Destined

 

DESTINED                B                                

USA  (94 mi)  2016  d:  Qasim Basir              Official Facebook

Winner of the Best Director award for Qasim Basir and Best Actor for Cory Hardrict at the 2016 American Black Film Festival in June, the idea for the film was inspired by a British film starring Gwyeneth Paltrow called SLIDING DOORS (1998) which explores alternate realities for her character. Similarly, Basir, who wrote the script, found a clever way to explore two parallel lives diverting from a single childhood moment, using the same actor, Chicago’s own Cory Hardrict, portraying each option, with complementary players also playing dual roles in each scenario, suggesting what a tenuous thread our lives are balanced upon, as had things gone just a bit differently, our lives could be entirely different.  It’s always fun to imagine these scenarios, what if I had gone out with that girl, or gotten that job, or never been hit by a car, or never met someone we are so intricately linked to, but also, from a black perspective, what if I was never shot or arrested, or studied harder, or had made different choices, would my life be significantly different?  This film takes great joy in examining alternate paths, where either one is realistically possible.  First and foremost there is Cory Hardrict, who comes into his own in this film, showing the full extent of his range, as he’s a pleasure to watch.  Playing Sheed and Rasheed, one kid is left to run the streets, get involved in gang violence, eventually becoming a drug lord, where he’s the kind of brooding, unrepentant guy who probably deserves to be in prison, while the other has secret dreams of becoming an architect, dreams that can be realized, though at a price, as he’d have to sell out his community to make money for white corporations that would be happy to pay him handsomely, as their profits would skyrocket.  Both are powerful men who own and command a room with their burning intensity. 

Rather than divide the film into two parts, Basir brilliantly interweaves the narrative, using other actors in dual roles as well, which opens up the film, adding plenty of side by side exploration, where they both feel like the same guy.  In fact, it almost feels like two different films that have been carefully edited together fusing the characters down to the bare essence, where by the end we’ll determine their real character and discover who they really are.  No such luck, as Basir goes all-in with both possibilities, where you’d be hard pressed to determine which one is more realistic, as both feel authentic.  So is Robert Christopher Riley as his longtime friend and sidekick, Cal and Calvin, the kind of guy you can trust, who, had things been different, could easily have ended up in Sheed’s position.  Nonetheless, these guys intrinsically know and understand each other, as they have similar instincts, both able to anticipate what’s going to happen before it does, where they beautifully complement one another.  What’s interesting is the use of Jesse Metcalfe in both segments, playing a dogged white detective who’s always on Sheed’s tail, but also one of the young execs of the architecture firm, the guy who has to step aside temporarily to allow a young black light to shine, but does so willingly because of the anticipated reward it will bring, where he is driven, even obsessed, by financial success.  Much of it shot in Detroit, some in Chicago, the scale of abandoned buildings adds an extraordinary texture to the film, as it’s literally a world falling apart right before our eyes, where the people that inhabit the condemned territory feel like they don’t belong there, that no one deserves to live like that, as if they’re stuck in a labyrinth with no conceivable way out.  Yet some of the scenes in the snow have a special power, as it feels especially nasty in the bitter cold.    

Shot by cinematographer Carmen Cabana, initially the seedy world of Sheed appears in sepia tones with washed out colors, adding an especially ominous look that looks a bit creepy, while Rasheed’s world is set in vibrant colors, as the world around him is immediately more inviting.  While the two worlds don’t remain totally distinct, over time they do blend into each other, sharing common characters, but also obstacles that need to be overcome.  Two women play significant roles in the film, Margot Bingham as Maya, who figures prominently in the outcome of each, adding a bit of a twist to the story, being more than what she initially seems, yet she more than holds her own in some of the most powerful scenes, but also Zulay Henao, in a smaller, less defined role as a reporter, still makes an impact, sometimes just by being on the scene witnessing extraordinary transformations.  Hardrict has to fight against himself the whole time, as the stakes are high, where one small mistake could alter the outcome.  While he attains power and respect in the drug business, he may actually come to regret what he’s built, while as a black rising star in a mostly white architecture firm, these opportunities don’t come around too often, so he should probably make the most of it, yet he’s being used to tear down and destroy his old neighborhood, with no affordable housing units to take their place, where gentrification is a tactic to drive blacks out of a neighborhood.  As James Baldwin once suggested “Urban renewal is Negro removal.”  In each case, there’s plenty on the line.  The slo-mo finale is a bit much and feels overly repetitive, as both fates seem to merge into one, where it’s never too late, it seems, to make a decision to change your life, even as you’re barreling down the wrong track, as you can always correct it and do the right thing.  That may seem like empty platitudes, but that could be the difference between spending twenty or thirty years in prison separated from family members or having a life that includes them.  One decision can make the difference. 

World on a Wire (Welt am Draht)

WORLD ON A WIRE (Welt am Draht) – made for TV                       A                    

Cologne, Munich, Paris  (Pt I 99 mi, Pt II 106 mi)  January – March 1973  d:  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973):

“I directed a series of two one-and-a-half-hour segments based on a novel by Daniel F. Galouyé.  It’s a very beautiful story called WORLD ON A WIRE that depicts a world where one is able to make projections of people with a computer. And of course that leads to the uncertainty of whether someone is himself a projection, since in this virtual world the projections resemble reality.  Perhaps another larger world made us as a virtual one?  In this sense it deals with an old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror.”

One of the most unique works over the course of Fassbinder’s entire career, his only venture into science fiction, where this may be the very first Virtual Reality movie, though it was readily explored on sci-fi TV shows like Star Trek (1966 – 1969) or Doctor Who (1963 – 1989).  This was also made for German TV, which is mindblowing in itself, as there is simply nothing else out there like this on TV, either before or since.  Some may find this excessively slow, as there’s no action to speak of for the first two hours, really only showing up in the finale sequence, yet this continually holds the viewer’s attention by the sheer boldness of the subject matter and the mind-altering production values used by Fassbinder, filtering nearly every shot through doorways, long hallways, frosted windows, glass fishbowls, peeking through a hole in the wall or around some object, where there are multiple reflections throughout caused by the incessant or one might say obsessive use of mirrors.  Only CHINESE ROULETTE (1976) comes close to using this kind of dazzling, shooting-through-the-Looking Glass stylization, both movies shot by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus.  In terms of look, this film most closely resembles the mannequin acting style of THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT (1972), where naked or fashionably dressed characters have a tendency to stare off into empty space, which in this film works excessively well, especially because it is projecting an artificially designed virtual world that contains no signs of human life, as it’s all a computerized reproduction. 

Adaptated by Fassbinder and Fritz Müller-Scherz from a 1964 Daniel F. Galouyé novel Simulacron 3, where computers can create projections of people, leading one to wonder if they, themselves, are just a projection?  This is a paranoid, ALPHAVILLE (1965)-style, corporate-controlled world of super computers where the company director mysteriously commits suicide, but not before muttering one of the prevalent themes of the film, “You are nothing more than the image others have made of you,” referring to the co-opting of his brilliant creation by an all-controlling inside elite, where programmed individuals are indistinguishable from actual humans. The powerful interests of the U.S. Steel corporation intervenes and wants to use the successor, Klaus Löwitsch as Fred Stiller, to manipulate the international markets, as the artificial computer design so exactly replicates our own world that the computer has the ability to accurately predict future trends before they happen.  He meets Eva Vollmer, Mascha Rabben, the daughter of the deceased former director, and the two begin to realize that they may be artificial, controlled by a higher intelligence, their knowledge of which could cause a threat to those actually in control, so it is a world where love is threatened by the repressed police state.  Can humans prevail?  Initially shot on 16 mm, now blown up to 35 mm, this is riveting from start to finish, adding improbable flourishes of dark humor, simply a stunning, highly original and unusual film, with Fassbinder regulars Adrian Hoven, Ivan Desny, Günter Lamprecht, Margit Carstensen, Ingrid Caven, Ulli Lommel, Kurt Raab, and even a brief appearance by Gottfried John. 

Certainly one prevalent theme is the Third Reich dream of world domination, only using a behind the scenes business model to accomplish what the German Army couldn’t achieve militarily.  Whoever controls the computers controls the world, including a Virtual World of people who are all prisoners in this alternate world, like the most brilliantly designed gulag imaginable, as all of the artificial creations are programmed to work solely to benefit and improve the lives of those living at the highest level, the real humans, creating a Virtual Reality society that remains a METROPOLIS (1927) designed underground world, where captive artificial slaves can never escape to the higher ground.  Fassbinder beautifully enhances this Nazi design as only he can, through a staged musical production in a beer hall, actually the Alcazar in Paris, where Solange Pradel performs her smoky Marlene Dietrich renditions of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” and “Lili Marleen,” sung to the shadowed images of marching boots.  Actually much of the futuristic design of the film was shot inside shopping malls, upscale hotels, and in the streets of Paris and Munich, adding that 70’s impersonalized, avant garde, corporate glass-windowed skyscraper look that defined Alan J. Pakula’s modernist THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) a year later, also using an oblique and radically abstract electronic score by Gottfried Hüngsberg that reflects psychic distress, but also a clever use of Wagner’s Liebestod, synthesized Bach, Strauss, and Peter Green’s strangely hypnotic “Albatross.”  Much of the first half introduces the viewer to the concept of a simulated world, while the second half shows Stiller growing ever more suspicious and paranoid, feeling continuously threatened, like a rat in a maze, as if he’s being hunted down by the controllers at the highest levels. 

Much of the narrative centers around people who simply disappear from reality, people that Stiller remembers, but everyone else has been programmed to forget, wiping that memory off the face of the earth, even in police and newspaper reports, except it still exists in Stiller’s memory, making him think after awhile that he’s the one going crazy since no one else recollects his version of events.  This is also a brilliant depiction of the vulnerability (and need) of outsiderism, showing how the State can easily program reality to reflect the propagandized views of the masses, where anyone who doesn’t conform to those views feels particularly powerless and isolated, subject to police arrest for becoming a threat to the stability of society, which almost perfectly resembles the real life fate of currently imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of the Russian oligarchy and the wealthiest man in the country before Russian President Vladimir Putin returned the nation to its police state origins, not to mention former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko who was assassinated by radioactive poisoning in 2006 allegedly by a Russian secret agent while Litvinenko was living in political asylum.  As outlandish as that sounds, that’s effectively the story here, as Stiller literally falls from grace in the corporate hierarchy and begins to see how he’s being used and manipulated by higher powers, how he’s taking the fall for their crimes, where his name is being posted on television news reports as a murderer to explain the strange disappearance of people.  Barbara Valentin is exquisite as the voluptuous corporate secretary who appears to be a virtual projection of the manager’s dreams and desires, also there are extraordinary set designs for party sequences, indoor swimming pools, and beer halls, where ironically the music of Elvis Presley blares out to a programmed virtual world of utter conformity, where society is in such lockstep they actually resemble the horrified depiction of zombies in horror movies.  From this State controlled world domination, can humans survive?  This is a beautifully staged theatrical rendition on the question of free will, where the entire planet appears to be an artificially designed mirror reflection of the real world.       

TRON: Legacy in 3D at IMAX

 

TRON:  LEGACY - 3D at IMAX               C+                                                                            USA  (127 mi)  2010  d: Joseph Kosinski

You're messing with my Zen thing, man!        —Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges)

It’s always something of a disappointment when a disclaimer plays at the opening of a 3D movie indicating much of the film was shot in 2D, so viewers please do not be alarmed.  Well of course that’s a disappointment, and remains one throughout, as it only draws attention to what becomes one of the film’s biggest drawbacks and limitations.  The whole purpose of seeing a film like this is to immerse oneself in a visual 3D feast of eye-popping artistry where an escapist futuristic video game world comes to life, where if it’s not 3D enhanced, then what’s the point?  Actually, only the opening and closing sequences are shot entirely in 2D, bookkending a thrill ride down a rabbit hole into a virtual world.  As this is a follow up to a 1982 film just called TRON, it is expected to hold the key to a new parallel universe onscreen.  It’s an interesting mix of old and new, as computers and electronic possibilities were just getting started in 1982, the same year BLADE RUNNER was released, where the Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” is playing on the jukebox in the background, and for that time period, this would probably look dazzling.  But judged by today’s standards and seen thirty years later, the visual scheme looks pretty similar to what we’ve already seen, where too much is left unexplained and the near incomprehensible storyline never comes together in any intelligible whole, but the idea of creating a virtual computer world that takes on a life of its own is intriguing, where all imperfections, such as the presence of humans, like a computer virus, need to be cleansed from the system in order for operations to run as smoothly as possible.  Instead this has the feel of fragmented set pieces, which even if visually and architecturally impressive, remain disconnected from one another, with characters that never build up enough interest to carry the film.  It’s a mishmash of ideas where a young first-time director, an architect by training, simply hasn’t the sense of purpose to make this matter as anything more than at times provocative eye candy. 

Jeff Bridges was Kevin Flynn in the original, the CEO and chief video game designer for a computer software company, Encom, and was on the verge of designing something brilliant, a dazzling landscape of a computer designed, architecturally complex city called “The Grid,” the representation of a Utopian virtual ideal, something he intended to show to his son, but instead he disappeared, leaving his headstrong son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) to flail on his own, though he grows up rebellious and equally computer savvy.  By the time Sam is 27, with the ownership of his father’s company in legal chaos, a friend of his father’s receives a message from a number that’s been disconnected for over 20 years from Flynn’s long shut down Video Arcade.  When Sam goes to investigate, he soon finds himself face to face with “the Grid” as he immediately enters a strange new world inside the computer where he’s ushered into the public spectacle as a Thunderdome gladiator of some kind, where he quickly has to discover how to fight using a dangerous flying Frisbee that can take his head off.  But when he bleeds real blood, a rarity in these parts, he is immediately taken to the highest commander known as Clu (a computer generated version of Bridges twenty years earlier), who looks like his father, but isn’t.  Instead he’s thrown into another impossible competition, this time with a wand that turns into a race car, where competing contestants attempt to run the other competitors off the road, usually resulting in death.   

In the middle of this contest, Sam is whisked away in a car driven by a gorgeous young woman, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a computer designed cybernetic lifeform called an “iso” (an isometric algorithm) who leads him away from the city into a protected and hidden landscape where his real father is living, having been overthrown by Clu and now having aged twenty years, where the formal dinner sequence is reminiscent of Kubrick’s White Room at the end of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968).  According to his father, once entered, the portal to this universe remains open only for a short duration, at which point it closes until someone from outside opens it up again, which is why he’s been stuck there for twenty years.  But since his father didn’t send the mysterious message for him, it’s apparent Clu most likely did in an attempt to spread his power and influence into the world outside, where he could conceivably enslave and take over the world.  This likelihood is why his father has remained inside, now offering his son the same advice, but Sam is more of a hothead who would risk the world for his own personal freedom.  What follows is a series of daring escapes and travails as they attempt to reach the portal, which of course is guarded by Clu and his minions, all matched by a stunning musical soundtrack written by Daft Punk that matches the tone of severity fraught with danger.  It’s easy to get lost in some of the intricately designed futuristic landscapes, but what’s missing is an original thought or the idea of seeing something we’ve never seen before.