Notes from the Film Vanguard (or, This Man Watches Disturbing Movies So You Don’t Have To)

More Sex, Drugs and Weirdness from Vincent Gallo
The Brown Bunny, 2003, 93 minutes, Unrated

By Ryan Hernández

Vincent Gallo wrote, directed, edited and starred in this film notorious for its graphic sex scene and universal panning at the Cannes Film Festival. However, when considered as an experimental supplement to his previous work, its potency is undeniable. Images of a loner talking to disinterested parents, a desperate need for love met with an inability to consummate the physical act call to mind Buffalo 66. The opening shot of Gallo’s motorcycle (number a 77) is a sort of wink to the viewer that this is a continuation of thematic material. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a professional motorcyclist, constantly in motion literally going around in circles. Like every character in the film he is named after a plant, and not surprisingly he is arrested in his development.

The Brown Bunny must be assessed as a movie within a movie, the first a boring six-day road trip cross country, and the second, a single scene of rich emotion, externalized introspection found beneath the surface of the otherwise unremarkable Clay. The real movie takes place at the end of his journey in a Los Angeles hotel room where Gallo is joined by actress Chloe Sevigny. The other sixty minutes amount to nothing but filler, even when the brief and brilliant appearance by 1970s supermodel Cheryl Tiegs is considered. Small tidbits of character development may be gleaned but the bounty of the final private fantasy is much richer. The film has almost no interest in narrative structure and one could easily set the DVD player to random chapter selection without detriment.

The film’s title comes from a pet bunny kept by Sevigny’s character, Daisy Lemon, since she was a little girl and which has survived far beyond the normal five-year life span. So it is with Bud’s memory of her: despite her rape, overdose and the death of their child, he remains in love with her. Another brown bunny is mentioned briefly in the dialogue: a chocolate once given as a gift from Bud to Daisy, which is eaten so voraciously that it is vomited immediately. Thus, The Brown Bunny is a story of love sickness.

At the time of release, the film’s detractors dismissed it as a celebrity-sex-tape intentionally leaked to the public, or else labeled Gallo a misogynist for having depicted a character receiving a blowjob while simultaneously cursing the performer. In fact, the scene is nothing more than a man blaming himself for his lover’s own capriciousness. Critics were well aware that Gallo and Sevigny were off-screen lovers, but were simply too uncomfortable with themselves to watch real people having real sex. Insistence that Film be taxonomized as either soft-core-paperback-romance or hardcore-pornography is extremely narrow-minded. The reason is obvious: love and sex are not always nice and happy; they’re frequently gut-wrenching.

In fairness to those who hated this film, even this cinephile was knocked on his ass by Chloe Sevigny’s on-screen smoking of crack cocaine. She, like Gallo, seemed to be invoking a career-establishing performance, namely Jennie, the character she played in Kids who was raped while passed out.

The film is simply too long to merit the 60 minutes of road-tripping and should have been shelved. What exists is good, but only as a short film. The film breaks from other avant-garde filmmakers like those of the Dogme 95 collective by its use of music. There is an actual soundtrack and the songs that occur on the freeway drives are not the Christian evangelism or country music one would expect to find in middle-America; they are impositions reflecting the mood of the character, not the locations.

Ultimately, the film is neither a total failure nor total success, just an honest experiment in vanguard cinema.

Notes from the Film Vanguard (or, This Man Watches Disturbing Movies So You Don’t Have To)

My Parents Let Me Watch Rated “R” Movies
This Film Is Not Yet Rated, 2006, 97 minutes, NR

By Ryan Hernández

Not since Citizen Kane has a director focused his lens so clearly on the concentrated power determining public opinion. In his documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, director Kirby Dick examines one of the most widely known, but rarely examined institutions in the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA is the organization that determines whether a film receives a G, PG/13, or R rating. The notorious NC-17 means the death of a film because it does not get the advertising or distribution of an R-rated picture. Originally released at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2006, it went on to play in select theatres throughout 2006 and is finally available to home video.

The long-held stance of the MPAA is that their work benefits the filmmaker, that the majority of parents find their work helpful, and that all films are rated along equal lines. Through interviews including Academy Award winning directors, A-list actors and industry insiders, a very different picture is presented. They argue that the MPAA operates in the interests of the 7 studios who sponsor it, and who not coincidentally compose 95% of domestic film business and 90% of all the media in the United States. Matt Stone of South Park fame recalls their differences in handling the censorship of his independent film with the Paramount feature from very vague and harsh criticisms in the first instance to very specific and helpful in the latter. The MPAA has also has also served as an informal industry agreement between Washington and Hollywood which limits the need for state censorship boards, but at a great cost to transparency.

The most interesting aspect of the film is its dissection of the MPAA’s double standard for rating violence and sexuality. The best example of this comes via split-screen comparisons of a scene where a girl’s breast implant is stabbed out in Scary Movie, which earned an R-rating, while the visible pubic hair in by Maria Bello in The Cooler garnered the much more severe NC-17. Also revealing is the standard that fully-clothed female masturbation and fully-clothed gay sex of any kind are automatically rendered not suitable at all for children under seventeen; as Kevin Smith exclaims in disbelief, “even with a fucking parent!?”. John Waters quips that by simple virtue of the internet “today’s teenagers have seen more pornography than their parents”. Theresa Webb of UCLA’s School of Public Health studied 98 of the top 100 grossing films of 2004. She attributes the absence of censorship for violent content to the profits made off the young male audience. She concludes that it is not a coincidence that this demographic is the one at greatest risk for committing violent acts.

Halfway through the film, Dick enlists the aid of a private investigator to determine the authenticity of public statements made by Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA. In so doing, he learns that the votes which determine the ratings include a Catholic priest and an Episcopalian minister, as well as double votes by the chairman of the board, and employment terms lasting beyond set limits. Dick does finally succeed in exposing the identities of the MPAA appeals board: not surprisingly, all 15 of them were executives of production or distribution companies. The distinguishing feature of the film is its ingenious employment of digital technology to free it from production costs and studio constraints. This Film Is Not Yet Rated mainlines the director’s vision into the viewer’s mind and proves to be as entertaining as it is illuminating.

Notes from the Film Vanguard (or, This Man Watches Disturbing Movies So You Don’t Have To)

Watch it on the Big Screen and Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You
300, 2007, 117 minutes, Rated R

By Ryan Hernández

Leonidus, ruler of the Spartan polis, attempts to save his people from the Persian Empire’s imminent conquest by weapons of mass destruction in Zack Snyder’s epic 300. Scottish actor Gerard Butler calls to mind Gibson’s Braveheart, leading his platoon of 300 soldiers against the ozymandian might of King Xerxes in the year 400BC. 300 falls into the no-man’s-land between history and fantasy and in much the same vein as Le Pact de Lupe and the soon to be released Pathfinder. Historical accuracies are here obstacles to be overcome for preference of sensationalism.

In my 28 years of film addiction, I have never seen violence and carnage like this. It surpasses the accomplishments of past Guinness Book of World Records champions for “Most Violent Film of All-Time”, Red Dawn and Rambo III, by a wide margin. In fairness to the producers, I did learn things I would not have elsewhere. I now know how to kill a charging rhinoceros using nothing but a spear, and what elephants look like when thrown from cliffs onto rocks below. I must warn you that one viewing was not enough, as I lost count of the various ways to decapitate a human being.

Historical liberties are taken with the emotionally potent and oversimplified drama; hallmarks of Spartan timocracy such as homosexuality and pederasty are presented here as deplorable. However, the costume design sublimely mixes antiquity with modernity and in so doing clearly defines heroes from villains. Visual effects prove to be fascinating displays of symbolism. The oracle’s prophesy of the Battle of Thermopolae spellbinds like a witches’ brew as smoke and water animate the priestess into trance. Slow motion is used deftly to replicate the trepidation and reluctance before battle; our thoughts, like the soldiers, are adrenalized, anticipating the imminent attack. This is heightened all the more by Tyler Bates’ orchestral score, which goes well beyond trumpets and the drums of war of the time. If you must see this fabulous war movie, do so in the theatre as television cannot hope to duplicate the scale of battle communicated by the big screen and loud speakers.

The Appolline warriors with their beautiful bodies are measured against the ugly, the lame and the unnamed ordinary Persian soldiers. The body-pierced and Bedazzled androgyne Xerxes is a dark reflection of Leonidus’ simple machismo. The effeminate villain and the grizzly brute-hero are seen in the film’s source material, Frank Miller’s eponymous graphic novel. These stock characters appear in previous works like Ronin, and The Dark Knight Returns. Miller himself has said that the impetus for the project came from a 1962 film he saw as a boy entitled, The 300 Spartans. Like his film Sin City, 300 was shot on black and white film stock and then transferred digitally to enable faint color to ebb and flow with the carnage, perfectly imitating Miller’s long-time colorist Lynn Varley.

My original enthusiasm for both states’ moral ambiguity ran high as neither was presented as being better than the other. Left to our own devices, we might have interpreted ourselves as either the Spartans, fighting a foreign menace with inferior weaponry, or as the technologically superior Persians, frustrated by a long and drawn out battle. In such a case, the thousands killed from both sides might be regarded as our own. By the end of the film it is clear that the filmmakers intend us to internalize the monocular vision of Spartan superiority and infallibility. The last line of the two-hour adolescent rescue-fantasy concludes that violence no matter how brutal or unnecessary is legitimized if it is committed in opposition to “mysticism and tyranny”.