HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION

aka GET THE GRINGO

(Adrian Grunberg, 2012)

Just when it seemed as if Mel Gibson had forgotten the secret of his own appeal as a movie star, he co-writes and finances a vehicle for himself that demonstrates that he knows exactly what once made him so watchable onscreen. As a director, his best characteristic is the tremendously strong visual storytelling evident in both Braveheart and Apocalypto. That is a feature of this film too, directed as it is by Gibson's protege Adrian Grunberg, presumably with Gibson in close attendance.
He plays the nameless Gringo, imprisoned in a hellish, massive Mexican prison having stolen $2 Million from a Californian crime boss. Inside, he has to learn the ropes and figure out how to survive and retrieve his money, currently in the hands of the Mexican cops who caught him.
Gibson's character has a little of Richard Stark's Parker to him, tough and smart and ruthless as he is, and Gibson plays him with much of his old wit and twinkly charisma. Even more vivid is the setting; this prison is a world unto itself, with shops and families and a rigid class system, and the film is at its colourful best detailing its quirks.
There are a couple of nice action scenes, a few good gags, a cast full of great Mexican faces, and it is a solid slice of b-movie pulp, tailor-made for it's star.

STREETS OF FIRE

(Walter Hill, 1984)

The main problem with Streets of Fire is its leading man. Michael Paré may have briefly been the next big thing, may have been extremely handsome, and may have looked the part of the action hero matinee idol. But he couldn't act.
Not in the way many other action stars can't act; those sort of stars generally know their limitations and play themselves and variations thereof repeatedly. No; Paré just seems an empty vessel, posing his way through his scenes. He is almost expressionless, utterly devoid of charisma, and wooden in each of his line readings.
He plays Tom Cody, an ex-Army drifter summoned back to his big City hometown to rescue his old flame, the rock singer Ellen Aim (Diane Lane) after she is kidnapped, mid-song, by a Biker gang, the Bombers, led by Raven (Willem Defoe). Cody teams up with Aim's new boyfriend and manager Billy Fish (Rick Moranis) and the tomboyish fellow veteran McCoy (Amy Madigan) to bust into the Bombers hideout, then get Ellen back across the City.
The final part of that plot is familiar from Hill's other work - a group of disparate personalities fleeing together across a hostile landscape describes the plot of both The Warriors and Southern Comfort, but this is a very different piece of work to either of those spare, stylish action classics.
The opening subtitle describes it as a "Rock & Roll fable", and it seems to take simplicity as the defining quality of that particular form; stripping everything down to its most basic core. That means that the characters are mostly cliched types fulfilling generic roles. The setting is more interesting; Hill aims for a timeless comic book world, a mixture of 1950s and 1980s styles, neon-lit and rain-slicked. There are a mix of influences and references: the villains are a leather-clad Biker gang like something from a 60s movie, the hero brandishes a rifle one handed, Western fashion, and the music is utterly 80s, with songs written by Jim Steinman among others.
The plots simplicity works well; offering a satisfying, predictable three-act structure allowing for action, humour, romance and a big final showdown. But the dialogue is more problematic. Everybody talks in a hard-bitten tough guy manner, making bad jokes as they ceaselessly mock and chide one another; and it's a little tiring and extremely one-note.
Some of the cast handle it better than others; Madigan sounds natural whereas Moranis sounds forced. Paré, for his part, sounds like a small boy trying to sound tough.
Hill retains his skill with action - all of it exaggerated here with thunderous sound effects and visceral cutting - and his eye for the pop beauty in an urban setting, but this feels like a film thatbgot away from him to some extent. Its a little too big and wild, a little too odd and strange to ever really work. And having a leading man who cannot lead doesn't help at all..

THE SOUTH

Aka EL SUR

(Victor Erice, 1983)

El Sur may well be the single most beautiful Film of the 1980s. Erice's use of natural light and, more particularly, of darkness, is spectacular, and worthy of comparison with Caravaggio and Vermeer. The opening scene is a perfect example. The titles appear over a black screen, then lightness enters the frame almost imperceptibly, until we can make out a window in the corner. Slowly light illuminates a room; a bed, some ornately detailed wallpaper. Someone is sleeping in the bed, and as the scene progresses - the narrative handled almost entirely through offscreen dialogue, telling us that a man has gone missing, his wife frantically ringing around in search of him - we watch that someone wake and rise.
She is Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren), and she narrates the story as an older woman, reflecting on a pivotal part of her life, when she lived in Northern Spain with her parents, before her fathers suicide. The majority of the film involves her investigation of her memories of her father, and his mysterious past in pre-Civil War Southern Spain.
Erice has his favourite themes - childhood, myth, memory - and this story allows him to tackle all of them. But he tends towards the elliptical and enigmatic, necessitating some effort on the part of the audience. That effect is exaggerated here by the flashback structure, and only the voiceover narration clarifies some of the more obscure plot points. But the themes are always prominent as Estrella seeks to understand her own idea of her father as an almost mythic figure with magical abilities (he divines water and studies hypnosis) and the connection of that with her mythologisation of the South itself.
That makes El Sur sound dry, but it never is. Erice has far too poetic and nuanced a sensibility, and this film is far richer in humanity than The Spirit of the Beehive, his superb debut. Here Estrella's life is complicated by her family, her ruminations and fantasies lent an edge by the realities and implications of Spanish National (and her fathers) history. Scene by scene this is an extraordinary piece of cinema, beautifully shot and toned, and filled with lovely acting.
The circumstances of its production - only half of Erice's script was shot, after a producer pulled financing - suggest it should feel far less complete and coherent than it actually does, and though it ends without any real narrative closure, that ending is moving and in keeping with the lyrical mysteries characterising the rest of the film.
Not only the most beautiful film of the 80s, then, but one of the very best films from that decade.

THE OUTFIT

(John Flynn, 1973)

Director Flynn made a series of spartan, taut little b-movie thrillers in the early to mid-1970s. The Outfit, the first, was soon followed by Rolling Thunder and Defiance. They're all naturally streamlined, narratively curt and focused on characters who are utterly defined by their actions. In the case of The Outfit, Flynn had the perfect style and sensibility for the source material, one of Richrd Stark's superb "Parker" series of novels.
His Parker is renamed Earl Macklin and played by Robert Duvall as a grimly focused professional who takes on the mob after they kill his brother in revenge for a robbery upon a mob-owned bank some years before. With his girl (Karen Black) and old partner, Cody (Joe Don Baker) in tow, Macklin sets about ruining the mob by attrition, robbing card games, bookmakers and counting rooms across the country and killing anyone who tries to stop him. This naturally gets the attention of big boss Robert Ryan.
Flynn's style is simple, utterly unadorned, and his storytelling is correspondingly strong. He often finds a good master-shot and lets a portion of the scene play out that way, his camera subtly tracking characters as they move around. Those master-shots are plain; there are never any fancy angles, overly clever framing or ostentatious movements in Flynn's work.
That means that sometimes - when he's not quite on his game - scenes can play like tv, despite the (occasionally inspired) Bruce Surtees photography, which is particularly good at finding the dingy beauty in the dull, underlit interiors of hotel corridors and galley kitchens. But other times there's a muscular, tight efficiency to his work.
That's there too in the acting; Duvall is stone-faced throughout, the mask only cracking a couple of times when he seems amused by what he is doing, or more commonly by one of Baker's country boy monologues.
Everyone is muted; Black has a couple of scenes of emotional upset, but Ryan was born for this sort of tersely masculine material, and his weary, lined face alone suggests the long life of death and violence his character has been responsible for.
There is much violence here too; Duvall and Baker pistol-whipping and blasting their way through a savage road movie underworld. Every situation turns on violence or sex - the hillbilly brothers they buy a car from turn violent when Baker refuses the advances of the wife of one, Ryan avoids violence on one occasion to protect his pretty young wife who, he insinuated "treats me well", and even a routine police traffic stop goes wrong. It all ends quite satisfyingly in a big showdown, as it must, and Flynn delivers.
He's helped immeasurably by a terrific Jerry Fielding score; by turns funky, sleazy and tense, it improves this gripping, pulpy b-movie the way all great soundtracks do.

SAFE

(Boaz Yakin, 2011)

More than a cut above the average Jason Statham vehicle, Safe works in it's own right as a gritty, 1970s-style action thriller. That it makes such good use of Statham's particular brand of glowering machismo and brutal fighting style only makes it a more satisfying genre experience.
Statham plays Luke Wright, a cage fighter who incurs the wrath of the Russian Mob. As a result, his wife is murdered and he is left alive, but told that anyone he get close to will be executed, that he must wander alone. Over a year later, and by now virtually a bum and on the brink of suicide, Luke sees an 11-year Chinese girl pursued through the New York Subway by the same Russian mobsters responsible for his wife's death. She is a maths genius with some important numbers locked within her head, and by saving her, Luke involves himself in a gang war between the Russians, corrupt New York cops and Chinese. Only, of course, as Luke begins to pummel and blast his way through opponents, we learn that he is far more than just another cage fighter.
Writer-director Boaz Yakin has some form in genre cinema, having written The Rookie, The Punisher (1989) and Prince of Persia. His directorial debut, the outstanding Fresh, was an interesting, enthralling spin on the crime genre. Aside from that work, he has mostly made dramas, and I think that Safe really benefits from his flexibility and experience away from the narrow confines of generic expectation.
His approach to some genre tropes is often interesting, and suggests the work of a filmmaker who understands his genre but is seeking to push against it's stylistic boundaries. He handles the exposition of the first act, for instance, with a series of interlocking, often elliptical flashbacks, which establish characters and move the plot along nicely. Later he stages two action scenes from within cars, so that all we can see of the gunmen outside is snatched, chaotic reflections in the rearview mirror (scenes reminiscent of Miss Bala). The final one-on-one confrontation is played as a direct snub to the expectations of this sort of film.
But Yakin also understands the appeal of Statham and puts it to use. His early slow-burn scenes work brilliantly, because we know exactly what will happen later. Then when it does happen, Yakin finds a happy medium between the coherence and stability of classic fight cinema and the modern love of hyperactive fast-cutting. These scenes are always clear - you can see exactly what Statham is doing - but they have the bruising impact audiences have been taught to expect since the Bourne films revolutionised the way action is shot too. Statham's performance is solid. He never gives much away beyond anger and a certain cold-hearted kick-ass relish for the fight at hand, but he manages the few gags he gets easily.
And yet for all its few jokes, Safe has more of an emotional kick than his work usually manages, due mostly to his relationship with the girl, which is gently played on both sides.
The surprising intensity of that emotional content is matched by the grit of the portrayal of New York City, here shown in the sort of street-level crime story more common in the 1970s. There are car chases along its avenues, massive gun battles in its streets and hotels (a casino shootout recalls and perhaps betters Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon), and fistfights in its bars and subway cars. The City is a character here, refreshing in an era when Cleveland and Vancouver often stand in for Manhattan. Another slightly retro touch is Mark Mothersbaugh's terrific score, which apes and updates Lalo Schifrin's 1970s work to fabulous effect,
But really, this is a Statham vehicle, and as such it must work as a Statham vehicle; meaning that it should be ludicrous, over the top and full of fighting, explosions and general mayhem.
That it does all that and works on it's own terms too is a tribute to some fine work from writer-director Yakin. Lets hope it's not long before he decides to handle genre material again.

GOODBYE FIRST LOVE

(Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011)

Camille (Lola Créton) is 15, and madly in love with her handsome, slightly older boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) in the way that only teenagers can really be. When he leaves for 10 months travelling in South America, and that becomes numberless years, she collapses emotionally. We next see her years later, studying architecture, and observe her begin a relationship with her middle-aged teacher (Magne Håvard Brekke) which lasts for a few seemingly content years. But then Sullivan re-enters her life and everything is thrown into question once more.
This is a simple old tale, this story of the first love which cuts deepest, and plainly autobiographical. It is perhaps strongest on the changes in the life of a young person. There are no political awakenings for Camille, just the realisation that architecture is her "vocation" and a new maturity about what she wants and what it means.
But the love story is problematic. Hansen-Løve shows us this couple kissing, arguing, hugging, weeping together. Their last holiday together is a familiarly idyllic rural break, and they are the kind of incredibly French characters who can leave no lake unswum, no horse unridden. Their passion is evident in the many bitter fights and recoveries they endure. We can see it, but crucially, we cannot feel it. There is an oddly cold distance here, between the heat of the emotions we witness and the measured recreation of those emotions by the filmmaker. It feels a little like being told by somebody about their great love affair. Interesting but not especially involving.
Camille's life away from Sullivan is always more compelling, and the film has an exciting sense of Paris as a living city, and a vivid way of expressing her growing feeling for architecture. The characters, particularly the pretentious, selfish, permanently scarfed Sullivan, flirt with being truly annoying, and are undeniably almost caricatures of the bourgeois cliches who have filled French cinema for decades; self-indulgent, solipsistic and whiny, only the warmth of the directors gaze and the charm of the actors redeem them.
The performances are always convincing, and Hansen-Løve is a good storyteller with a great sense of time and place and a feel for music, but you get the feeling that this film is just that bit too autobiographical for her. As Camille hears in class "Art is. Private matter for the Artist". Perhaps in this case, too private.

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS

(Whit Stillman, 2011)

Whit Stillman has not directed a film in the fourteen years since The Last Days of Disco. And yet, so consistent with his earlier work and distinctive is Damsels In Distress that it feels almost as if he has not been away at all. Like his earlier work it focuses upon a small group of educated young people set apart in a world predicated on order. In this case that world is a New England College, and the people are a group of co-eds who fasten onto a new student and instruct her in their ways and beliefs. They try to help and improve their fellow students - particularly the males - led by their eccentric alpha female, the hyper-articulate Violet (Greta Gerwig). All the while, Stillman allows them romances and emotional crises, most of it wound around his trademark conversational style. His characters discuss ideas, always with wit, a self-conscious erudition and disarming earnestness. Indeed, a surfeit of ideas is a Stillman characteristic. Not many romantic comedies are so dense with interest in the most casual dialogue exchanges. But this is no ordinary romcom. As much a droll, wonky comedy of manners, it appears to somehow reflect Stillman's own time away from cinema in Violet's depressed escape from College, his return echoed by her own decision to embrace a joyous cultural phenomenon. It is dryly funny throughout and contains a few big belly laughs, and the cast catch Stillman's tone and handle his dense, literate dialogue beautifully. Gerwig and Brody are the biggest stars here, and both are wholly appealing, believable and even lovable whether they are discussing soap, the correct spelling of Zorro, the plural of doofus or sexual practices among Cathars. Stillman's elegant style is mostly invisible before it becomes most expressive for his climactic, joyous musical sequence. In short, Stillman remains Stillman, and cinema needs such unique talents.