FauxNixon

The Last King of Scotland is the story of Idi Admin (Forest Whitaker), the leader who came to power in Uganda in a coup in the 1970s.  But the story is told through the eyes of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) who is bored with his life in Scotland and decides to go and see the world, but lacking the imagination to select a place to visit, closes his eyes, spins a globe and makes a promise to himself that he will go to whichever country his finger lands on.  Obviously that country is Uganda.

As Nicholas travels there, first by plane and then by bus, his bus is past by dozens of military vehicles on their way to support the coup which is occurring in the capital and bringing Amin to power.

He begins work a rural medical center where he meets an attractive European woman named Sarah (Gillian Anderson), the wife of the doctor who runs the medical center.  The two begin an affair which they fear Sarah’s husband will discover and act cautiously as a result.  One day Nicholas decides to go see Amin speak and Nicholas is immediately taken aback by the charm of the leader the way in which his rhetoric seems to reflect the wants and needs of the poor crowds before him.

Sarah is hardened and has seen leaders come and go, most often by coup, multiple times in her times in the world and has no high hopes for Amin, but Nicholas is idealistic and believes that the new leader should be given a chance before he is judged.

While discussing this, the pair are interrupted by Ugandan soldiers who have come to bring the doctors to a nearby accident where Idi Amin has been injured and needs treatment.  Amin’s motorcade has collided with a cow, his hand is broken and the cow is moaning as it lies dying its painful death by the side of the rode.  The cow’s cries distracting his attention from Amin’s wound, Nicholas, rather impulsively, grabs the nearest pistol, calmly walks over the cow and shoots it, much to the shock of the leader of Uganda and his soldier-bodyguards whose nerves are only settled when Nicholas lays down the gun and makes it clear he means the leader no harm, just that the cow needed to be put out of its misery.

The wound is treated and Amin is taken with Nicholas’ demeanor, asking him if he is English.  Amin hates the English and is incredibly relieved when Nicholas clarifies that he is Scottish, not English.  Amin, being a bit of an eccentric, eyes the t-shirt which Nicholas is wearing and insists one of his sons would love it and trades his full dress military coat for the t-shirt right there at the scene of the accident.

Thus is the beginning of Nicholas’ trip into the world of power, greed, sex, violence, war, paranoia, charisma, and confusion as he is summoned a few days later and offered the position of personal physician to Amin.  After some protest, he agrees and with this new position comes power, wealth, and the many, many strange habits Idi Amin has.

In one instance Nicholas is summoned to an emergency in Amin’s room, where he is complaining of intense pain in his lower torso.  Nicholas provides a cursory examination, determines the problem and grabbing a nearby baseball bat, uses the bat to bear-hug Amin and force out the gas which is causing him such pains.  He then advises him never to mix one medication with another to avoid future such problems and after the calm, the two sit and talk.

It is easy to see the way Amin has a charm with people and without his temper and his paranoia he may very well have lead Uganda into some significant success.  He speaks of growing up in extreme poverty and working his way up from grunt to soldier to officer to higher officer and now, finally to becoming the supreme leader of Uganda.  His stories are touching and well told and he has an easy demeanor with people that make him instantly likable and a person with whom one may speak with fantastic ease.

Alas, one could go on and on about Amin, but that in itself is testament to the writing from the screenwriters and to the magnificent performance by Forest Whitaker as Idi Admin.  Whitaker takes on the characters mannerisms, emotions, modes of speaking, accent, and other varieties of specific features to such an extent that at times it is difficult to determine whether this is a feature-length movie serving as a form of entertainment, or an attempt at a docudrama of the life of Idi Amin.

Nicholas’ character eventually realizes that he has himself been brought into something of a trap.  Everything he has, including his passport, his housing, his food, even his transportation are all in the control of Amin and he is not free to return to Scotland.  He is instead, a very wealthy, very powerful prisoner-physician to what would become one of the world’s most infamous African dictators.

Constantly getting himself into trouble, Nicholas eventually comes into Amin’s bad graces and finds himself in imminent danger of being executed and the movie’s most exciting climax comes when we discover whether or not Nicholas is one of the very few who have managed to escape the wrath of Amin, or if he is to find himself among the countless dead for which Amin is already responsible.

The direction is fantastic in the sense that one never really notices is.  Director Kevin Macdonald manages to recreate the world of Uganda in the 1970s and direct his actors and all of the various other elements with such skill that one manages to forget that this is just a movie and becomes enveloped in Uganda in the 1970s and the world of Idi Admin.  The present president of Uganda was thrilled by the notion that this film would accurately portray Ugandan history and the cast and crew were given basically unfettered access to the country, including the cooperation of the military and the ability to close roads as necessary for the production.  Rent it, buy it, download it, borrow it, whatever it takes.  Just see The Last Kind of Scotland because it is absolutely fantastic.

The fifth entry in my Great Directors series profiles Steven Soderberg best known for his work with for his work with Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels and Erin Brokovich.  He was born January 14, 1963, in Goergia, in the US.   Steven’s interest in film began at least in high school and, upon graduation, he moved to Hollywood to begin his career.

His first cinematic break was very dramatic and came in the form of sex lies and videotape, which was released in 1989, which received the prestigious Palmes d’Or  at the Cannes Film Festival, the independent spirit award for Best Director, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, with the screenplay having been written by Soderbergh himself, and in 2006 was inducted into the US National Film Registry for preservation. He is prone to casting Julia Roberts, Topher Grace, Don Cheadle, and George Clooney along with many others.  A little known fact is that he often works as his own director of photography under the name of Peter Andrews, which is the first and middle name of his father.

For all those pining away at this site and wondering when the next update will come, my answer is soon.  I have been on a week or so vacation, and just scheduled some posts in advance to keep things going.  I am now working on the next edition of the Great Directors series, so stay tuned for that!

The Limey is a 1999 Steven Soderbergh-directed, Lem Dobbs-written crime thriller in the neo-noir style, but with drastically different, carefully fragmented editing that gives the film a wonderfully novel feel and imparts the meaning of what is being said or done in a much different way than the Hollywood staple method of simply splicing things together into a chain. It is a story of revenge; Wilson (Terence Stamp) has recently been released from prison in Britain to find that his daughter has been killed in Los Angeles and he travels there to discover why and if there was foul-play as he suspects, to avenge her death.

Upon his arrival in Los Angeles he seeks out the man who sent him the newspaper clipping informing him of his daughter’s Jenny’s (Melissa George) death: Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman). Roel is an ex-con himself who was a friend of Wilson’s daughter Jenny and provides him with assistance since Wilson finds Los Angeles a very strange and alien environment.

Together with Roel, Wilson meets Jenny’s acting teacher and best friend and together the three of delve into the underworld of Los Angeles in an attempt to discern how and why Jenny’s boyfriend Terry George (Peter Fonda) may have had her killed. Wilson is quickly established as a very dangerous character in an early scene where he leaps from a dead calm into a tortuously dominant hold on a thug to which he is asking questions and, after being savagely beaten by those employed by that thug, returns to gun calmly gun all of them down one-by-one, leaving only one to flee the scene of Wilson’s blood-spattered face screaming for the man to, “Tell him I’m coming!”

Together with fantastic performances by Stamp, Fonda and Guzman, particularly, director Soderbergh and writer Dobbs weave careful editing into the film by constantly fragmenting both the soundtrack and screen action into often out-of-sequence groupings. It is referred to as fragmenting by Soderbergh and it allows for the ability of a film to really show not only that a character is thinking, but what he is thinking; viewers are allowed to see the film from his point-of-view, inclusive of many of his thoughts, which leads to conversations’ audio often coming out of sequence with the action shots of the speaking, flashbacks with dialogue superimposed, and other techniques.

Both the director and writer, speaking after the release, reportedly wished they had fragmented the movie more so than they did. What they did, however, changes the movie from something other than just a simple, but great crime thriller into a new aspect of cinematography that has continued with Soderbergh into later films and increased in general usage greatly since The Limey’s release.

The movie is fantastic and definitely something that captures both the spirit of an indie movie combines with that enough of a mainstream appeal that its poor box office showing is surprising. Perhaps, had it been released in this environment, with American audiences more accustomed to Cockney rhyming slang and a greater deal of cinematic complexity, and even Soderbergh’s style specifically, it would fare a great deal better. It is certainly something that will make for a great viewing by a viewer with even the slightest patience to allow a movie to play out in front of themselves. It is beautiful, surely, but not so richly complex that it is challenging to view. Just sit back and enjoy it and the startlingly effective performance by Terence Stamp!

#08 - Will Hunting, GOOD WILL HUNTING [1997]

“Why shouldn’t I work for the NSA? That’s a tough one, but I’ll give it a shot. Say I’m working at NSA. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I’m real happy with myself because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and 1,500 people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are saying, ‘Send in the marines to secure the area’ because they don’t give a shit. It won’t be their kid over there, getting shot. Just like it wasn’t them when their number was called because they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It’ll be some guy from Southie taking shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, because he’ll work for 15 cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain’t helping my buddy at 250 a gallon. And naturally they’re taking their sweet time bringing the oil back and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain’t too long until he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy’s out of work and he can’t afford to drive, so he’s got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he’s starving because every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they’re serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I’m holding out for something better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president.”

Read the rest of the list, including the comments, at Alternative Reel.com

#03 - THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST [1988]

“I am here to set fire to the world!” Martin Scorsese directed this adaption of Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial 1953 novel that is notable for the scandal it caused as well as for its bizarre casting that included Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, David Bowie as Pontius Pilate and Harry Dean Stanton as Paul. Numerous religious leaders throughout the United States organized protests against The Last Temptation of Christ (many of whom didn’t bother to make an effort to watch the film!) and several Southern cities such as Savannah, Georgia, banned the film. In addition, Blockbuster Video initially refused to carry the title in its stores. Scorsese was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for his efforts (Barry Levinson ended up winning the award for Rain Man).

Read the rest of the list at The Tin Drum

Paul Thomas Anderson was allowed to make Magnolia only after the commercial success of his previous film: Boogie Nights.  Anderson was given free reign, or as close to it as a Hollywood studio would ever get, to complete his project which is deeply spiritual and explores the lives of people in nine different, but connected, plots whose common trait is a distinct dysfunctionality whether within their family life, or more commonly their personal lives.

William H. Macy plays Donnie Smith, a adult who gained a great deal of celebrity as a child on a long-running quiz where he amassed a large amount of money in winnings which were stolen by his parents and now laments his useless collection of knowledge and wants something to replace the loneliness in his life, and despite having flawless teeth, he convinces himself he needs braces so that a local bartender will love him as much as Donnie thinks that he loves him.

That quiz show is hosted by Jimmy Gator, played by Philip Baker Hall, and is still going strong, more than thirty years later.  Gator is an alcoholic who has a fatal case of cancer and wants to make amends with his wife for his many infidelities over the years, which he now regrets, and to his daughter Claudia, who he molested as a child and whose relationship with him has been incredibly strained ever since.

Claudia is played by Melora Walters and is a very troubled young woman, addicted to cocaine with many psychological and psychiatric problems stemming from her father’s abuse of her as a child. When Gator comes to visit and try to begin mending his relationship with his daughter he is greeted at the door by a man Claudia picked up at a bar the night before and sees the evidence of cocaine use before having his daughter explode with anger at his presence and screaming at him to leave.

This commotion causes complaints from her neighbors, who summon the police in the form of Officer Jim Kurring, played by John C. Reilly, who is a good-natured person with a lot of insecurity and loneliness in his life.  He uses a telephone dating system and often narrates what it’s like to be a police officer when there is seemingly no one else in his cruiser.  Kurring explains the noise level and the screaming complaints which were the cause of his arrival and makes an awkward effort to talk to Claudia, eventually gathering the courage to ask her out on a date, which she accepts.

The producer of Jimmy Gator’s quiz show is Earl Partridge (Jason Robards) who is literally lying on his death bed lamenting all of the mistakes of his life, but often still acting like an abusive prick to his personal nurse Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and trying to believe his young wife Linda (Julianne Moore) loves him for him, not for his money.

Parma is genuinely a kind person who takes an interest in Earl’s wishes, especially when he expresses a desire to reach out to his son Frank T. J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) whom he abandoned years ago during Mackey’s mother’s death from cancer.  Mackey resents his father and has taken his mother’s name, claiming she’s alive and that they are close and that his father is dead.  He makes his living selling advice to men about how to use subliminal psychology and hypnotic tricks to control women and get them to sleep with them.

Linda Partridge is deeply troubled by all of the infidelities and lies that have come from her marriage to Earl, which was for his money, but has since transformed into a genuine love for him as a person and a desire to not accept his fortune upon his death as a penance of sorts.  At the same time, she is unable to even contemplate that Mackey will receive the money if she refuses it, believing that to be the last thing Earl would want to happen to his money.

Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman) is the current version of Donnie Smith; gifted to the point of genius with knowledge in general and as such, a tour de force on a quiz show, where he is quickly approaching the record in earnings, but is under constant pressure from his father and the employees of the show.

Finally Anderson presents us with the character Dixon, who interacts with Officer Kunning at an earlier incident, trying to help him solve the case and get some money in return.  He is trying to act like a gangster and Kunning doesn’t tolerate it very well, leaving a bit of a rift between the two, with Kunning leaving and giving him cliched advice like “Be cool, stay in school.”  Dixon will later be the one to discover Linda in her luxury car, parked, unconscious and in the middle of a suicide attempt and robs her of her cash before using her cell phone to call 911 and get her to a hospital.

Mackey’s well-developed psychological and emotional barriers begin to breakdown initially when a TV reporter informs him that she has found that his father is actually very much alive, but abandoned him and his mother during his mother’s terminal illness, and that his mother died some significant time ago.  Mackey is unable to handle this and it is during this interview that he receives a relayed telephone call from Parma regarding his father and urging him to come to the Earl’s house and visit the dying man as a last request.

The film is more than three hours long and very, very intricately designed and crafted by writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson.  As evidenced by the interconnectedness of the storylines, it is an unusual film that features a lot of typically almost-taboo features. At one point the entire cast summarized above sings along to Aimee Man’s Academy Award-winning song for the movie, “Save Me.”

There are a great deal of thematic connections, in addition to to the connections of relationships between the characters in the movie, including infidelity, happiness, loneliness, misogyny, suicide, the meaning of life, love and death.  It is often considered a very spiritual movie and perhaps the most raw emotion the movie provides to the viewer overall is a palpable sense of regret.

Each of the characters seems not only to have many regrets about their pasts, they also continue to make decisions in their presents that will be regrettable ones later.  The message of the movie is far too complex and personal to have stated in a review because it requires multiple viewings and is going to be different for virtually every viewer.

That said, the film is phenomenally well-made.  From its cast of powerhouse actors to its strong writing and direction from Anderson and musical contributions from Mann, there is very little about the movie that can really be said to be flawed; certainly controversial, difficult to understand, challenging to the viewer, and perhaps even unappealing to some viewers, but still not flawed.

The infamous scene of frogs raining from the sky has been explained by Anderson as originally being kind of a joke, but as he made the script evolve he came to believe that it best illustrated the absurdity of much of the worries in life and there came a point in one’s life where a doctor is telling them that they are dying and there are just frogs raining outside at the same time.  This becomes a recurrent theme in reference to Exodus 8:2, with Anderson hiding probably a hundred or more references to the numbers throughout the movie on clocks, walls, booking shot ID numbers, etc.

Since the film means different things to different people and takes quite a while to digest, I can really only speak for me when I say that what I took from the movie overall is to not let the worries that are going to seem ludicrously trivial distract one from living one’s life in the more important areas.  Think about what you’ll have wanted to have done when you lay dying and do that.  Try to be a good person and as is demonstrated by Parma’s actions and Officer Kunning’s monologues, avoid harming anyone else so that one won’t end up like the characters in the film: all regretting various things in life.

This was best illustrated by Stanley in a scene towards the end of the film where he stands in the doorway and tells his father that he needs to be nicer to him.  After being told to go to sleep, Stanley remains and is insistent that his father be nicer to him.  A message there and with the lack of regrets from Phil Parma shows that Anderson is trying to suggest that it is both possible to live such a life, and possible to change one’s life back into that state if it is veering off of that.

As I said when I began discussing this, Magnolia is a difficult movie to understand and takes many viewings and some thought.  It doesn’t just give up itself easily to the audience, you’ll need to put in some effort in your own part, but if you’re willing to do so, a jewel of the cinema is waiting for you with something deeply meaningful and different to say to you.  So make the decision for yourself and if you’re able to handle the challenge, you should find yourself with a very unusual and very enjoyable film experience that you can watch over-and-over again finding deeper meanings and messages left by Anderson in his writing and direction.

Conspiracy is so accurate and realistic, forcing the viewer to see by proxy a real meeting held by Nazi Germany’s administrators to plan The Holocaust that it actually leaves the viewer quite literally on the verge of nausea.  It is a horribly sad, but true tale, based upon the one surviving copy of the meeting’s notes found in the aftermath of World War II.