Banality In Venice: Clooney Worship, Tired Auteurs and Herzog’s “Unlucky Dip”

A scene from Grant Heslov's "The Men Who Stare at Goats." Image courtesy of the Venice Film Festival.

“What can I, but enumerate old themes?” —W.B. Yeats

A man took his clothes off in a press conference yesterday. He was not an attractive man. Nor did he even do an especially good job of undressing, since he seemed, as the moment arrived, to be on the verge of hyperventilating with panic, perhaps even passing out. But he felt obliged to deliver the message that burned behind his pale and unlovely man-breasts - and to do so, furthermore, as publicly as possible.

“I love you!” he shouted, in heavily accented English. “Take me! Choose me! May I kiss you, just once?” By now, he was down to white boxer shorts and a black tie that, as George Clooney, the target of this spectacle, observed dryly, was “just long enough”.

This ritual of Clooney-worship, by now tediously familiar (a female Italian TV presenter had already professed her own amore earlier in the press conference), was borne by the star with pained good grace, though you could see, at the edges of that million-dollar smile, a slight tension that might have been exasperation. But it also begged a couple of questions, the most urgent being: why are the journalists at film festivals so goddamned STUPID? Their questions tend to the dimmer side of sub-normal—barely one step up from “If you could be any kind of tree, what tree would you be?”—and their behaviour is either boorish, or breathtakingly ignorant, or both. Sure enough, at the end of the session, in another monotonous ritual, they rushed the stage to beg for autographs, presumably in the belief that they hadn’t yet demeaned themselves or their profession enough.

Of the film, meanwhile, barely a word was said, as both sides of the equation, Talent and Press, each seemed to recognise the choreographed futility of the occasion. As it happened, Grant Heslov’s “The Men Who Stare At Goats”—adapted from the bestseller by British journalist Jon Ronson—was rather good: funny, sharp, and conspicuously well-performed by its cast (not only Clooney, in his best comic turn in years, but also Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, and a waspish Kevin Spacey). Like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Informant!”, which had screened the day before, it seemed to argue for quieter virtues than either Hollywood or the Lido would ordinarily allow: favouring irony over broad slapstick, thoughtfulness rather than spectacle, and showcasing a deliberate modesty of resources, unusually well-deployed.

Yet Soderbergh and Clooney are exceptions, the strident unpredictability of their careers recalling something of the journeyman ethic of classic Hollywood. If the concentrated viewing of festivals teach us anything, it’s that most contemporary filmmakers have neuroses, obssessions, idee fixe; you see them recurring time and again, in work after work. It’s the very definition of auteurism.

But you can also go too many times to the well, as a number of works here showed all too eloquently.

Take George Romero, a clever, capable filmmaker who, as a result of an early, genre-defining success with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead”, has since found himself obliged to churn out one zombie movie after another. Doubtless there are other films Romero would love to make, other kinds of story he would dearly wish to tell; his handful of non-Dead flicks—“Season of the Witch”, “Martin”, “Bruiser”—are at least as interesting as his better-known work. But much like the survivors whose fate he documents, he’s marooned among the walking dead, albeit in Hollywood rather than Pittsburgh, apparently unable to get any other kind of film financed.

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A scene from George A. Romero’s “Survival of the Dead.” Image courtesy of the Venice Film Festival. For the most part, he’s made the best of his predicament. 2005’s “Land of the Dead” was a hoot, and “Diary of the Dead” (2007) breathed new life into the franchise (if you’ll pardon the expression), cleverly evoking the aesthetic and narrative strategies of contemporary reality-TV. Which only makes the latest installment—“Survival of the Dead”—all the more disappointing. Uninspired in conception, perfunctory in execution, it also lacks any of the director’s usually acute social and political satire. There are no points being made, here, and no energy on either side of the camera: the humans look and act as lifeless as the zombies, and Romero, for the first time, seems bored by the limits of his own creation. Likewise, Shinya Tsukamoto, whose debut feature, “Tetsuo The Iron Man”, arrived in 1989 like a blast of dirty air, gusting up out of the Tokyo subway. A ground-level technological nightmare, its messy collision of flesh and machinery was at the time labelled “cyberpunk” by most critics, but was actually something stranger and more perverse: a drama about sexual anxiety (and specifically, heterosexual male terror of homosexual rape), and the gradual awakening to one’s true nature. Though not usually mentioned in the same breath as “Swoon” or “Poison”, it’s nevertheless one of the key gay films of that period—as well as an heir to the social and political provocations of 60s underground Japanese flicks like “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” and “Godspeed! You Black Emperor”. A sequel, made three years later, confirmed, rather than diluted, its power. Since then, Tsukamoto has made other, outwardly more conventional films—though 1999’s “Gemini” played equally effectively with the notion of a hidden half, the secret volteface of one’s accepted self. But now, as if low on inspiration, he returns with another Tetsuo movie—this time titled “Tetsuo The Bullet Man”—and draws from the same old bag of tricks: that hyper-kinetic visual style, the camera jerking around like a spastic child on a rollercoaster; the same abrasive industrial soundtrack. But he’s stymied by some lousy English-language acting, an obvious lack of budget, and above all, the unavoidable sense that we’ve seen it all before, fresher and therefore better. In adding nothing especially new to the mix, Tsukamoto simply reiterates a meagre handful of images and obsessions. Why, now, should we care? -This story continues on page 2-   (1 of 2)  Next Page › Login to recommend this article » posted on September 9, 2009 |Share Login to Leave a Comment »