Elephant

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) "Columbine from the Trenches." The film starts with a car out of slow-motion control smashing into garbage cans along the street. John McFarland (John Robinson) has to take the keys away from his father (Timothy Bottoms), who is driving his son—drunk—to school. Already we're given a sense of life out of control as we spend a weirdly typical day at a High School in suburban Portland, following the criss-crossing paths of several strata of students in long floating camera tracks down the long corridors of lockers and linoleum. The shots follow the gaze of the walkers extending to vanishing-points down the halls, leading inexorably...to what? Usually, another hall-way. After many minutes of this you begin to feel trapped in a maze, and Van Sant's doing enough obscure things with his mumbling non-actors (most of the film was improvised) to keep an audience-member on-edge. It's The Shining, all "Greased" up and nowhere to go. Around each corner, there may be the photo class guy who wants to take your picture, or it might be the last thing you ever see.

The film is an homage of sorts to Danny Boyle and Alan Clarke's experimental film about an IRA shooter, using long tracking shots and a chilly minimalist approach. But Van Sant (and his producer Diane Keaton) have changed the "elephant in the room" to school violence and the 1999 Columbine Massacre, which the carnage from Elephant somewhat resembles. The film plays out dispassionately without any answers and no questions asked. The Act simply is. Kids get pissed. Kids arm up. Kids get revenge. The shooters aren't glorified. They have little on the ball, get abused by the jocks, play first-person shooter video games, experiment with gay sex, and build bombs that don't work. Their assault is shooting fish in a barrel, with no rules and no thought. What could explain it? And nothing could justify it. In the end, you're left drained and hopeless and questioning why you wanted to see it in the first place.

But Van Sant excels in draining feeling out of his movies. Oh, emotions are there, but there's a chilly null-void surrounding the actors as they float through the landscapes. The kids in the school are chirpily distracted, turning drama from the trivia. They're not even thinking, so much as using brain-energy and you can feel the complacency in their hall-walkabouts—("This is where I'm supposed to be, and okay, I get to do things I like to do, so no problem") They're innocent cows in a field, ill-prepared for armed assault, and death unfathomable given their age. They're the slowest of targets.

The shooters have that same null-void cocoon around them and through them. They shoot, sometimes watch the results, but mostly just randomly pick off kids they encounter by chance. All the earlier intersections we've seen (and re-seen from other perspectives) come to an abrupt ending, the wanderings stopped with a bloody, crumping jolt. This is death by violence, but it's not a crime of passion. These kids feel nothing, not even satisfaction, wandering through their little cloud of atrocity, while the other kids wander in theirs of complacency. The gun-shots are the lightning that form when they meet.

It's a disturbing film for its utter lack of feeling, remorse or empathy. As such, it provides a bit more insight to a senseless killing than any speculation of its cause might serve.

 
What could explain such an act?

 
Nothing.

Don't Make a Scene: Open Range (2003)

The Story: I still feel grief. But, one has to move on. There's the line from The Shawshank Redemption—The simple choice: "Either get busy living or get busy dying." It's the responsibility of the living to live. To go on. "To be or not to be" somebody else put it. Make something of the life that you've got, mindful of the gift others have lost.

 

But, homage must be paid. Tribute. It's the responsibility of the living to acknowledge the dead. See them off. Move on.

 

We'll be doing that for the next couple weeks. Funeral speeches. There's a lot of them, but I'll do just two.

 

Then, move on.

 

Revisiting Kevin Costner's Open Range not too long ago, I was struck by just how good and how simple it is. Magnificently photographed with Costner's eye for detail and vista, it's a story of loss, responsibility and integrity, and it holds up as well now—maybe better—than when I first saw it upon its release.

But, this scene hit me in the gut.

I guess that means "amen."

 

The Set-Up: In the West, death can come in many forms. For the cowboys working a few dozen cows and horses for cattleman Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall), a quick supply visit to town the town of Harmonville—a town that hates free rangers—their cook, Mose (Abraham Benrubi) has been beaten up in town and jailed, and Spearman and his associate Charley Waite (Kevin Costner) have sprung him and had his injuries treated. But, now they're known in town and are targets. When Boss and Charley disarm some would-be attackers they've spotted, another group enters their camp, attacks Button (Diego Luna), kills Mose and the group's dog, Tig.

Action.

BOSS SPEARMAN: Looks real nice, Charley.

CHARLEY WAITE: Yeah, a man ought to have something to show he was here. 

CHARLEY: Be gone in another big storm. 

BOSS: Don't matter none. He's got your dog for company. 

BOSS: He'd like it you put old Tig with him. 

CHARLEY: Yeah, he was more Mose's dog in the end than he was mine. 

CHARLEY: Be right to say some words. 

BOSS: You want to speak with the man upstairs, do it. 

BOSS: I'll stand right here and listen, hat in hand, 

BOSS: ...but I ain't talking to that son of a bitch. 

BOSS: And I'll be holding a grudge for him letting this befall a sweet kid like Mose. 

CHARLEY: Well, he sure as hell wasn't one to complain. 

CHARLEY: Woke with a smile. 

CHARLEY: Seemed like he could keep it there all day. 

CHARLEY: Kind of man that'd say "good morning" and mean it, whether it was or not. 

CHARLEY: To tell you the truth, Lord, if there was two gentler souls, I never seen them.

CHARLEY: Seemed like old Tig wouldn't even kill birds in the end. 

CHARLEY: Well, you got yourself a good man and a good dog, and I'm inclined to agree with Boss about holding a grudge against you for it.

CHARLEY: I guess that means "amen." 

Open Range

Words by Craig Storper

Pictures by J. Michael Muro and Kevin Costner

Open Range is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Buena Vista Home Entertainment.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003) We've talked about The League of Gentlemen, Basil Dearden's ingenious caper movie. Writer Alan Moore had a devious idea for what he called "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," a comic series he created for the "America's Best Comics" publishers. He'd had editorial problems—"notes" as they're called—with the major comic book companies because he'd write stories for their licensed/trademarked characters only for editors to tell him "we/they can't do that, as we need the characters to sell breakfast cereal/action figures/underoo's/whatever." Rejection. It was just this sort of thing that forced him to create new characters for his landmark "Watchmen" series, when the characters he wanted to use (and rather irrevocably, too) were considered "too marketable or exploitable" by the company that had acquired them. He couldn't kill them off, give them less than honorable intentions—anything the Comics Code Authority considered "unheroic."

Quatermain, Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, The Invisible Man, Mina Murray and Captain Nemo

But, for this "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" he decided to make up his team consisting of characters that appeared in works in the public domain, where nobody could squawk or...sue...for that matter...over their use and what Moore wanted to do with them. So, his book has Mina Murray, recent paramour of Count Dracula, recruited by British agent Campion Bond (yeah, "they're" related) to recruit a team which consists of: Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard's books (particularly "King's Solomon's Mines"), Captain Nemo from "20,000 League Under the Sea," Dr. Griffin from "The Invisible Man", and Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll (and if he's in, so is Mr. Hyde). The first story had the League recruited by Bond's  spy-master boss, "M" (who is eventually revealed to be Professor Moriarty) to look into the smuggling of the valuable anti-gravity mineral "cavorite" (from H. G. Wells' "First Men in the Moon") involving a Chinese criminal named "The Doctor" (who resembles Fu Manchu). The next series had them battling invading Martians during that bothersome "War of the Worlds" incident. A library of literature and "alternate histories" were there for Moore to exploit and the series enjoyed great success in comics circles.

Connery, being the biggest star, becomes the de facto leader of "The League"

Moore's work had already made it to the screen—The Hughes Brothers had adapted his "Jack the Ripper" series "From Hell"—and there had been talk of making a film of his "Watchmen" since the time it was published. Moore was apathetic—he hadn't liked the From Hell film and found the attempts to adapt his work tedious and less than faithful—and vowed to have nothing to do with them.

Mina Murray—a vampire in broad daylight in Africa

It would seem hard to screw up "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", however. The characters were well-known, Moore had breathed a less Victorian sensibility into them—while remaining true to the original concepts. But, that was assuming people read books. The screenplay—by James Dale Robinson—became a patchwork of Moore's concepts and studio-dictated "ideas," such as the character of Dorian Gray (played by Stuart Townsend), who for the film is not only immortal, but also unkillable, Mina (in the film and played by Peta Wilson) is not just immortal but a full-fledged vampire, The Invisible Man (played by Jason Flemyng) is another character entirely (use rights could not be obtained for Wells' character of Dr. Griffin), and—for the benefit of American audiences who might find the film too "European"-centric, a character named "Tom Sawyer" (played by Shane West) is added as a member of the U.S. Secret Service; there is nothing extraordinary about him, other than he might be able to paint fences. The thing is: if somebody doesn't know who "Dr. Jekyll" or "Captain Nemo" is, they're not going to know who "Tom Sawyer" is, either.

Captain Nemo (played by Naseeruddin Shah) is true to Jules Verne's Prince Dakkar version—not Disney's—but the emphasis is on Sean Connery's Alan Quatermain. His salary took a big chunk out of the budget, and, as one of the film's producers, he and the director clashed so often they nearly came to blows. Connery subsequently retired from acting—except for some voice-work, and Norrington, citing studio interference and the difficulty of working with large crews, stated he's never direct a large studio film again. They might have added Mary Lincoln to the characters if only to ask "How was the play?"

Quatermain reasons with Hyde

Where the film sticks to Moore's original it's rather good: Connery's a fine Quatermain—but the film-makers misspell his name at a rather crucial point—and the other actors acquit themselves rather well given what they have to do; the most unnerving thing is the sight of the gargantuan Hulk-like Mr. Hyde, even though it recalls the way artist Kevin O'Neill drew him in the books. Nemo's Nautilus also recalls the "Scimitar of the Sea," although how it could traverse the canals of Venice without scraping bottom remains a mystery, along with how Dorian Gray can survive multiple gun-shots and how a vampiric Mina can go out in the noon-day sun of Africa.

But, then, there's not much to the story. Moore's book was so "inside" that it would have left audiences in the library-dust. So, there's no "cavorite" and the main villain is "M"/Moriarty disguised as a phantom menace known as The Fantom (and played somewhat tepidly by Richard Roxburgh), whose scheme is to build the League in order to discover their secrets and thus make replicas of them for a rampaging world-conquering army of vampires, invisible men and Id-creatures armed with Nemo's technology. The question lies: they needed Quatermain to do that? Not really, and given that there were enough members of the League capable of double/triple-crossing their ranks, such a formation becomes unnecessary...even an empty effort that just delays things. Moriarty would never do that. I doubt Gaston Leroux's "Phantom" would do that. Even Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Phantom" wouldn't do that...he might fit in a song-soliloquy, but he'd get on with it.

It's something of a mess, and it's such a gory mess that even the several gateways to literature it provides ends up as so many dead-ends; no parent would take their kids to see this, although so many kids have some of these characters in their culture growing up (well, the last time I was a kid, they were). Such a waste of good material and the potential that Moore made of it, one of the most fanciful pastiches to come out of the comics world and out of literature.

An extraordinary waste, fiction be told.

The Nautilus crests...