Idiocracy

Idiocracy

Dir: Mike Judge

Starring: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph

About a year ago, the chances of this film seeing the light of day were very bleak.

After a year of post-production limbo, Idiocracy was eventually released in the US in September last year.

20^th Century Fox were under a contractual obligation to give the film a cinematic release before it came out on DVD. After test screenings they decided to show it in only 125 cinemas, do nothing to promote the movie, and refused to screen it to critics.

On this side of the pond, the film has only just been released on DVD and never played in the cinema.

None of it good news, you might think, given that the vast majority of straight-to-video films are terribly poor.

Well, rumours circulating around the internet suggest otherwise.

Both the New York Times and the Guardian have implied that Fox stamped on the film because of its radical slant and anti-corporate message. Edward Havens of FilmJerk.com called the stifling of Idiocracy’s release “one of the most egregious travesties of modern cinema.”

There are good reasons to be suspicious. Despite its glossy production, Idiocracy contains some savage attacks on consumerism, modern American culture and the dumbing down of politics.

Army librarian Joe Bauers is picked by the military to participate in a cryogenic experiment, primarily due to the fact that he is a totally average human being.

Although the plan is to wake him after a year, he ends up returning to consciousness 500 years late, in a society so dumbed down he is easily the most intelligent person alive.

Court cases are turned into glossy Pop Idol television extravaganzas, complete with celebrity judges and flashy corporate advertising. The President is a porn star and five time Ultimate Smack Down champion. Starbucks offers hand-jobs with its cappuccinos.

Bauers is recruited to the White House to fix the world’s problems. He begins by convincing the President to water crops with water, instead of a pop drink called Brandos.

Mike Judge’s best known work, Beavis and Butthead, contained many implied criticisms of American culture. They pale in comparison, though, to the bravery and perceptiveness displayed here.

Fox News, for instance, is portrayed horribly, despite being owned by the same man as the film’s distributor: Rupert Murdoch.

Idiocracy is a comedy, sometimes of the gross-out, high school variety. But it has a strange tone to its laughs, and a savage wit to its politics.

There are few laugh-out-loud moments here, but the jokes that hit have a reassuring intelligence to them and simmer in the brain longer than they have any right to be there.

It is far from a perfect film. Several moments fall flat, and it occasionally seems more of a pastiche of humorous sketches than a coherent narrative.

But these deficits are comfortably made up for by the indignant cleverness of the script and the impressively radical plot.

There’s good reason to think Fox tried to stop you watching this film. Don’t let them.

Warts and all, you probably haven’t seen anything quite like it.

Apocalypto

Apocalypto

Dir: Mel Gibson

Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez

Here’s an interesting question: Just how bad can a good movie be?

Answer? Appallingly bad.

Case in point: Apocalypto. For make no mistake, Apocalypto is a good movie.

Never let it be said that Mel Gibson does not know how to make a film. He does.

He knows how to create and maintain tension, he was a decent eye for vivid, unfussy cinematography, and he elicits good, believable performances from his actors. As an action/chase film, Apocalypto is gold standard.

But make no mistake: Apocalypto competes for the status of worst film of the year.

It’s difficult to know where to start, but we could probably do worse than discussing the utter darkness of Gibson’s heart.

I’m not talking about unfortunate road-side monologues on the war-like nature of the Jewish race. If you’re going to stop enjoying a work of art because of the anti-Semitism of its creator, you’re going to have to stop appreciating T. S. Eliot, and if you do that a small piece of you will die forever.

You can search as hard as you like for anti-Semitism in Apocalypto, but you won’t find it. The darkness here is in the violence.

Now, I rather like a bit of gratuitous violence. I like Die Hard, I like Terminator. But when I’m forced to watch scenes of wives being beaten and raped in front of their husbands, or women and children slaughtered at leisure, I do feel there should be some point to it all.

Without a point, one can only presume that watching it is somehow meant to be pleasant in its own right, which it most certainly is not.

The historical value of these scenes is non-existent, they’re not there to communicate any sort of message, and they develop neither character nor plot. As this becomes increasingly clear, you slowly develop the conviction that Gibson must simply enjoy making them.

It would all be acceptable if the film contained a level of historical accuracy, allowing the violence to be passed off as an attempt to educate us about the nature of a civilisation. But let’s make something clear: Gibson knows nothing about the Maya.

The saddest historical fact about the film is his use of the Yukatek Maya language and an unknown (and very good) set of Mexican and Native American actors, for these combine to give the film an invaluable air of authenticity to which it has no legitimate claim.

The actions of the Maya leadership which constitute the plot of the film – the gathering of villager Maya for sacrifice in a metropolitan centre – simply did not happen (or if it did, we don’t know about it).

In actual fact, members of the royal family were as likely to be sacrificed as commoners.

The Maya are presented as a brutal, primitive race, as incapable of compassion as they are of operating an ipod.

There’s little mention here of their ability to produce extremely accurate astronomical predictions, or the fact that they developed the concept of zero while Europeans were still smearing faeces over the walls of their bedrooms.

I don’t suppose that much of the audience for Apocalypto will ever encounter Mayan history again, and the knowledge they leave this film with will be tragically false.

In Gibson’s world, humans are a nasty bunch. Every so often there’s a bloke who loves his family, but generally we’re all a bunch of violent thieves and rapists, even when we have no particular reason to be.

Under Gibson’s nasty and puerile lens, the standard human behaviour is cruelty, with any kindness standing as some sort of insane anomaly. It is simply impossible to grasp the motivation of the characters without accepting this premise.

If Gibson had wrapped what is basically a long chase scene into Lethal Weapon packaging I’d have told you that he’s proving himself a highly capable action film director.

Unfortunately, the chase is wrapped in packaging that suggests some great meaning, a meaning which is never specified and which will evade your grasp no matter how hard you waste your time looking for it.

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate film upon which to attach Shakespeare’s metaphor of “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Gibson’s thematic vision remains as empty and vacuous as a child playing with his bellybutton.

Le Mari de la Coiffeuse

Le Mari de la Coiffeuse

Dir: Patrice Leconte

Starring: Jean Rochefort, Anne Galiena

You always know you’re not going to get a happy ending with a French film. The only question is how bad it will be and how long you’ll have to wait.

In the case of Le Mari de la Coiffeuse, it comes after an hour and a quarter.

There’s something to be said for a story confident enough to make its point before the 80 minute mark, but Le Mari doesn’t just make a point, it leaves a small melancholic stain on the back of the brain.

That, in a nutshell, is as much as you can ask of any piece of art.

We spend the first third of the film following young Antoine (later played as an adult by Jean Rochefort) as he falls in love with his aging hairdresser, a woman who leaves her blouse sufficiently undone for him to catch a fleeting glimpse of her breast.

Upon her death, he develops an obsession over her that haunts him for the rest of his life.

We rejoin him after thirty years or so, now a middle aged and rather sad looking man. Going to a barber’s, he sets his eyes on the beautiful Anne Galiena, a hairdresser, and, you guessed it, it is love at first sight.

All of which sounds sombre and slow and, well, French.

None of it indicates, however, just how breezily the film progresses, while always remaining substantial and worthwhile.

Leconte really knows his way around the sticky, sensuous glow of pre-pubescent sexual awakenings, the discovery of something more significant than the sum of its parts.

The way he injects those feelings into the adult scenes between Rochefort and Galiena produces a strange, heart-warming response. It’s not every day you’re treated to sex scenes that actually develop character, or that are laughable and yet oddly kinky at the same time.

For a story that concerns itself with the doomed decay of romantic love into affection, it’s also impressive how far Leconte manages to soak the screen in warmth and understanding.

As his youthful object of affection lies dead on the floor of the barber’s, young Antoine still attempts to peek up her skirt from outside the glass door. Amazingly, scenes like this are made genuinely heart-warming, teasing out humour and empathy from what are incessantly tragic circumstances.

Performance wise, Galiena demonstrates one of those rare conjunctions of expression and physique that elevate her from a beautiful woman to a sort of glowing virgin queen, the kind of canvas the audience can pin Antoine’s feelings for her onto.

For his part, Rochefort nimbly traverses the sweet natured perversion of his character without flinching from its reality or coming across as unpleasant. It was this that Sir Peter O Tool recently attempted, but ultimately failed, in his Oscar nominated turn in Venus.

What you’re left with is a twisted, bittersweet little love story, the kind of film adults should be watching on Valentine’s Day.