film. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is led around the yard outside the mansion of millionaire Henrik Vagner (Christopher Plummer), who has changed Blomkvist with investigating his family. Henrik explains each member of his family, where they live, and who talks to who. But Mr. Fincher’s camera refuses to let our eyes process this information. He cuts to shots of each home of each family member, and refuses to orient the spatial relationship of these homes to each other, just that they all surround each other. This reflects not only the script’s suggestions that the closest people to us are often the ones that hurt us the most, but more so, Fincher’s deconstruction of the investigative process. The textual information is displayed concretely and without flourish, but because the director refuses to reinforce each detail with visual information, we remain lost to the mystery.

            If Zodiac, Fincher’s cult classic masterpiece about the true-life serial killer in San Francisco, was all about making audience as obsessive as the characters solving an unknown case, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo does the opposite. The answer to the central mystery is slapping us in the face, but because Fincher constantly disorients us with his bold and anti-genre compositions, it remains more of a character piece. And thus, the American director of Fight Club and The Social Network has done the best job he can in adapting the tepid, international best-seller by Stieg Larsson. Why the Swedish novels became an extravaganza still remains something of a mystery—the narratives are built on the same twist-heavy lackluster prose that launched Dan Brown, but include intense violence and rape as well. Perhaps thought, that comes down to the film’s titular character, here played by Rooney Mara (last seen breaking up with Mark Zuckerberg in the opening of The Social Network).

The Interrupters: Between a Gun and a Hard Place

The Interrupters

Directed By: Steve James

Produced By: Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James

Featuring: Ameena Matthews, Tio Hardiman, Eddie Bocanegra, and Ricardo Williams

Director of Photography: Steve James

Rated: Unrated, but it features language and a scene of shocking gang violence.

            What does it mean to be a violence interrupter? This group, the focus of a new documentary called The Interrupters, has one focus: stop people from killing each other. They don’t try to break up gangs, or set up curfews, or teach drug awareness. They instead set themselves up as the last line of defense between two men and a gun. And if you’ve been looking for a real superhero this summer, forget Steve Rodgers and Hal Jordan; the real superhero of the summer is Ameena Matthews and the other subjects of this sublime work of real life caught on film.

            The Interrupters is directed by Steve James, best remembered for his 1994 basketball documentary Hoop Dreams. Mr. James has returned to the same part of South Side Chicago, but instead of showing us a glimpse of the American dream, this is the American tragedy. Late in the film, Tio Gardiman, who runs the violence interrupters (a chapter of a group called CeaseFire), discusses the irony of having a black president in office when violence between African Americans, especially in Chicago, has reached staggering rates.

I Saw the Devil: The Killer Instinct Inside Us All

I Saw the Devil

Directed By: Kim Jee-Woon

Written By: Park Hoon-Jung and Kim Jee-Woon

Starring: Lee Byung-Hun, Choi Min-Sik, Chun Kook-Haun, and Chun Ho-Jin

Director of Photography: Lee Mogae, Editor: Nam Na-Young, Production Designer: Cho Hwa-Sung, Music: Mowg

Rated: Not Rated, and probably with good reason

            Director Kim Jee-Woon really knows how to setup the cruel world his characters exist in. In the opening of his latest film I Saw the Devil, a young woman sits quietly in car as the silent and gorgeous snow falls around her. She’s got a flat tire, and her fiancé sings to her on the phone (though from the quiet bathroom of the secret service mission he is on). Even a nice school bus driver offers to help her change her tire. Unfortunatley, that bus driver is in fact Oldboy star Choi Min-Sik, and he’s a serial killer, who smashes through her windshield. Later, when her body has been bloodied, she pleas with him, telling him she is pregnant. Mr. Choi ignores this fact, and continues his hacking job.

            It would be easy to deride Mr. Kim’s sadistic and often unpleasant world for just those reasons, but that is not why I found I Saw the Devil so boring. Mr. Kim, who has taken on multiple genres like the horror (A Tale of Two Sisters) and the western (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird) is the type of director you want to reinvent the way we look at the serial killer genre, a movie type that has been sorely lacking for some time, save for David Fincher’s Zodiac. And with his perfectly crafted sequences, filled with pitch-black humor, Mr. Kim can suck us into the logic of his world. The boyfriend of that poor girl turns out to be Lee Byung-Hun, and he wants revenge.