James Cameron, Shin Bet and the Doom Generation Button That Could’ve Got Me Killed
Plus new reviews; Tori & Lokita; and John Wick: Chapter 4
Short notices this week on Jon Jost’s Tourists; achingly awful Paint; French meta-documentary dark comedy, The Worst Ones; not-quite-the-latest Hong Sangsoo, the building stories of Walk Up; plus a Robert Zemeckis retrospective in Chicago and capsules from the city’s burgeoning revival & repertory scene here.
European masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne seventy-one and sixty-nine-years-old, respectively, have been on the international stage since before the turn of the century, and have made twelve fiction features since 1996’s La Promesse. The level of the two-time Palme d’Or winners’ work could be taken for granted—but the chronicles of the working-class in their part of Belgium have lost none of their urgency, and their latest, Tori and Lokita, is among their finest, fearless yet lovingly observed, beautifully constructed, as bold and simple and direct as a thundercrack. [More here.]
Then there was the time James Cameron had to save my life over that piece of Doom Generation memorabilia.
There was a press junket at the Regency Hotel in New York City, and Twentieth Century Fox was excited about the possibilities of Kathryn Bigelow’s fiery, feverish fifth feature, Strange Days, set in that distant future of 1999 tying into the new millennium. The vivid, violent screenplay was by Jay Cocks and her ex-husband of a couple of years, James Cameron.
The half-filled elevator opens onto the ground floor. There’s a scrum of men in the area, and they are surrounding Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who would be assassinated less than a month after the release of the movie.
The Shin Bet security detail looks the motley group of interviewers and publicists up and down, and I am dressed down, casual as they come. My faded canvas messenger bag has a small white-on-black all-caps button pinned to the shoulder strap, promoting The Doom Generation, which debuted in January of that year at Sundance:
“EAT
FUCK
KILL“ … (Story continues with interview with Gregg Araki from the film’s original release here.)
Even on a first viewing of a movie as detail-packed as John Wick: Chapter 4, there are notes made in the dark that stay there: carving cogent paragraphs requires so much peeling away, unless you take up the “recap” format of ending that first go with a clutch of bullet points.
And then all the vivid writing by other eyes: who’s going to weave those together? (Excepting the mechanized aggregation of Rotten Tomatoes, of course.) A challenge, maybe, for the digital release. But certainly before its release on Peacock in the fall.
Just like a king: confidence, not hubris. All the fu, all the time, nonstop-fu, sad Keanu-fu, almost three hours-fu. The grim fairytale John Wick: Chapter 4 is relentless: the world, this world, wishes to kill simple, unostentatious assassin John Wick. His dog and wife left far behind. Wick has offended the arcane rules of a reigning society that cannot bear the odor of any form of resistance. (Like Congress, but with sharper suits, boisterous kicks, spins and effective weaponry.)
The extended elegy for cooperation and community takes only a couple of deep breaths in a trajectory from its imagined Manhattan to fictional Osaka to assassin-seething Paris. (The cast is large and agreeable; the costumes always sharp or sleek.) The legerdemain of the “High Table” runs a few degrees shy of balderdash, but backstory outside of the organization’s essentials is still almost nonexistent. “He is a ghost looking for a graveyard,” is that not enough for you?
Wick’s a walker, or a Walker, to hark back to John Boorman’s seminal thriller, Point Blank, in which monosyllabic, dead-undead Lee Marvin’s character, Walker, dream-walks through 1967 Los Angeles night and bright daylight, sharp-suited, bullet-domed, in restless forward motion, looking to collect a debt from mobsters who have cheated him out of only a few tens of thousands of dollars.
The rest of the review is here.