Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) starred Harvey Keitel as a corrupt New York City cop who spends more time gambling, taking Class A drugs, and abusing young women than he does investigating homicides. But he finds himself questioning his own actions and choices while investigating the rape of a young nun. The film therefore dealt with typical New York themes like sleaze, urban decay, and Catholicism.

Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (from now on referred to as Port of Call) transports the action from the Big Apple to the Big Easy, as Nicholas Cage’s ‘Lieutenant’, Terence, investigates a gangland killing in the wake of hurricane Katrina. Cage is promoted to Lieutenant largely because so many people left New Orleans after the hurricane; and his drug addiction is explained by an agonizing and chronic pain in his back caused by jumping into a flooded prison to save a prisoner.

These may seem like cosmetic amendments to Ferrera’s idea, but the perspective and direction of the film are shifted massively due to these changes: Terence is not in a position to analyse his own destructive behaviour, and continues to dig himself further and further into trouble as the film plays out. Herzog’s lieutenant is like a malicious and self-destructive version of the Philip Marlowe in Altman’s ‘The Long Goodbye’: he constantly bumbles from one terrible and seemingly inescapable situation to the next. He jumps from the frying pan, to the fire, and back again for the entire duration of the film: upsetting loan sharks, mafia bosses, drug dealers, police chiefs, district attorneys… the list goes on.

A newly promoted Terence is supposed to be investigating the murder of a Senegalese family in the middle of Big Fate’s (Xzibit) territory. Terence is far too busy scoring drugs and ‘protecting’ Frankie (Mendez) to concentrate on the case; and things really start to unravel when Terence rushes to a casino to save Frankie from a gangster ‘client’. He loses the key witness that he has been looking after (thereby destroying the case against Fate) and also makes enemies of the mafia (who demand $50,000 from him after roughing up Frankie’s client) and the chief of police (after beating up a politician’s elderly mother in a care home). To make matters worse he owes a shady bookie $15,000 after a string of bad bets. Terence is at his wits end; he is strung out on drugs, his life is in danger, he has had his badge and gun taken away, and he owes a lot of money… but Terence isn’t the sort of guy who lets things get on top of him. I won’t explain how Terence attempts to fix all these problems, because that is where the real satisfaction of the film lies, but I will tell you that it is a fantastically entertaining and original piece of filmmaking that will have you laughing and twisting in your seat with glee and anticipation.

The cast list is quite breathtaking for such an under-publicised film: Cage is joined by Val Kilmer (his police partner), Eva Mendez (his prostitute girlfriend), Xzibit (the kingpin gang leader) and a few other recognisable faces from Herzog’s extensive filmography. It is Cage that really makes this film though. Herzog mentioned in a recent interview that he has never been a prolific drug user, and so he relied heavily on Cage’s wealth of experience on the subject to help instil Terence with that level of believability. Cage is truly electrifying in this role: he combines the snarling, venomous evil of Face/Off with the nihilistic apathy of ‘Leaving Las Vegas’, and somehow still finds room for some of the charming anti-hero honesty of ‘Raising Arizona’. This all combines to create a nasty and uncontrollable anti-hero that you just cant help caring about and rooting for.

This film is also ‘Herzog’ to the very end. He is probably the only filmmaker who could have created such a complex, sporadic, and thoughtful take on Ferrera’s film, while also making it the funniest entry at this year’s festival! Herzog’s relaxed attitude to filmmaking, and his willingness to do away with the rulebook and the concepts of classical Hollywood cinema, allows the story to stray wildly outside the lines. It is not neat, it is often unrealistic, and it might be the least responsible film since ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’; but it is also frenetic and absolutely hysterical.

There is really no way to describe the playfulness and exquisite timing of the comedy in this film. It is partially Herzog’s zany artistry, and partly Cage’s masterful control of facial expressions and comic timing. I have tried to write out a few anecdotes from the film to give you a taste, but they just aren’t funny on paper because you need to see it to believe it, and it is only funny in the context of the moment in which it is occurring and the wider context of the story world. So you will just have to trust me, along with the hundred-or-so journalists who were rolling in the aisles and giving the film the first ovation of the 2009 LFF press screenings.

★★★★★

What follows is basically what The Insider would have looked like if Mel Brooks owned the rights. Mark agrees to wear a wire in order to incriminate the top executives at ADM, but he is so childishly excited about his foray into espionage that he never stops to think about what he is getting himself into. But the tables turn swiftly when ADM’s lawyers discover Mark has been skimming money from the company profits, and the FBI decides to sideline the ADM case and go after Mark instead!

This film easily fulfils, but never really exceeds, expectations. It is certainly not a genre-defying, complex, caustic comedy about the global agri-industry; but it is another fairly successful outing for Stephen Soderbergh and his pals George Clooney (who executive produced the picture) and Matt Damon. It shares with the ‘Oceans’ films an effortlessly well-paced and uplifting tone that only comes about through a sort of synergy when an experienced, confident, and supremely talented filmmaker like Soderbergh decides to let his hair down with a few trusted friends and remind himself how much fun filmmaking can be. The fact that the ‘friends’ who decided to join in are two of the most globally renowned actors in history certainly can’t have hurt either.

Matt Damon may have achieved international fame in the Bourne films, and critical acclaim working with directors like Gus Van Sant and Martin Scorsese, but rare appearances on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and Entourage (not to mention his friendship with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone) prove that he is also an incredibly astute and underrated comic actor who knows how to make fun out of himself. This film will hopefully broadcast this hidden talent to a global audience. His performance is slick and understated; he is never brash or knowingly ‘comic’ (a refreshing quality after so many years of Ferrell, Stiller, Rogen, et al) and he maintains that slightly dim, Middle American charm that effortlessly radiates from his calm, ‘farm boy’ physique. I am always amazed by how easy it is to overlook the fact that Damon is actually an Oscar-winning screenwriter from Boston; his demeanour and physiology are so fresh and agrarian that one almost wishes he was more like Private Ryan.

This may not be the most tightly honed comedy script in recent years, and I must admit that it is one of those films where the trailer is funnier than the actual film. When the court case gets under way the story becomes a bit heavy handed and loses some of the snappy pace and fleet-footed dialogue that defines the rest of the script. But if this was the sort of film where every last moment was painstakingly thought out to avoid stagnancy, then it wouldn’t be the sort of film that allowed Soderbergh and Damon to enjoy themselves and create such a thoroughly entertaining and raucous insight into their famous friendship; and I for one am willing to overlook the hiccups and slow-points in this generally well paced and thoroughly enjoyable film.

If anybody was looking forward to Steven Soderbergh’s cutting, fictional attack on the corn industry (similar to Linklater’s fantastic rebuke to cattle rearing in ‘Fast Food Nation’) then they will be disappointed. This film only touches very lightly on the ‘corn’ issue in America (in case you didn’t know, every American is eating far more corn than they should be because the US government has been over-subsidising corn production at an unsustainable level since World War 2). Similarly, if anybody was looking for a deep, three-dimensional character study of a torn soul stuck in the heart of a giant US corporation (à la The Insider) then they will leave unfulfilled. The script prioritises laughs ahead of depth of emotion in almost every instance; and while there is pathos by the bucket load, we can’t ever really say we care about Whitacre. If, on the other hand, you arrive at the cinema looking forward to a frivolous, expertly produced, and very funny movie with a few cracking performances, then I think you might just be in luck.

★★★★★

As the girls try, in vain, to access nightclubs, VIP areas, and apartment blocks to feel closer to their obsession, so their friendship and trust for each other tightens. It is an uplifting story of how the seemingly unconstructive and much maligned institutions of premiership football and the cult of celebrity can actually bring two separate souls together despite their troubled backgrounds, loveless parents, etc .

The characters are entirely believable and their actions sincere to a fault. Anyone with a daughter or younger sister will know what it is to see teenage girls zip through this fleeting and defining period of their lives with the same wild swings of emotion and unexpected surges of kindness that these well-drawn characters embody. Nicole’s emotionally barren and impoverished background, with a criminal brother and invisible parents, is teased out subtly in Hayes quiet but powerful performance. And similarly, Burley’s upper-middle class, ‘nouveau riche’ princess, Jasmine, is brash and shallow (for her, Lee is more a flavour of the month than a reason for living), but she is still a caring and thoughtful individual who sees passed Nicole’s lack of glamour.

Heymann’s direction, for the most part, has a great feel for the pace and tone of the story it is telling, and also manages to relay this in its visual tone. But sadly, and not for the first time in this festival, the story is inherently flawed and undeserving of cinematic exhibition. The fatal blow occurs about an hour into the film, when the girls decide to kidnap Cassidy and force him at gunpoint to stay at Liverpool after reports he is leaving for Madrid.

This is an absolutely absurd, insincere turn of events, and it destroys the emotional gravity and the genuinely uplifting tone underlying the idea of the film. There is a desperate attempt to find a natural situation in which this turn of events could occur; they meet Cassidy drunk outside a hotel after an argument with a team mate, and his decision to go with them is admittedly quite believable. But this is all rendered useless by the simple fact that these girls would never act in this way, and they certainly wouldn’t be so casual about it.

This honest exploration of the unlikely friendship between to lost youngsters is lost forever in the quagmire that ensues: a static and meandering half hour during which they almost have sex with him, almost kill him, almost ruin his career, and almost destroy themselves. In the end, though, none of these things happen, and the only truly tragic thing about the ending is how detached and callous it feels when compared to the fantastic story that preceded it.

★★★★★

To begin with, Max is the only person on the romantic cruise who is there alone, and he is also the only person under the age of 65! He sulks around the ship, dejected and lonely, until he eventually befriends a few members of the crew. This section of the film does admittedly begin to lull after a while. There are only so many comic situations you can come up with on a cruise ship full of old people, and Max spends most of his time staring at a TV screen or throwing up in his shower. It is when he arrives in Jamaica that the real fun begins…

Max immediately escapes from the tourists on his boat and befriends Bruno, a Rasta with an almost unintelligible Caribbean accent. They head to a ‘local’ beach, and Max finally seems to be having some fun with his new friends: he learns a few Jamaican phrases, smokes some weed, and goes for a solitary swim. When he returns, his bag has been stolen (along with his wallet and passport) and Bruno claims ignorance and runs away. Max eventually gets back to the ship that evening, just in time to see it pulling away from the harbour. Max is thus forced to embark on a long and fraught journey to the US Embassy in Kingston; a journey that takes him through dangerous townships, football-obsessed teenage gangs, an evening spent celebrating Obama’s election victory in a shack bar, and a terrifying ordeal with a knife-wielding youth.

It is impossible to imagine this film working without the performance of leading man, Shaun Bones; he even gets an “in collaboration with” credit after the names of the director/ writer team. His performance is a perfect balance of self-pity and self-realisation, resilience and defeatism. The brief programme synopsis says, “Bones’ enigmatic performance [makes] it difficult to know whether to laugh or despair”, and this is perfectly true. When the tension and drama are high, Bones performance rises to the task, but when the situation calls for a relaxed and naturalistic style of acting, he is right on point as well. The performance is filled with pathos and comic timing, but is also completely believable.

Bones’ performance mirrors the general feel of the film perfectly. At many points it is impossible to work out whether this is guerrilla-style documentary footage with non-actors, or a more designed and purposeful style of filmmaking. When Max plays football with a group of teenagers, and ends up spending the night with them celebrating Obama’s victory, it is so naturalistic that one can only assume Bones’ and one of the directors literally spent the night at that bar.

But underlying this guerrilla/ slacker aesthetic is a well-conceived narrative of self-realisation and resilience that follows an almost mythical path. Max is unbelievably unlucky (the only other person I can think of who was this chronically and tragically unlucky on film was Charlie Chaplin!) but the fateful and catastrophic events that befall him force him to dig deeper and deeper inside himself. He is, as with all the great myths, aided by a host of mentors, heralds, gatekeepers, and other Jungian archetypes that give him special powers and gifts to help him on his way.

In the end, Max’s journey results in a kind of browbeaten acceptance of the chaotic and often cruel world in which we live. But this acceptance is reached in such an odd, genuine, and uplifting way that you can’t help feeling buoyed by his journey as you leave the cinema with a smile on your face.

★★★★★

From the moment we meet Mei, scowling outside her shack watching youngsters play pool, she is already a bitter and uninspiring character. She starts dating a flashy, motorbike-owning young man from Shenzhen who introduces her to a life of karaoke bars and neon lights; but when she refuses to sleep with him, he dumps her and returns to Shenzhen. This is evidently the catalyst for her decision to leave her village in search of a larger world, but you would never guess it from her response. She remains cold and detached from her surroundings, and we are no closer to empathising with her as a character.

Mei starts spending more time with a burly truck driver, who eventually rapes her. It is at this point that Mei decides to run away to the city. She is fired from her job at a shirt manufacturing factory (although she doesn’t seem to care) and starts working at a hair salon/ brothel. There she falls in love with a gangster, but when he is murdered she uses his secret stash of money to escape to London. Once again, Mei seems almost completely unaffected by these events. I won’t bore you with the rest of the synopsis, but suffice to say she marries an aging Englishman, gets bored of him, moves in with an Indian man who gets her pregnant, runs away again, and ends up on a beach somewhere outside London.

The unavoidable and damning fault in this film is the fact that it is filled with potentially dramatic events and situations that are rendered mundane and nebulous due to the filmmaker and lead actress’s inability to delve into the conflict at the heart of these events. Mei is raped, abused as a worker, marries an old Englishman just so she can stay in Britain, becomes pregnant by a man who runs away, etc. But at no point do these events seem to affect Mei on an emotional level. She remains aloof and detached, and so there is no drama or conflict or emotional growth. The viewer is expected to simply sit and stare at an episodic and meaningless series of events, and this is not a sound or responsible basis for a feature film.

The only interesting thing about this film is it’s partial location in a world that is foreign to most westerners. But no film deserves to be praised purely on the basis of its “exotic” location, as any location would seem interesting to someone who hasn’t been there. Rural China has been represented in a much more interesting way recently in films like ??????, and many of these films also manage to weave a fascinating human story into their representation of specific locales.

There are, perhaps, moments of emotional purity that help to redeem the film. At one point, when her Muslim Indian boyfriend explains that he can’t eat pork because Allah said it was dirty, Mei explains that she washed it in the sink. There are moments like this dotted throughout the film that help us to empathise with Mei slightly, and they fortunately work within the limited emotional range of the fairly stilted and one-dimensional lead actress.

In conclusion, this was a promising film with an intriguing premise. The idea of following a young woman on her journey from a rural Chinese village all the way to London is certainly an interesting idea, and probably accounts for the film’s presence at this festival. But the ways the idea is dealt with – in the creation of the script, the direction of the film, and the performance of the lead actress – fail to create any interesting emotional or thematic premises, and so it remains a dull and uninspiring film throughout.

★★★★★

Passenger Side is the story of Michael Brown (Adam Scott), who is awoken on the morning of his 37th birthday by a phone call from his annoying, ex-drug addict brother, Toby (Joel Bissonnette, brother of director Matt). Toby persuades Michael to ditch his girlfriend and spend the day driving him around on some mysterious mission. What follows is a fairly lackadaisical, but never nebulous, talkative journey around the outskirts of Los Angeles.

I say the story is lackadaisical because the conversation mostly revolves around witty banter (I hate that word, but it’s Tuesday evening so we are sticking with it) that mainly serves to showcase the comedic sensibilities of the filmmaker; I say it is not nebulous, because the dialogue never entirely strays into the very British, Cowardian tradition of talking for talking’s sake. There is a constant undercurrent of sibling rivalry, male bonding, and that childishness that rears its head whenever we spend too much time with our immediate family.

The film is certainly helped by the performances of the lead actors, who at first seem to be pawns delivering funny lines, but eventually learn to gel as a duo and find their character beats marvellously. In a film that relies almost entirely on dialogue, it is essential that the actors work well together, and have a natural sense of timing and delivery, in order to prevent the story from feeling flat or lacking in conflict and dynamism. There is not a lot a filmmaker can do to avoid these pitfalls if the actors don’t work well together, but that certainly isn’t a criticism you could level against this film.

As I have already mentioned, the soundtrack is superb (as long as you like Dinosaur Jr… if you don’t then I must politely ask you to leave this blog!) and works perfectly in harmony with the aesthetic and tone of the overall piece. The cinematography is simple, but captures perfectly the unique atmosphere of East Hollywood and Echo Park. It is an area that can feel hot and claustrophobic, but seconds later a breeze finds its way from the Pacific, through the more famous and wealthy parts of the city, to the cracked and dusty settlement of hedonists and writers that is… Silverlake. This is easily my favourite part of LA, and while funds are tight it is great to be transported there so effectively by a filmmaker.

Don’t get me wrong; there are certainly downsides to this film. The dialogue does, at times, get on one’s nerves with its incessant wit and speed of delivery. I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if you stuck these brothers in a room with the mother and daughter from Gilmore Girls… I shudder to think.

There is also the terrible twist at the end (don’t you hate it when people tell you there is a twist at the end?) It’s not clever and it’s not shocking; it is contrived and insincere and annoying, and it very nearly ruins the ending of the film. In the end Toby finds what he was looking for, and Michael returns home to face another year of loneliness and confusion. I had hoped that he might have learnt something during the film, but alas he has not… and so I was forced to leave the cinema with the realisation that the film had lacked any genuine conflict or drama. But at least it provided some intelligent conversation, beautiful imagery, and a great 90-minutes of rock music.

★★★★★

The story revolves around “twenty something London lad” David (James Brough), who has skipped work and travelled to Liverpool in the hope of tracking down a one-night stand from the night before. His mission proves to be in vain and so, dejected, he gets drunk and sleeps rough for the night. After being robbed of his last few pennies, he enters a betting shop where a beautiful young employee, Tina (Helen Elizabeth), persuades him to bet on a particular dog. When her tip pays off, a refreshed and elated David begs her to take the rest of the day off and show him the sites of Liverpool. We follow this odd couple around for the rest of the day, as they cheer each other up and eventually learn to confide in each other. There is, of course, the predictable “downfall”, when one of them accidentally offends the other and all seems lost, but then they kiss and make up.

It is fair to say then, that this is not the most original or interesting film of the festival, and it hasn’t lived up to many of its expectations. I am at a loss to understand why such a talented actor, and a man who has worked with the likes of Frears and Tony Grisoni, would choose such a formulaic and unoriginal story for his debut feature. I appreciate that Morrissey is Liverpudlian, and that there was finance to be found there during the city’s term as European Capital of Culture, but there must have been a more interesting story with more depth of character out there somewhere. This is just a drab and uninspiring copy of Richard Linklater’s superb ‘Before Sunrise’. The characters wander around a few iconic sites talking about the nature of friendship and where their lives have gone wrong. But while Linklater’s film was fresh, dynamic, and insightful; in this film the character’s problems are mundane and their insights shallow and obvious.

There is something faintly charming about the story and the characters, and it did make me want to escape to the coast for a day or two, but it is distinctly uncinematic and would have faired much better as a Tuesday night drama on BBC3. For a British audience, I think it is difficult to completely write-off a film that harks back to the Woodfall ‘kitchen sink’ dramas and gritty, slightly romanticised Northern-centric films like ‘Billy Liar’ and ‘The Taste of Honey’. But I’m not sure that this film was consciously trying to build on those films, it just happens to share a location with them. It certainly lacks the sense of wonder and fantasy that those films managed to incorporate into their dull and depressing worlds.

One would have hoped that, at the very least, this film would have boasted some powerful performances due to the status of the director. Alas James Brough, who only got the part because he wrote and starred in the original play, is frankly amateur. I feel like a ratfink for being so negative, but that really is the only word to describe him; he isn’t actually terrible, just unprofessional and lacking in depth.

There isn’t even much to be said of Morrissey’s directing skills: the direction and camera work are as boring and one-dimensional as the story itself, and as drab and grey as the Liverpool skyline they are trying to capture. The opening section of the film is a whirlwind of short, meaningless scenes that fail to capture any emotion or atmosphere, and while the pace improves and allows the actors to find their footing, Morrissey never adds any visual flare to help the story along. A few seconds have been left open here and there for establishing shots of Liverpool, but if the filmmakers think this is enough to warrant the claim that it is “David Morrissey’s homage to his beloved city” then they are sorely mistaken.

The film is shot on video, I assume as a budgetary requirement, and this only serves to heighten the sense of cold detachment that abounds in the film. The footage lacks the softness of film, and while it might help to capture the atmosphere of a cloudy weekday in Liverpool, it fails to capture the emotions of the characters of the ‘feel’ of their world.

This film does have one saving grace however… Helen Elizabeth. Elizabeth is really a joy to watch for most of the film. Similarly to the lead actor, she takes a while to warm to the character and the script, which is awkward and stilted at first. But as the script and the direction and pace open up, so Elizabeth delves into the heart of the character and delivers a performance that many more esteemed actors would have failed to elicit from such a banal script. A scene in a confession box, where Elizabeth finally admits to having had an abortion, is really quite powerful, and almost justifies the making of the film on its own. I like to think that Morrissey had a helping hand here too: the performance has the measured and understated power and the beautifully controlled pace that Morrissey accomplishes so well, and if Helen Elizabeth has benefitted from his great talent and goes on to impress us with this quality of acting again and again, then maybe this film wasn’t a complete waste of time after all.

★★★★★

If you feel like you are interested in any or all of the above, then you really need to see Ondi Timoner’s ‘We Live In Public’. The film charts the rise and fall of one of the most iconic ‘dot com kids’ of the early 90s. Josh Harris discovered the Internet while Tim Berners-Lee was still perfecting HTML at MIT (I cant be bothered to explain any of that last sentence; just open another tab in Wikipedia and come back when you’re ready) He knew there was money to be made, and he had the seemingly uninspiring idea of creating a research company that prospective internet start-up companies could pay for data. It really was a genius idea: nobody had a clue how to quantify the internet, so Harris paid a rag-tag bunch of mathematicians and statisticians to come up with some positive projections for potential revenue on the internet. Harris was an overnight success, and used his newfound wealth to start up the first ever Internet television station, Pseudo.com.

The Pseudo.com studio in Manhattan came to resemble Andy Warhol’s Factory, and it wasn’t long before comparisons were being made. Pseudo was a hit, and Harris became a very young, very wayward, multi-millionaire. He began hosting huge parties with supermodels, bands, films, and limitless amounts of drugs and alcohol. This was a computer analyst geek-turned-millionaire who created the coolest scene in downtown New York since the punk scene of the late 70s. He used the parties as a way of finding new creative talent for the wacky shows that aired on Pseudo, and the station went from strength to strength.

This is where things get really interesting. Harris had had a difficult childhood; somewhere between his estranged father and alcoholic mother, Harris was left to bring himself up using the television as a surrogate parent. He grew up to be a detached and troubled young man. Having reached the pinnacle of success – by the mid-nineties Harris was worth $80 million – his mental state began to unravel, and he spent more and more time hiding behind his ‘clown’ alter ego, Luvvy. The investors of Pseudo.com began to distance themselves from Harris, and eventually he left the station, claiming that it had only ever been an “art experiment” and he wanted to move onto something new.

That “something new” turned out to be perhaps the coolest, most unbelievable social experiment in history, ‘Quiet’. Harris sank millions of dollars into the creation of an underground community in a basement in New York. He invited famous artists to build an odd, futuristic church, a firing range with a breath-taking arsenal of weapons, a huge dining room, a bar, a performance space, a transparent tent for showering, and a ‘pod hotel’ of individual pods for the inhabitants of the community to live in. Oh, one more thing… he also set up hundreds of live-feed cameras to record every movement in the building, and hooked them all up to a 75-channel private TV controller so that everybody in the community could watch everybody else on their personal computer screens in their pods! So you could be sitting in your pod and decide to sit up and watch the guy four pods down sleeping, or watch a couple having sex in the shower, or a guy taking a shit in the open-plan toilets.

The experiment opened in late 1999, and was an instant success. The Dandy Warhols came down to check it out, the creative director of MoMA had to beg for a pod, and an entire community of the quirkiest, most hedonistic New York artists moved in for the month-long experiment. The footage of ‘Quiet’ is enough to recommend this documentary on it’s own… it really does have to be seen to be believed. It is like a cross between ‘Das Experiment’ and ‘Fear and loathing in Las Vegas’. There is sex, drugs and rock and roll in unprecedented measures, not to mention drunken naked women firing automatic weapons! There is a compulsory interrogation room, and Harris reserved the right to create any rules he saw fit to make: he could tell people what pod to sleep in, when they could eat, etc.

In the end, in the early hours of the morning of January 1^st 2000, the NYPD were alerted that a millennium cult had gathered in an underground basement for a mass suicide. Imagine being the first officer to arrive down in that basement: hundreds of artists, either naked or dressed in matching grey and red ‘Quiet’ uniforms, drinking, shooting up heroin, watching each other on banks of monitors, sitting in a futuristic church listening to their ‘leader’ (Harris) delivering a millennium mass, and running around with loaded automatic weapons!

And all this was organized by one of the richest men on Wall Street at the time!

I will resist the temptation to transcribe the whole film for you; but suffice to say this is a man you really need to get to know, and the only way you can do that is by watching this film.

The filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, was an inhabitant of ‘Quiet’ and became a lifelong friend of Harris’ (if Harris is capable of keeping a friend for life). The film was ten years in the making and charts his rise to success, through the ‘Quiet’ years and goes on to explore his disastrous attempts to stream his life, 24-hours a day, on a website… an experiment that only served to further dilapidate his frail mental state.

Timoner is the perfect person to explore Harris. She clearly cares about him – she respects everything he has done and sympathises with his difficult past – but she is not blind to his mistakes and is willing to admit that he is a flawed and difficult human being. Timoner also seems to have inherited Harris’ philosophical and artistic approach to the Internet, and the way it will affect human society. She is therefore able to explain just how ahead- of-his-time Harris really was. ‘Quiet’ is, in itself, a perfect representation of the Facebook/smart phone generation: we all sit around in our defined spaces (our ‘walls’ or ‘pods’ depending on your choice of nomenclature) staring at each other but never really connecting.

In the end, you probably wont understand Harris any better at the end of this film; but at least the filmmaker hasn’t tried to force some balanced, insincere closed ending onto it. This is a fairly simple exploration of a fascinating and complicated man. Timoner may not have unravelled the mysteries, but she has certainly captured the fascination and awe that so many people felt for Josh Harris… “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of.”

★★★★★

I am willing to make allowances in certain cases: I would argue that many of John Cassavetes’ films lacked any coherent structure, and yet they still proved to be some of the most engaging, powerful, and dramatic explorations of character in the history of the cinema. But then, Cassavetes was exploring fascinating people that we can all engage with: a distraught husband who has lost the ability to reach out to his mentally-frail wife; an ageing actress who has lost the will to carry on; a strip-club owner who has forgotten why he loves the Sunset strip. Cassavetes uses improvisation, ad hoc camera-work, and fluid storylines to ensnare the audience and take them on a captivating journey into the world of his characters.

Harmony Korine has never been a stalwart of classical narrative structures, but the characters he chose to study were at least classical in their innate ability to encapsulate and create conflict. His first writing credit was on Larry Clark’s much-lauded debut feature, ‘Kids’ (1995). A film that felt a lot like Cassavetes’ character studies, ‘Kids’ helped blur the lines between feature filmmaking and the incisive, honest photo-journalism that made Larry Clark a household name in the early 1970s. While Korine’s script did loosely adhere to a narrative structure, it was clear that he was much more interested in exploring fragments of his characters lives, and building up a more layered, web-like understanding of the characters that would stick in the minds of the viewers, rather than simply forcing the viewer to empathise with the characters for 90-110 minutes before discarding them on the way home from the cinema.

Korine’s next project, which also constituted his directorial debut, was ‘Gummo’ (1997). ‘Gummo’ was the story of a group of teenagers stranded in a tornado-ravaged Ohio town; and it proved to be another successful experiment in non-linear storytelling. The barren, hopeless surroundings and the meaninglessness of the characters actions were perfectly reflected in the confused, episodic nature of the story.

I am therefore usually willing to align myself with Harmony Korine, despite my personal preference for traditional narrative storytelling. He has a rare ability to create fascinating characters, and expose the drama, conflict, and emotion at the heart of theses characters and their surroundings.

I must admit, however, that I was slightly more suspect than usual when I took my seat in the BFI Southbank this afternoon for the London Film Festival press screening of Korine’s latest film… ‘Trash Humpers’. The film follows a trio of geriatric perverts who butcher innocent people and teach a primary school student to crush a doll’s skull with a hammer.

While ‘Kids’, and even ‘Gummo’, had some semblance of narrative and traditional character arcs, ‘Trash Humpers’ is a helter-skelter, chaotic home video, seemingly shot by one of the very psychotic creatures we are watching. I can’t imagine Korine ever wants us to feel empathy for these people, nor does he seem to make any effort to explore them, or justify his decision to make a film about them. There is no semblance of realism in the film, and no attempt to make the film aesthetically attractive. But I cannot deny that I sat there, thoroughly engrossed, for the entire 78-minute running time.

The three main characters are not actually elderly, they are really young men and women dressed up in prosthetics. They closely resemble the Jackass crew in the sections of their feature-length films where they dressed up as old people to perform pranks on unwitting members of the public. I mention this connection not so much as a visual aid, but because it may explain why I noticed a dark humour and childish mischief in the film. The three characters are an unsettling mixture: the power and virility of young adults, mixed with the naïveté and irresponsibility of small children, all wrapped up in the decaying cadavers of the elderly.

Korine, in his director’s statement, explains that the characters were inspired by a group of, presumably homeless, elderly people who used to hang out under a bridge near his childhood home and hump trash cans while laughing and communicating in garbled noises. It is a testament to Korine’s odd artistic mind that he never let go of this childish memory. Many people would have adapted the memory every time they remembered it, slowly explaining away the mysteries until it was just another banal childhood experience. But Korine refused to explain this memory to himself; he preserved the thrilling mystery of it, and managed to transfer it onto video without losing the raw, almost horrifying childish simplicity of the memory.

These are people that only a child could imagine in a nightmare, but suddenly we are face to face with them, with only a cheap video camera to protect us. We are forced to mingle with them and listen to their gargling, screeching noises and destructive, irrational behaviour. Sometimes we are just standing next to them in a field while they hump, and masturbate, trees. But sometimes we find ourselves in a playground with them while they teach a child to strangle a doll with a plastic bag, or sitting at some warped house party where one of them has beaten a man to death and is standing in a pool of blood in the kitchen… laughing.

Korine has done a fantastic job of making the film look as cheap and shoddily made as possible: the whole film looks as if it has been edited in camera, and even the credits have been created in the cheapest possible video format. At no point from start to finish do we have cause to release ourselves from the illusion and gasp with relief that this really was just a stunt by one of the mavericks of American cinema.

The film never really employs any traditional conventions to illicit fear in us; but it is an unsettling concept and it shares with the horror genre that visceral, disgusted feeling that we get when we desperately want to escape from something but we cant run away. To quote Korine’s director’s statement again, “it is a new type of horror; palpable and raw.”

★★★★★

Sergio is probably the only man in modern politics to be referred to, globally, by his first name alone. Not even the Kennedy clan, so beloved and trusted at home, were referred to as ‘Bobby’ or ‘John’ outside the US. From the opening frames of the film, as Sergio flashes his famous grin, it is easy to get the measure of the man: he is enigmatic, charming, handsome, and effortlessly cool; but he is also selfless, and confident in a way that frees him from the urge to win people over with false promises or pompous shows of masculinity. He is the sort of man who could meet Ahmedinijad and George W. Bush on the same day and charm them both into a slightly warmer, less Hawkish, attitude towards global affairs.

Unfortunately, not even Sergio could prevent Bush’s morally dubious offensive against Iraq in 2003; and while most of the world, including the UN, wanted to distance themselves from the barbaric and thoughtless actions of the US and British governments, they realised that they had a responsibility to help clean up the mess. Of course, Sergio was the first name on everyone’s lips. In 1999, Kofi Annan had sent Sergio to see if he could fashion some sort of peaceful democracy in war-ravaged East Timor. Against all the odds, Sergio succeeded, and it is the only example in history of an occupational force actually helping to bring peace and prosperity to a war-torn region.

Sergio, after so many years living in dangerous territories from Bosnia to Cambodia, had seemed about ready to settle down. His first marriage ended badly, and he rarely had time to see his two sons, but reaching the position of High Commissioner, and finally falling in love again with a Brazilian economic advisor in East Timor, left him reluctant to risk throwing it all away. But a man like Sergio is bound by greater responsibilities than the average human. There are not many people who can claim that the world really needs them in a time of crisis, but Sergio is such a man, and so he took a four-month leave of absence from his post as High Commissioner to serve as Kofi Annan’s special representative in Iraq.

Sergio went about his business as usual. For the man who had negotiated with the Khmer Rouge in their jungle hideouts, Sergio was not scared to go out into the streets of Baghdad and speak to the people and find out what really needed to be done to help this country get back on it’s feet. Sergio had always been an advocate of treating those in need as human beings, rather than large groups of ‘refugees’ that needed to be herded like cattle.

Unfortunately, there has not been a single happy ending during the never-ending nightmare of Operation Iraq Freedom. On August 19, 2003, a truck bomb organised by Zarqawi (Bin Laden’s representative in Iraq) ploughed into the UN headquarters in Baghdad, right below Sergio’s office. Two US army reserves spent hours trying to save Sergio, but without any back up or equipment, they failed to recover his body, and he died buried in the rubble.

Barker’s film reveals the bombing within the first fifteen minutes of the film; and it is one of the most effective and thrilling pieces of documentary filmmaking I have ever seen. We cut back and forth between flashes of a truck speeding along a dirt track, and various interviews with people explaining exactly what was happening in the seconds leading up to the crash. This all builds up to a crescendo as we cut to a conference on the ground floor that was being filmed at the time of the explosion. The timing is perfect, we know what is about to happen but Barker holds off for just long enough so that when the explosion finally rips through the room, and the camera goes black for a few seconds, our nerves are shot to pieces and we feel physically and emotionally devastated.

Up to this point, we really don’t know much about Sergio, except to say that he is an important political and humanitarian figure, and we are more shocked than upset at the attack. But this is probably the most interesting element of this documentary: it is first and foremost a direct account of the attempts of two US army reserves to save Sergio and Gil Loescher (an advisor who was trapped with Sergio). We learn about Sergio’s blessed life through colourful and vibrant flashbacks, and they are all the more heartbreaking for seeing them as brief pockets of hope during the tense and harrowing attempts to save Sergio after the blast.

I did wonder if the film was going to stray into exploitative territory, and use Sergio’s death as a stick to poke the failures of the US occupation in Iraq. Director Barker is an American war correspondent made famous by his caustic examination of the world’s failure to act over the Rwandan genocide. While his integrity, intelligence, and passion have rightly never been called into question, I did wonder what he was getting at by making an entire feature documentary about one death.

But then I realised that Barker had ultimately found something almost hopeful and redeeming in this morbid and heart-breaking story. Even in his death, Sergio encapsulated the selflessness and calm optimism that he had exuded throughout his energetic life. As Barker writes in his director’s statement, “for all it’s tragedy, I ended up making a film that I think is ultimately about hope and the abiding resilience of the human spirit – even in the face of impossible odds. That’s what Sergio taught me, and maybe that’s a quality we can all use a little of right now.”

The key people in the film are the two US army reserves who trued to rescue Sergio (William von Zehle and Andre Valentine) and Carolina, his girlfriend who was present during the blast and refused to leave the site until his body had been recovered. It is Willim von Zehle’s account of the final moments, when they realised Sergio had passed away, that filled my eyes with tears. Von Zehle is one of those unassuming, soft spoken, and quietly intelligent Americans that doesn’t seem to fit with the global image of brash rednecks who never leave their own country save to blow up someone else’s.

While Carolina, understandably, has dealt with her grief by speaking about Sergio is poetic and almost metaphysical terms, and Andre Valentino is a slightly irrational evangelist; it is von Zehle who provides the most gut-wrenching, frank account of events. The fact that such a reasonable man finally breaks down on camera and is forced to choke back his tears, speaks volumes about the effect Sergio had on mere mortals, even in his dying. It is also a genuinely powerful cinematic moment, and as I looked around me I noticed that I was not the only audience member gently wiping away the tears from the corner of my eye.The film comes to a close as von Zehle reads aloud a letter that he felt impelled to write to Kofi Annan. In it he explains the courage, calm, and selflessness that Sergio exhibited in his dying hours. This humble fireman and reserve troop goes on to sum up everything Greg Barker wanted to say about Sergio: death is never easy or positive, but to die in a way that inspires hope in others, and immortalises your character in life, is surely a precious and rare thing.

★★★★★