What does one do with nearly 300,000 tons of deadly radioactive waste?  Finland thinks it has the answer.  In Michael Madsen’s documentary, “Into Eternity,” the Danish filmmaker examines the Finnish government’s efforts to bury its share of the world’s nuclear waste in a tunnel three miles into the earth.  After its completion in 2100, the tunnel must remain untouched for at least 100,000 years.  This intriguing and bold plan leads Madsen to raise many philosophical and technical questions throughout his film, providing a haunting take that is more poetic than scientific on a dire environmental issue.  But the answers are too profound and nuanced for this ambitious indie film.

Madsen laces interviews and stunningly shot footage with personal interludes in his self-proclaimed “A Film for the Future.”  As the screen fades to black, the filmmaker strikes a match, faces the camera and asks as the flame dies, “Our people are dependent on nuclear energy. Are you dependent on nuclear energy?  What resources do you use?”  The questions Madsen poses are directed towards future generations, but their implications are very relevant to the present.

At its start, the film has all the makings of a NOVA special.  It delves into the current problem of nuclear waste storage, providing insight from scientists working in the facilities as well as from top Scandinavian experts and politicians.

Hello? Anyone?

As the film progresses, Madsen begins to look at human aspects of the problem and the issue becomes more poignant.  How will future generations know not to unearth the hazardous waste?  Should they even know about it?  What can we do now to save both ourselves and our posterity?

The footage is hauntingly beautiful.  Madsen’s cameras go straight into the tunnel, into the dark abyss of what is now a barren wasteland and into the eerily mechanical nuclear facilities.  The camera paints an ominous picture of what humans have done to their world now and what is to come in the future.  At times, the film seems to be larger than it needs to be because the issues Madsen is examining are too monumental to be resolved in 75 minutes.  Towards the end, his philosophizing starts to become repetitive, as he asks the same questions over and over, both to the audience and to the people he interviews.  There is talk of science and political discourse, though down to its core, the film is about human sustainability.  Although a “A Film for the Future,” it is really a warning for the present.

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Visceral is the word.

The Hurt Locker is about Iraq, and about men, and about war.  It is certainly the most heralded film to emerge from the conflict.  The plot centers on William James (Jeremy Renner).  His rank: Sergeant First Class, US Army.  His addiction: taking bombs apart.  When James takes charge of a bomb-disposal squad, Bravo Company, he finds that the troops take issue with his methods.  The newly anointed head man is a renegade to the rulebook.  He seeks out fresh explosives to dismantle with a fearsome urgency, hunting them wherever they may be.  All the while, James keeps count of successful disarmaments, the number whizzing steadily upward.  Bravo Company lives in fear for unnecessary casualties on the heels of their leader’s relentless bomb-sniffing.

Director Kathryn Bigelow focuses in on the view of war espoused by writers like Chris Hedges.  Her film highlights a quote of Hedges’: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”  James cares little for his life and highly for his war.  The Sergeant’s prize possession is a trove of bomb components.  “This box is full of stuff that almost killed me,” he says, with relish.  To endure such terrors as Bravo does, its men must have some passion making the suffering worth undergoing.  Clearly, James loves his work.  The adrenaline, the feeling of invincibility, the blood pumping to the head – the octane of the fight is James’ everything.

Such a breakdown cannot provide the essential reason for which nations go to war.  Nonetheless, Bigelow’s work gives us great insight.  Would James be interested in the dilemma?  The more I see his character, the more I see his unlikely likeness to Sartre and Camus.  He could be an existentialist mounting his example on thoughtless obedience to the drive for gratification.  Yet, that pleasure serves a higher purpose.  Generals and general staffs determine it. James executes it.

The Hurt Locker explores the lives in flux of professional soldiers that must undergo personal transformations each time they move between worlds.

Renner is a standout.  The star has screen presence – spades of it – in his understated way.  The actor does what a George Clooney or Robert Redford of yore could not.  He nails the dichotomy of his character.  James is at once both a middling civilian and a super-solider.  He’s the middle-class father pushing a cart down the supermarket aisle, and the first-class bomb expert disassembling insurgent explosives.  In either case, the man fulfills roles defined by others in ways that he defines himself.  Within limited boundaries.  Purpose is relative.  Presupposed action can exist independent from reasoning.

The actor is the perfect leading man for another reason.  He’s a talent that matured outside of Hollywood.  The service members that run impossible missions daily do so anonymously.  Here at home, civilians celebrate the actors that play the roles more than the soldiers who fight for our nation’s security.  America’s public keeps the angels of the battlefield unsung too often.  It’s appropriate that audiences don’t become distracted with a star cast – “Oh, there’s Russell Crowe! Brad Pitt! Matt Damon!”  The fighters that Renner and Co. portray are true stars.  But you will not read about them.  You will only know that somewhere now, in places known and unknown, our fighters face locked cycles of coalescent adrenaline, dualism, misgiving, sacrifice, and pride.

Here are the caveats.  Reality, the Hurt Locker is not.  The Iraq War, it is not.  The Hurt Locker is, however, a thrilling and surprisingly poignant.  It is an interpretation of the war, one from the outside.  In that sense, the Hurt Locker is a genuine historical source.  Many years hence, when thinkers of any stripe attempt to understand the nature of our war, they should certainly factor The Hurt Locker in that understanding.

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The Basterds are merciless.

Inglourious Basterds (2009) is Quentin Tarantino’s sauerkraut Western.  Rather than the spaghetti scenery of conventional Westerns, we have WWII scenery.  A much-revised WWII.  In Tarantino’s war, the Basterds are a band of Jewish-American soldiers deep behind enemy lines.  Their leader is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt).  Their goal: to terrorize the Nazis the same way the Nazis terrorized Europe.  Raine orders his men to scalp a hundred Nazis each.  And to relish doing so.  (They will even get a stab at Hitler.)

Hunting these fearless Americans is SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz).  Landa is infamous for his cruelty even amongst big-screen Nazis.  People call him the “Jew Hunter.”  Waltz’s character seeks out Jews across Axis territory and executes them — on the spot.  Early in the film, one Jew escapes from Colonel Landa.  Shoshana, played by French actress Melanie Lauren, concocts a revenge plot of her own.  And the doings of all these characters will eventually intersect in explosive ways.

Colonel Landa is the stand-out character of the film (Christoph Waltz won a best-supporting Oscar for his performance).  His power is in his language, verbally pummeling everyone around him.  Command of language is a mighty hand. He humiliates others with his multilingual proficiency, doing laps around them, backing them into corners.  Landa also knows the power of composure.  His self-awareness and control are absolute.  A look, a point, a word are momentous.  This is a mighty villain.

Is he too evil to be human?  “Nazi ain’t got no humanity,” says Raine.  Neither does Tarantino’s film, actually, and not that Inglourious Basterds needs humanity.  The Basterds gave up their humanity when they took to scalping and snickering about it.  The view from outside allows the Basterds to teach us a little about ourselves.

For instance, that vengeance is motivation enough for anything.  The real-life Jewish commandos of the war blast the film.  Its depiction of their exploits is outlandish.  Even so, the commandos agree that they slept with dreams of sweet revenge.  Even as they infiltrated the enemy lines.  The Basterds’ behavior accurately reflects revenge fantasies of Allied Semitic contingents.  These Nazis were the ones killing their people.  They sure would have liked to brutalize them in return.  Little things like the tactical and practical impeded them.  So did their humanity— what the Nazis lacked.  Here, the Basterds have a mercilessness to rival any National Socialist.

Inglourious Basterds has a high quotient of quotability.  Tarantino eschews moral depth in favor of damn good lines.  And his actors deliver these lines damn well.  They often find themselves in perverse situations.  Not just funny, these situations capture the scope of wartime cruelty.  The screenplay is replete with wanton destruction— big lies— fallacious logic— just like the war itself.  However, unlike with the war, you can laugh with the Basterds.  It’s a unique comedy of errors.  Here, very intelligent, very capable, and very suave characters commit the errors.  They are the best at what they do, but they, too, make mistakes.

Director Quentin Tarantino on the set of Inglourious Basterds.

The “Italian Escorts” scene is about one of those mistakes.  It ranks among the great moments in cinema hilarity.  Aldo & Co. get to a Goebbels premier incognito, as Italian filmmakers.  The Basterds earnestly project bona fide Italian heritage as they see it.  Yes, obvious stereotypes.  Painfully obvious stereotypes.  Landa sees through the guises.  The SS (serial sadist?) agent subjects the “Italians” to a torturous interview in their professed language.  Landa again utterly crushes adversaries with his mastery of the tongue.

Tarantino uses Samuel L. Jackson as a narrator twice in the film.  This isn’t usage enough to justify his presence in the first place.  Then again, this is Tarantino.  If he wants to put Sammy L.’s voice in his baby, he’ll do just that.

Tarantino is his own brand.  Like previous efforts, Basterds bends genres.  The director includes moments of understated aplomb.  He alternates between his trademark killing sequences and these moments of deliberation.  Even the more lyrical moments are rending with suppressed violence.  But violence is what Tarantino does.  He dresses it, gives it form, and makes it a picture.

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500 Days of Summer (2009) is as warm and tantalizing as the season that it takes its name from.  And just like the finest season, you’ll treasure it as a rose-palette recollection.  The flick mixes rapture and melancholy with a light heart. 

500 Days of Summer, directed by Marc Webb, features Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) recounting his five-hundred-day relationship with the wonderfully whimsical Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel).  The film opens with a narrator’s voice-over:  “This is a story of boy meets girl.  But you should know upfront, this is not a love story.”  No, Tom and Summer are not dating.  They do everything that couples do, but a couple they are not.  Their conflict is a matter of perception – and Webb’s movie is about perception.  Men and women simply see the same things differently.  At first, this truth means wild happiness for Tom.  Later, it blindsides him.  The difference between Tom and Summer’s perception of their relationship becomes an unhappy dichotomy.  The former is wholly smitten; the latter wants to “keep it casual.”  Tom remembers the days of his Summer love just as we all remember human relationships: in a nonlinear haze filtered by emotion.

Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel

Even with those emotions flying about, 500 Days is therapeutically refreshing.  It’s refreshing as a romance flick, it’s refreshing as a comedy, it’s refreshing as a study on gender contrasts.  The film hinges on the performances of Joseph-Gordon Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.  They deliver.  Levitt possesses tremendous charisma.  He embodies the affable, love-struck young guy.  He knows that life might disappoint.  Summer just makes it so sweet that he forgets.  And Deschanel is simply inimitable.  The nuances of her acting set the character apart.  She makes Summer what women of Hollywood love yarns are not: alluring in ways genuine, whole, and mysterious.  It’s no wonder that Tom fell hard.

And Webb has a knack for uniting disparate film elements.  500 Days has a song-and-dance here, a documentary-style session there, droll pop-culture humor in between.  The soundtrack, the dialog, and the cinematography work so well because they unite.  The union has an exceptionally distinctive tone.  Each feature comes together with rare finesse.  Webb’s movie is a movie with a soul.  Like Tom and Summer’s relationship, that cinema-soul is offbeat and singularly engaging.

This is a lovely little film.  500 Days of Summer is honest, clever, and riotously comical.  It has spirit.  It has unflustered personality.  It has an inexplicably magnetic draw – just like love.

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Johnny Depp and Tim Burton.

Getting off the escalators on the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art, the difference in mood of this exhibition compared to the permanent collection is quite evident.  In front of you is a statue of a huge creature with its mouth open; to enter the Tim Burton exhibition, you walk through the jaws of this colorful monster.

Tim Burton, known for mixing quirky fairytales with dark themes, is a director, writer, and producer of many popular movies of our time, such as Batman, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Sleepy Hollow.  His more recent films have been twists on classic stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sweeney Todd, and Alice in Wonderland (which opens this March).

The MoMA exhibition shows personal work from his childhood up to 2009.  His original sketches, paintings, sculptures, and memorabilia (like in Planet Hollywood) from his movies fill the walls, and as you walk from room to room, you begin to realize how many ideas he has, and the creativity of his works of art.  In addition, some of his movies and short films are playing on screens next to corresponding experimental storyboard sketches and character drawings from when he was starting that project.

To give you an example of his “type” of art, imagine cartoon monsters that he drew to entertain himself while working at Disney (yes, he started off working at Disney).  They are stark, in black and white, with elongated features, and drawn with harsh lines, some disconcerting and disorienting; these sketches are not warm and fuzzy like a regular cartoon, but are angular, some slightly disturbing, but with an element of humor.  These cartoons are what developed into his recognizable and self-expressive films, and if you are a huge Tim Burton fan (such as myself), you might be able to recognize certain creatures in some of his early sketches that develop and reappear in his later films.

Two things surprised me about the exhibit. Most of the sketches were untitled, although they displayed such passion for art and for creative expression. Also, almost all of the sketches and drawings were from his private collection that he allowed to be displayed, so they were never-before-seen, and very personal.

I found the Tim Burton exhibition at MoMA enjoyable because I am familiar with his work and have seen all of his films, but I believe it would still be entertaining and inspiring for people who less familiar with his work, for it is unlike anything else in the whole museum (or in the world, for that matter), and for its uncensored creativity.

(By the way, you can get passes to MoMA and a bunch of other museums for $2.50 through High 5.)

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There’s nothing wrong with murder, ya know.  Especially if you’re going to get some money out of it.

Fargo is a modern classic.  It was nominated for seven Oscars in 1997, and won two.  It’s been on almost every top ten list, from AFI to Roger Ebert’s.  It is a comedy and a neo-noir at the same time.  One might wonder, at first, why it’s so hilarious. There’s little to laugh about it.  It is a gruesome film, rife with murder, blood, violence, sex and nonsensical scenes that leave the audience squirming in their seats.  It is creepy and unnerving.  It doesn’t force you to think really, and it doesn’t make you jump.  At no point are you on the edge of your seat.  At no point are you screaming or gasping for air.

What it does do is challenge your perception of normalcy because nothing in the film is normal, though everything seems normal.  There is a deceptive blanket that one wants to lift but is too afraid to do so.

Much of this film takes place in Brainerd, Minnesota, but writers/directors Joel and Ethan Coen (called collectively the Coen Brothers) decided to call it Fargo because it sounded better.  (As a matter of fact, only the first ten minutes of the film are set in Fargo, North Dakota.)

At its core, this “homespun murder story” is a social satire.  Upon review, every line and every shot is completely deliberate, from every “ya know” to every “you betcha.”  It mocks the concept of “Minnesota nice,” a stereotypical behavior of people in the Upper Midwest that includes forced hospitality, courtesy and passiveness. Under all the smiling and the “oh, ya know” mannerisms, every character, from the desperate car salesman to the mild-mannered police officer, there is something hiding.  In this film, there is no good and evil, no black and white. Even the pure white snow of the vast Minnesota landscape is stained with blood.  There is something dark about the friendliness and something humorous about the sinister.

The beginning of the film introduces it as a “true story.”  It tells us that “the events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.”  It is just like the Coen brothers to mess with your head.  The movie is indeed completely fictitious, as noted in the end credits, but the directors wanted to add to the unease.  They wanted you to feel uncomfortable thinking that the film was set in reality and actually happened.  This can’t be reality, you think.  The plot is too calculated and ridiculous, the characters too crazy.  But in a sense, they are real.  The film remains true in spirit.  The Coen brothers wanted to create a movie that portrayed their hometown of St. Louis Park.  They wanted to create a film that represents the people they grew up with, the stereotypical passive aggressiveness of their culture and the eerie but stunningly beautiful emptiness of the Midwest in the winter.

Ultimately, what’s chilling about the movie is not the senseless murder.  It’s the unsettling realization that not everything is as it seems.

Bonus:  The 1997 Fargo trailer

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I was building a guitar in my basement fairly late on Friday night, listening to Q104.3′s Eddie Trunk Show, which features metal music instead of the classic rock normally played on Q104.3.  I generally do not listen to metal except for the occasional Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath, unless one counts Zeppelin and Deep Purple as metal bands.  So anyhow, I was listening to Q104.3 and I heard this song called “Metal on Metal,” and I was thinking how cool and catchy it was, and that whoever was playing it sounded talented.  Well, it turned out that the mystery band was Anvil, the recent stars of Sasha Gervasi’s movie, “Anvil: The Story of Anvil.” [Click here to watch the trailer for the movie.]  Gervasi was in the studio with Trunk, and they announced that they were going to give away tickets to a showing of the movie and then a secret performance by Anvil after the film.

I called in and miraculously won a ticket.

I did a little bit of research, and found that Anvil has been around since the late 1970′s, and they toured with Whitesnake, Bon Jovi (back when he was metal-ish) and the Scorpions. Due to a bit of bad luck for Anvil, they managed to influence lots of metal bands (Metallica being the most popular), but never really took off on their own. I was curious, and I had a free ticket, so off I went the next night.

“Anvil” was being shown at the East Village Cinemas, and the line of people waiting was around the corner of the block. The audience did not seem like the die-hard Anvil fan seen in the movie chugging a beer through his right nostril; most of them seemed like people who had grown up in the early 80′s around that whole metal scene. The movie turned out to be extremely well done from a film standpoint, but the movie’s greatest triumph is that it spurred Anvil’s reemergence into the public consciousness. This is fully illustrated by the fact that they’re opening for some of AC/DC’s shows in the North American part of AC/DC’s Black Ice World Tour.

When the movie ended, Anvil immediately started playing. They are talented, not virtuosos, just enough to be deemed a good band, certainly as talented as a band like Metallica. The most impressive bit about them is that they have never stopped playing since Lips met the drummer, Rob Reiner, when they were in high school. Even now, as Lips is balding, he still puts on as good a show as a video I saw of him playing “School Love” in Tokyo 25 years ago. Anvil’s enthusiasm and love of the music they play is so palpable both in their live performance and in the movie, it really affects whoever listens. At the end of the show, Lips vowed not to leave until he talked to everybody who wanted an autograph. This just displays even more the kind of true, pure band Anvil is. Certainly one of the most appealing aspects of Anvil is their underdog story, but their music would be no better if they had been touring stadiums throughout the world for the last 25 years.

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The first time I saw The Godfather, I didn’t know why it was so great. That’s not to say I didn’t appreciate the film or didn’t comprehend the artistic depth this cinematic masterpiece delivered. It just left me puzzled, perplexed, as to what exactly drew me in so deeply. Upon viewing it a second time and after some thought, I realized no other movie in recent memory offered the following: a deep, detailed storyline without a need to pour over the details in order to comprehend the depth; abundant spectacular performances as believable as this; and a broad pallette of cinematic techniques, weaving the themes through all of them. Basically, they don’t make them like this anymore.

The ensemble cast of mobsters and cops, Corleones and civilians, and mothers and children, are freed from the burden of extraneous roles such as pirates and warlocks. And as the protaganists and important characters are all actually criminals, no actor is stuck in a simplistic role on either side of the fence that divides hero/villain. Each person in the film has motives, real reason behind their actions, real purpose. All of this is self contained in each scene. Each actor shines all on their own here. There’s Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Talia Shire, and most of all Marlon Brando. These names are the biggest of the big. However, in this most brilliant of universes, they are not Pacino and Brando but Michael, Don Vito, Sonny, and Tom Hagen. The Godfather is truly a fascinating little world. It comprises its own universe.

This has to be said: even next to the other career-best performances from the cast of The Godfather, I have never since seen a performance in film greater than the one Marlon Brando pulls off here. The man executes what is simply a flawless, haunting portrayal. His voice appears to not be that of an actor, but that of a sickly old man upheld solely by power. The pauses of deep thought, and the meaningful warnings are those of a wise Don. The respect commanded by this man is not because of his fame and A-list status, but because of the things he’s done in the underworld and the things he can very easily do.

The Godfather truly plays more like real life than a movie. It uses music, yes, but doesn’t need filler scenes just as an excuse to play some Top 40 hit in the background. It uses violence and blood, but these acts take you by surprise, just as the great Luca Brasi is caught by surprise and strangled death. It even uses tools rarely utilized today, such as strong story resonance through the use of symbolism. The title is both unforgettable and of essential relevance to the plot. The themes are powerful without becoming presumptuous.

However, the crux of realism in The Godfather is not that the events likely occurred in reality. It is that the flow and presentation comes across as completely organic. Shock value here becomes like suspense in most movies of this ilk, while suspense itself is only granted to the viewer when it is granted to the characters. Ranking consistently within the top two or three movies ever made, often called the greatest movie of all time, The Godfather is a must-see. If you have yet to the peerless masterwork, then consider this an offer you can’t refuse.

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