Maps to the Stars.

“Hollywood is a world that is seductive and repellent at the same time, and it is the combination of the two that makes it so potent.”[1] David Cronenburg latest cinematic outing is a comment on human nature, part satirical sendup of Hollywood, part dysfunctional family drama and part decent into madness. It was Ben Wagner’s screenplay that persuaded the Canadian director to make a film about Los Angeles located amongst Hollywood personalities.  Maps to the Stars (2014) is Cronenburg’s first film shot in the USA although many have been set there.

The jaded movie star.

The pyromaniac. 

Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) was a famous actress who is now aging and quickly fading, a women haunted by memories of her mother a famous movie star who abused her as a child to such an extent that she is still having therapy years after her mother died in a fire.  But this does not stop her wanting to play her mater in a remake of one of her most famous movies. The other main characters belong to the family Weiss. Father Sanford (John Cusack) is a celebrity TV psychologist, a man who see’s himself as a healer and who, incidentally, is in control of Havana’s therapy. Sanford and his wife Christina (Olivia Williams) are sister and brother; they were separated at birth and discovered their true relationship after meeting in college and becoming a couple. Christina also act’s as the manager of her precocious 13 year old son Benjie (Evan Bird), who after a stint at rehab when he was nine years old is attempting to put his movie career back on track while at the same time battling his demons. In to this potent mix we add Benjie’s sister Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) who has recently been released from a sanatorium where she was treated for criminal pyromania. Turning up in LA unannounced, still carrying the visible scars of her crime, she gets a job as the personnel assistant of Havana and attempts to re-engage with her family.

The healer who married his sister.

The manager who married her brother.

One very precocious brat. 

The strength of the film is in Wagner’s characters, the pull that LA has on them and finally how the narrative gradually reveals there complicated lives, secrets and fears. As well as a comedic tone there is a darkness that runs right throughout the movie with its unsettling observation of celebrity culture. This entertaining cross between Sunset Boulevard (1950) and 1999’s Magnolia won Julianne Moore yet another best actress award this time at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

---

[1] David Cronenberg.

Only Lovers Left Alive.

I sit here in my darkened room listening to the soundtrack recording of the film that I’m just about to write about. I not sure whether it’s the hypnotic vibes from this collaboration by SQURL and the Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem or perhaps it was the fact that ‘breakfast’ was not delivered today but I can’t get Jim Jarmusch latest movie out of my head?

 

Adam and Eve....

A darkly comic tale of a long-term relationship between husband and wife is the main theme of Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)[1]. The average marriage today is said to be only 7 years (barely worth the expense!) so very few marriages last for hundreds of years, with the exception of the aptly named Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) a vampire couple whose relationship could conceivably last for ever if they can continue to obtain a supply of good quality blood. Adam lives in the run down backwaters of Detroit while Eve lives in the romantic confines of Tangiers.

 

Christopher Marlowe.

Similar to Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008) this is not a tale about vampires but a love story between two people who happen to be vampires albeit with heightened perceptions from having lived for such a long period of time. A character study that Jarmusch claimed is a metaphor for the decline of 21^st century America. Note the bankrupt and run down city of Detroit and compare it to the vibrant and mystical Moroccan city of Tangiers.  

 

Sister Ava and Ian.

The biosphere of our two lovers varies. Whereas Eve accepts the present with her mobile phone and modern cultural attitude, Adam seems to be stuck in the culture of the 1960’s and 70’s producing his music on vintage equipment, collecting guitars from that period and driving a vintage Jaguar. He dislikes what he calls ‘zombies’; his only human friend is Ian (Anton Yelchin) who, along with the musical instruments and recording equipment, provides him with a wooden bullet! His only other contact with the zombie world is Doctor Watson who works in a hospital and who provides the clean blood that guarantees Adams survival. Eve, who has come back to join her lover in America, has previously got her ‘supply’ from the English Elizabethan dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), the man who allegedly influenced William Shakespeare and died at the age of 29 in 1593, little do the historians know? She also has a younger sister Ava (Mia Waslkowska) whose actions are not appreciated by Adam.

The Taste of Blood is playing again and I’m feeling a little faint……….

---

[1] Shown as part of the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club and hosted by Julie and Connor McMorran.

Stoker.

Allyson Paton admitted that Park Chan-wook was one of her favourite directors, during her very accomplished maiden introduction as host at this weeks Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club which was showing the South Korean directors latest film Stoker (2013).

 

Mother and Daughter.....

Born in 1963, Park, known for his violent, dark psychological thrillers, is one of the most significant talents to emerge from South Korea’s new wave cinema. He studied philosophy at Sogang University, where he founded a film club and developed a strong interest in film theory and criticism. Working first as an assistant director and then in 1992 he went on to make his feature film debut The Moon is the Sun’s Dream. The film that brought him to world prominence was Joint Security Area (2000) a drama focusing on a murder in the demilitarized zone highlighting the volatile political relationship between North and South Korea following this he went on to make what has become known as his vengeance trilogy. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) was followed by Old Boy (2003) which tells the tale of a man who has been incarcerated in a room for fifteen years, and who on his release attempts to determine the identity of his captor and why he has been imprisoned. The third part of the trilogy is Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005) the film opens with our heroine serving a 13-year prison sentence for the abduction and murder of a child. After her release she plan’s to carry out vengeance against the man who was really responsible for the murder. Other films of note have been I’m a Cyborg, but that’s OK (2006) an offbeat screwball comedy described as a madcap fantasy, made so that his young daughter was able to see one of his films. This was followed in 2009 by Thirst, in which a priest becomes a vampire!

 

.....Uncle Charlie with the widow......

Allyson then went on to tell us that tonight’s film was the first time Park had made an English-speaking movie and it’s also the first writing credit from Prison Break star Wentworth Miller. Sadly it was the last film co-produced by Tony Scott who died shortly after production.  This British-American psychological thriller stars Mia Wasikowska as eighteen-year-old India whose father dies in a car accident. Matthew Goode is her father’s brother Uncle Charlie, a mysteriously charming man whom India never knew existed, who comes to live with her and her emotionally unstable mother. Nicole Kidman plays the mother who finds Uncle Charlie irresistible.  Our host also told us that the film was not a reference to Bram Stoker and that we would find little or no product placement in the movie that she said was deliberate to make the film seem in a world of its own.

 

.....the grieving daughter with Uncle Charlie.

The group discussion that followed the screening agreed that the film was very effective with its gradual build up and a narrative that was always threatening to break out into violence action, which is a trademark of Park’s work. This is a wonderfully dark and disturbing movie with its underlying gothic theme but set in modern day, and along with Chung Chung-hoon’s sumptuous cinematography, which included a superb visual pun involving Kidman’s hair and a field of long grass, makes it a movie well worth seeing again.

Lawless.

The real Bondurant Brothers.

We finish yet another season of Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre Film Club movies. This  ‘term’ we have had an excellent and varied collection of films from different genres and countries and tonight’s film was certainly no exception. Described as an American gangster film Lawless (2012) centres on the seemingly indestructible brothers Jack (Shia LaBeouf), Forrest (Tom Hardy) and Howard Bondurant (Jason Clarke) who produced and sold illicit alcohol in Franklin County Virginia, during Prohibition in the United States of America. 

Howard, Jack and Forrest Bondurant.

Giving as always an exceptionally interesting introduction Rachel Findlay informed us that tonight director is the Australian John Hillcoat whose previous film The Road (2009) was also shown as part of a Film Club season. Prior to that he had directed Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Guy Pearce and John Hurt in the rather brutal The Proposition (2005) that was set and filmed in the Australian outback and as in Lawless writer and musician Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and scored the music.  The book on which Lawless is based is called "The Wettest County in the World" and it's by Matt Bondurant, a literature and creative writing professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Rachel went on to tell us that she had watched and read a number of interviews with the author one of which I reproduce for your information which, as our host pointed out served as a useful background for the film we were about to see.

Jack Bondurant.

"We were all aware that my grandfather used to run liquor when he was young, but these were things that were never discussed in Franklin County. Moonshine was a dangerous business: the distillation process involves fire, high pressure, and flammable liquids. Improper technique or materials could cause paralysis, blindness, or worse. Bootlegging, or what they called “blockading” in those days, was also fraught with danger; a car full of booze on the open road was fair game for hijackers or law enforcement.

We all just assumed that Grandpa Jack’s trade was small and general. So when my father unearthed a series of newspaper articles about a shooting at Maggodee Creek Bridge in 1930, we were quite shocked. In these articles my grandfather and his brothers Forrest and Howard, “The Bondurant Boys,” were described as a notorious group with a dangerous reputation. My grandfather was still alive then, and when my dad confronted him about the shooting he merely lifted his shirt to show the bullet hole. That was it. I was living across the country at the time, and didn’t have a chance to question him further. He died the next year at 91 years old.

Like many young boys, I was afraid of my grandfather. He was an imposing man, and people around the county treated him with respect. I spent a lot of time in his back storage room staring at an old pair of brass knuckles hanging on the wall, understanding even then that my grandfather lived a very different life than anything I would know."[1]

Apparently Matt Bondurant carried out some research after his grandfather died, and discovered that the Bondurant brothers had served as prosecution witnesses in "The great moonshine conspiracy trial of 1935". He went on to use the transcripts of the court trial and the grand jury testimony when writing his novel.

A great cameo from Gary Oldman as the big city gangster Floyd Banner. 

Rachel also read out an excerpt from an article that the director John Hillcoat wrote about why he made the movie, again I reproduce this for your information:

"I have always wanted to make a Gangster movie. However like all genres, they need to be somehow reinvented, made fresh again. The source material came from a great book originally titled The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant that takes the most iconic American genres, the Western and the Gangster, and explores where one (the Western) ends and the other (the Gangster) begins. The true story of the Bondurant brothers arises out of the Western legends from their remote woods and portrays the next generation of country outlaws -- the men and women who gave birth to the big-time urban mobsters like Capone by servicing the Prohibition cities with their rot gut whisky. The book's family saga brought the 'hillbilly moonshiner' to life in an authentic, gritty, and exciting way.

Nick and I wanted to explore the ideas of the myths of immortality and the transition from one age to another with the brutality that accompanies such transitions. About the little guys, those foot soldiers and worker bees, the dealers at the bottom supplying the gangsters on the rise to the top, exploiting the thirst of a nation via a new ruthless machine that relentlessly pursued the American dream in what became crime's first major gold rush, the largest crime-wave in history.

We felt there were parallels to draw with our own times socio-economic, political, and -- with the dustbowl -- even environmental upheaval. To this day, one can draw parallels to more recent crime waves -- 'war on drugs' -- based upon the demand of outlawed substances.

We also wanted to capitalize upon the mythic allure of the backwoods life -- the raw music, the dry humor, and undiluted grit of the Southern Rebel character and in our movie draw out its dynamic mix of blues and country music; its mix of religious sects; the moonshine blockading that invented one of the country's most popular sports (NASCAR racing)."[2]

Federal Deputy Charlie Rakes.

Like The Proposition tonight’s fine-looking period piece was really a film that carried with it the essence of a classic western rather than a gangster movie asking us to metaphorically cheer the ‘not-so’ baddies and to boo the baddie. In this case a crooked Federal Deputy Charlie Rakes (Hillcoat regular Guy Pearce) a slimy dandy destined for purgatory. The only criticism leveled by an appreciative audience was at times the intelligible dialogue, but otherwise the season ended with jolly shootout and bags of violence (and that was just the coffee break!) what more could this discerning gathering which for? Role on next season.

---

[1] The Daily Beast Aug 2012.

[2] The Huffington Post Aug 2012.