Ladies whose voices can send chills down my spine…
Good a topic for a post as any. Strength and vulnerability interplaying. Of course getting up in front of a mob to sing them a song takes intrinsic guts and strength that isn’t usually acknowledged.
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This one grows on you over the years. It’s such a weird little indie indulgence that it needs to be seen. Based on a graphic novel, Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanssen are angsty high school graduates facing a dismal suburban future and trying to find themselves. Caught between childhood and adulthood, and unsure about the road ahead, it makes for an unexpected, twisting melodrama unlike other teenage films.
Society and its mores are in the gun sights, as these misfits face the possibility of conforming. This conformist / anti-conformist dichotomy drives the story and drives a wedge between longtime besties, Enid and Rebecca.
Throw in one off the wall encounter with Steve Buscemi, a hard core recluse dweeb with an old 78 record fetish, and things get highly discomforting. Enid plays games with everyone’s lives, including her own, with mixed results. In the end, perhaps we’re not sure what the hell happened or how to make sense of it. The fantasy ending is what annoyed me originally. Now, I can look past it and enjoy the film for its view on our culture and the performances of those involved.
An unexpected tear jerker, I didn’t know what to think about this one beforehand. It has such an uncomfortable premise, a turn off with an odd situation that maybe people won’t want to expose themselves to.
Turns out the situation isn’t so odd or unusual at all. This true story is remarkably brought to life with so much humor and freshness that it shouldn’t be missed. The actors are superb.
Thirty minutes into Kim Nguyen’s film War Witch (2012) (simply titled Rebelle in its original French Canadian release) I knew I was watching something like nothing I had seen before. Nguyen’s film is based on true stories of child soldiers captured in Burma by rebels to fight against the government army. The film is set in the Democratic Republic of Congo and told through the eyes and words of the young girl Komona. It follows Komona from ages 12-14 as she is torn from her childhood and thrown into the blood-drenched violent chaos of an unnamed African civil war. The story is harrowing, brutal and heartbreaking, yet the cinematography is so beautiful, the camerawork so sensitive and perfectly executed that the pain is brought to the surface not through overwrought melodrama but through quiet beauty meshed with violent reality. Komona’s tale will rip your heart out for sure, but her survival is not the result of some Western Deus Ex Machina, some prince on a white horse, or helicopter for World Relief. Rather Komona’s survival is a result of her own will, her personal strength, her instincts, and her ability to continue to move forward and keep herself alive even as her world is crushing in on her.
So no, War Witch is not the kind of movie we usually see about Africa. This is not United Nations Cinema and a vehicle for white people to feel bad about Third World struggles so they can feel good about themselves for feeling bad. Rather, War Witch delivers African Realism like we’ve never seen on the screen before. It is experiential cinema, and the experience is not filtered through the propaganda of Hollywood or Western culture. War Witch is the tale of heartbreaking survival in an environment where the odds against survival are stacked as deeply as the boxes of AK47s which young children wield against an unnamed government army. But through the set location, mechanisms of production, cinematography and acting, the film allows the audience to breathe even in a seemingly suffocating and hopeless world. We are given a chance to feel and experience the plight of Komona, yet without a didactic Western imprint.
Komona’s story could be called a coming of age story, but that is too tame a phrase for this film. If Hollywood made this movie, perhaps it would be a coming of age story. It would undoubtedly involve some sort of Western intervention – the Peace Corps, missionaries, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, or maybe even Bono or Madonna. But the young protagonist in this film isn’t even allowed to come of age. Rather Komona’s childhood is violently ripped away from her, and she is thrust into a tale of survival against all odds in a landscape whose bloody and violent history rustles in every leaf on every tree and every blade of grass in the film. For the entire 90 minutes we are immersed in Komona’s life within her African culture. There is not one single white person to offset, dilute, or Westernize this exceptionally harrowing and heartbreaking vision of life in the Congo. In other words, this is not Out of Africa, The Constant Gardener or Blood Diamond. War Witch is African Realism, and realism in the Congo includes traditional practices of African magic and ritual combined with guns, child soldiers, chaos and a landscape soaked with the blood of its violent history.
The only image of a white person who appears in the entire film is Jean-Claude Van Damme’s distorted and blurred face projected from a shitty VHS tape of Universal Soldier projected on a beat-up TV that is used for a theater to entertain (and indoctrinate) the army of children with guns. The children applaud with glee and raise their guns in celebration and victory as the credits of the movie role and they identify with the plight and victory of Van Damme’s vigilante rebel hero. Other elements of Western culture are strewn through the film like so much litter. The film begins with Komona’s face staring from behind a commercial banner which provides a makeshift wall for her shantytown house. The banner literally frames her face before the rebels arrive, kill off the adults in the village, and capture the children as soldiers. The film ends with Komona playing out her final struggle while wearing a t-shirt with the brand ABERCROMBIE emblazoned across its bloody and dirt smeared front. So while Komona’s story is grounded completely within its Congo setting, the imprint of Western culture certainly exists but not in any heroic sense by a long shot.
In fact, the rebel army that captures Komona and is led by a leader simply known as Great Tiger barters in the mineral coltan and exploits his child soldiers not just to fight against the government army but also to mine this mineral which is exported and sold to make cell phones. Nearly 80% of the world supply of coltan comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The children are taught to see the mineral as the source of magic power (particularly that of its rebel leader) when in reality it is just a natural resource being sold to the profit of few at the expense of many, including children. So ties to Western culture certainly exist in the film, but not in a very favorable light.
This brings me to the title of the film War Witch and Komona’s story. The film opens with a pan of the shantytown where Komona lives. Komona’s mother braids her hair as we hear Komona’s voice begin to narrate her tale in a voiceover that runs throughout the film. Komona tells her story to her unborn child, and she prays to God that she won’t hate the baby. The words she speaks are so brutal in contrast to the image of the innocent twelve year old child walking out into the sun, her hair spiked with the braids her mother just gave her. Komona bounces playfully on a wooden 
board, and the fragility of the board, the fact that it can crack at any moment, sets the tone for the world that is about to collapse around this twelve year old girl. Smoke from war rises beyond the grassy planes where Komona plays. Everything in this opening picture is a painful contradiction. Here we see a young girl carving childhood joy out of a precarious landscape of poverty and violence. She turns her head to a sound in the distance, and in a flash her world rips apart as she runs screaming for the people of her village to take cover. The rebel army arrives, slaughters the adults and captures the children to serve as its soldiers.
In a scene of unbearable pain and tension, the rebels place an AK47 in Komona’s hands and tell her to shoot her parents or the soldiers will violently butcher them with machetes. The parents implore Komona quietly to go ahead and shoot them. Komona pulls the trigger and rapid gunfire punctuates the tears that roll down her cheeks. Her braided hair is the last trace of her childhood as she walks out with the soldiers in a state of shock. At that moment, the twelve year old Komona is thrust abruptly into a violent adult world where all she can do is fight for her survival, a world where she learns “to turn the tears inside her eyes” so they can’t be seen and she won’t be beaten.
Enslaved by the rebel army, Komona covers her braids with a cloth band. In other words, the last trace of her childhood is covered with garments of war. She and the other child soldiers are given AK47s and told that the guns are their mother and their father now. Their ancestral traditions have been replaced by the violence of war. The children walk through the Congo landscape weighed down by ammunition and sacks of coltan.
This all sounds brutally harrowing, and it is. But what moves the film beyond a relentlessly hopeless, bleak and violent tale of one girl’s struggle is the way in which Nguyen blends traditional African Vodun (spiritual magic) practices with the hard reality of war and violence and the way the cinematography heightens this blend. From the onset of Komona’s capture by the rebels, magic, war and violence are all mixed up. The cinematography literally saturates the screen with color and light, propelling this tragic and violent tale into a kind of magical realm that has been usurped by the forces of civil war. Magic is as much a part of the reality of this film as the war that is being fought. One young soldier tosses a handful of rocks and reads their position to determine the troop’s next tactical maneuver as if he is reading tea leaves. When the new children recruits are given their AK47s, it is done with ritualistic song and dance combined with a celebratory shower of gunfire, a coming of age ritual performed with bullets instead of herbs.
In order to make life in the frontlines more bearable, the child soldiers drink hallucinatory “magic milk” that comes from tree sap. This alters their sense of reality, and turns violence into a dream instead of a nightmare. When Komona takes her first drink, she wanders through the jungle hallucinating. She stumbles onto a road and has a vision of two ghosts of the dead. They warn Komona to run because government forces are coming. Komona yells at her rebel group to flee, but it’s too late. Gun fire explodes from the jungle as if the landscape itself has been transformed into a weapon, and every single child from Komona’s village is shot dead except for her.
As the lone survivor, Komona is named “War Witch” by rebel leader Great Tiger. The rebels celebrate Komona’s magical contribution to their guerilla efforts by shooting off their guns into the night. The night sky explodes with orange fireworks from gunfire from automatic weapons. The troops celebrate their new “War Witch” in an apocalyptic vision of chaos and ritual. Komona, on the other hand, sits quietly shut off from the revelry, her face a portrait of inverted stone. Great Tiger may have named her a War Witch, but she is a reluctant witch. All she knows is death, brutality, pain and blood. She is named witch simply as a tool for Great Tiger to exert power over his enslaved troops and hold them in his spell, and Komona will be killed off as soon as she ceases to be valuable. Not a lot of magic in that formula. The close-up of Komona’s resigned face cuts to a brief scene in the middle of the celebration when Great Tiger guns down one of his rebels for stealing some of the coveted coltan.
Guns, as witnessed in this scene and many others in the film, are directly connected to ritual and magic. They have been integrated into the violent culture as much as Vodun magic itself. Children wear rifles as if the weapons are extensions of their bodies, prosthetic limbs. Their young bodies are laden with ammunition straps like the costumes of ancestral warrior rituals. The rifles are lifted and fired in celebration. They are used to slaughter the enemy as if they are divine weapons. The powder from bullets is used to light fires. Komona is given a “magic” AK47 with carved Vodun images on its grip – the Witch Gun. But there is no magic in these rifles, and Komona knows it, just like she is no War Witch. In Komona’s world, tradition has been replaced by ammunition. The kind of blood sacrifice witnessed in this film has nothing to do with offerings to the gods, but is senseless violence without reason or spiritual connection.
Komona hooks up with a fellow young soldier (one of her original captors) Magicien when she glimpses him performing magic in his sleeping quarters. Magicien, an albino soldier, shows her strings of stones and bones that represent his dead ancestors and a wing of a bird that represents freedom of the spirit. Komona looks on hopefully as if she can find a glimpse of something beyond the hell she is living. Magicien opens her palm and places a string tied around a cluster of rocks in Komona’s hand. He shakes violently with the magical energy of the talisman, infusing it with Vodun spirit, and he tells Komona to keep it in her pocket to protect her from war. Magicien himself wears a similar talisman around his neck to protect him. But in the end, the talismans are made of rocks, string, and other junk and only allow for momentary glimpses of possible protection, a small taste for magic in a world where AK47s and machetes trump magical powers. Magicien and others infuse Vodun rituals and talismans with faith because they need to hold onto something that is greater than the sum of their reality (death, blood, death, blood).
In a bloody shoot-out on a great rocky expanse, both Magicien and Komona let lose all their anger, rage and confusion as they fire violently at the encroaching enemy. Komona lifts her “magic rifle” and fires while screaming. Magicien fires endless rounds through a mounted machine gun. After the battle, a lone AK47 stands mounted as Komona watches the ghosts of the dead move silently over the rocks. The ghosts Komona sees are filmed beautifully and subtly almost like whispers as their white bodies and empty eyes roam the war-torn landscape. Their beauty fills the ghosts with both grace and tragedy.
After the shootout on the rocks, Magicien convinces Komona to flee the rebels. He proclaims his love for her and asks her to marry him. In a momentary glimpse of real magic and sincere beauty and tenderness and an attempt to reclaim the ancestry that was stolen from her, Komona proclaims that she will only marry Magicien if he gives her a white rooster which is the African tradition she learned from her father. Magicien takes his charge seriously and embarks on an often humorous and heartwarming hunt for a white rooster, providing a window of relief in a film that is suffocatingly brutal. Magicien eventually finds the white rooster in a community of albinos like himself, and he trades his magic for the bird. The albino community is filmed through an overexposed sun-soaked lens and shows happy families, children and adults smiling and living freely. There is not a gun in sight. It is a tiny window of possible utopia in the hell that is Magicien and Komona’s world.
With the white rooster strapped to the back of a motorcycle, Komona and Magicien are happily married and in love. They go to live with Magicien’s uncle “The Butcher” whose entire family was slaughtered in war. Komona and Magicien laugh and kiss in the fields with the grass blowing around them. But there is tremendous tension under the laughter and the smiles. The fragility of their connection blows through the landscape. The cinematography captures a landscape in a constant state of agitation. We know that the rustle of the grass could be the result of a playful breeze or could be a disruption from the feet of soldiers moving toward them. The landscape is filled with beauty and potential danger. There are secrets lurking in its recesses, and those secrets come bearing weapons. Danger rises violently and breaks the magic spell that briefly holds Magicien and Komona together. In a violent clash between love and pain, magic and reality, Magicien is butchered before Komona’s eyes, and she is taken as a sex slave to another rebel leader.
At this point, Komona goes into aggressive survival mode. She fights off her slave by combining magic with cold hard tactical strategy. She inserts a seed pod in her vagina, an act that could seem like a Vodun ritual, but which is actually a tactical maneuver to castrate the man who rapes her. She then wields a machete and brings him down with the force of a lion. The magic is gone for Komona, War Witch or not. The only magic she has is her own strength to survive, which proves to be a miraculous force.
Bleeding and pregnant with her rapist’s baby, Komona moves through her fourteenth year in a haze of extreme Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She thinks everyone and everything is a threat. Her internal state of self-imposed disassociation turns into a toxic cocktail of unspoken outrage. She eventually wanders off alone where she rows a canoe back to her homeland, pausing along the way and doubling over in labor pains. She delivers her baby on the shore entirely on her own, pushing it out of her body as if she is pushing every bad thing that she has witnessed in her young life, every horror she has committed under force and that has been committed against her.
With her baby in her arms, Komona returns to her home to bury the ghosts of her parents who have been haunting her since she was forced to kill them. Komona stands in the spot where she held the AK47 in her 12 year old arms and fired on her parents. She looks at the bullet holes and blood stains on the linen blowing in a dirty breeze, and it is utterly devastating, the only material left of her childhood home.
In the dirt on the ground she finds the broken remains of the comb her mother used to braid her hair during those last moments of Komona’s childhood. The comb had been stomped on, crushed, and shattered by rebel soldiers. She takes the comb’s broken body and a shirt and performs a burial in the sand. In this scene, she sings a song setting her spirit and her parents’ spirits free as she buries the ghosts of her parents, her lost childhood, and everything that was stolen from her. Finally the tears she hasn’t shed run quietly down her cheeks.
We see these tears as we always seen Komona, in absolute close-up. Her face fills the screen. The emotions locked inside her stone face are as volatile a force as the landscape she occupies. Every moment she is filmed, the strength she exerts to contain her emotions pushes out of the frame of the screen. Rachel Mwanza, the young actress who plays Komona, brings such enormous emotional presence to the character that it feels like we embody her as we are immersed in this violent world through a child’s experiences. Every scene carries a tremendous sense of immediacy and shock.
One of the reasons the film is so emotionally effective is because Nguyen uses non-actors. Rachel Mwanza was actually a child living on the streets when she was recruited for this role. Most of the actors can’t read. They were given only a page or two of script at a time and had no indication of what was going to happen next in the film’s story, so every act in the movie played out as if it would in real life – unpredictably. The actors responded with immediate emotion that was captured on film. This is not highly polished and rehearsed Hollywood filmmaking. This is largely unpracticed spontaneous human emotion, and it seeps through the film as densely as the beautifully rich cinematography.
By the end of the film, we have followed young Komona as she is forced to kill her own parents, pick up an AK47 to fight government soldiers, become enslaved by rebel leaders, go on a hunt for a magic white rooster, watch the ground literally drip with blood from those she is forced to kill and those who she watches get killed, and finally give birth to the child of her rapist. Certainly this could be the material of overwrought melodrama, but the film never once lapses into that exploitive Westernized territory. It stays true to its unique brand of harrowing cinematic magic grounded in the brutal realism of the Congo and the history of senseless violence and civil war that have soaked that land in blood. In War Witch magic and the real are combined to show a tale of survival on its own brutal terms. At the end of the film, when Komona falls asleep in the back of a truck, she has saved herself through her own perseverance and resourcefulness, not from some divine intervention, magic spell or Western aid. Her baby resting in the arms of a stranger, Komona lays her head on a sack, and she finally falls asleep. At age fourteen, she has her whole life ahead of her, or maybe she doesn’t . . .
Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic living in Tucson, Arizona. Her writing has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Souciant, La Furia Umana, and The Berkeley Poetry Review. She recently published her first book, Mapping the Inside Out, in conjunction with a solo gallery show by the same name. She can be reached at knicolini@gmail.com.
Reviewing Flight (2012) has compelled me to think back and acknowledge where some real self-destruction and cinematic genius had coalesced. Sid and Nancy is as good a place to start as any.
Based on the real life of Sid Vicious, the bass player of The Sex Pistols, we see how raw and unhinged addiction, the music industry and love can all be. Throw them together and it’s a ride you won’t soon forget (unlike Denzel’s public service announcement for AA).
Roger Ebert was a big booster for the film:
“[Sid] was handed great fame and a certain amount of power and money, and indirectly told that his success depended on staying fucked up. This is a big assignment for a kid who would otherwise be unemployable. Vicious did his best, fighting and vomiting and kicking his way through his brief days and long nights, until [Nancy] Spungen brought him a measure of relief.”
It’s a fascinating descent into complete shyte. These two, playing off of one another, expose the senselessness of their reckless ideology, its self-destructive mandate. On a spiraling death plummet, but not without an original stain on the pavement, Sid and Nancy live forever in infamy.
Trailer From Hell: Sid and Nancy
Other selections in the sub-genre include Johnny Depp’s Blow, a fantastic modern history of the drug trade and one of his most underrated films. The allure of prohibition is more than just substance addiction. Drugs have been a thorn in the side of society for so long, and their outlawing provides for a significant underground economy, including the predictable wars and mayhem associated with avoiding capture and prosecution, the creation of warlords and the casualties produced with increasing territory and profit margins. People get caught up over their heads in so many ways. Blow is also based on a true story, and Depp’s range is on display here. Speaking of Depp, what’s a more mind-bending drug fueled descent into madness than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas?
While Blow tackles cocaine, the larger problem today is arguably crystal-meth. Spun is a twisted indie take on that menace, and also underrated / unknown. Powerful performances, powerful situations, and the filmmaking is sharp as a shiny new hypodermic. Spun is an experience, a trip to take, much like Requiem For a Dream. There are just so many great drug addled explorations once that Pandora’s Box is pried open.
Yet another addiction drama with a twist is Rush, with Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Undercover narcotics officers get hooked on their own contraband. The lines between law and outlaw are blurry indeed. Denzel’s previous drug film Training Day also explored that territory.
Clicking on the Sid and Nancy imdb page instantly prompted me with Oliver Stone’s The Doors, which is another groundbreaking intense exploration of addiction and self-destruction – and pretty much true, and significant.
Others in this genre include Less Than Zero, with Robert Downey Jr. and Bright Lights, Big City with Michael J. Fox. I’ve given a nod to The Wackness with Ben Kingsley and even Charlie Bartlett (Downey again) had more complex characterization than Flight.
Perhaps the crème of them all is Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Mind bending exploration of addiction, prohibition and the images are presented like no other film you would have seen (except perhaps Waking Life).
If you watch all these films, you will instantly see why Flight comes up so banal and inconsequential by comparison. It’s relegated itself to the cheap, disposable dustbin of obviousness and even preachiness. Flight is far too simplistic and simple-minded to bother talking about any further.
The vampocalypse hits redneck America. Savage, though pretty dumb, the vampires are hunted down by a man with no name. At the opening, a teenage boy is recruited by the hunter, when this boy’s parents are chomped by a particularly aggressive vampire.
The boy comes of age in an environment of vigilante justice, desperation and the breakdown of society. The hunter has his own code, which he tries to impart to the boy. The complication is a huge cult, the Brotherhood, which runs large parts of the landscape. These religious nuts are potentially worse than the vampires.
This film has a definite right leaning, libertarian bias. The landscapes are devastated, abandoned, and Washington is to blame. The people are left to survive by themselves, which they do in an old west styled, circle the wagons mentality. The rugged individual is all that’s left, and any organization seems doomed to fail, a victim of herd mentality and crazy ideas or rose-colored idealism. It’s a depressing tale, but not a bad vampire flik. It has its own cult following around it, and that’s how I heard about it.
Most survival tales skew right with guns and self-reliance elevated to mythic proportions. This is true of zombie films and most horror genre pieces. See if you can read more into Stake Land than meets the eye.
The Argentine/French auteur has attempted to push the envelope in terms of camera movement and perhaps even in shock value. Enter the Void (2010) is a mind bending journey unlike other films in several regards.
Noé’s previous film Irreversible (2003) was similarly shocking and stylistically aggressive in the extreme. That tale is told backwards, as in Memento (2000). The backwards narrative, while confusing, is also naturally filled with mystery and urgency making it a tense thriller and hard to look away.
Some audience members walked out of Irreversible early in response to the extremely violent rape and the sadomasochism that transpires inside a gay nightclub. Noé also employed strobing flashes that can induce seizures and that assault the viewer’s eyes deliberately.
“My aim was to make you feel out of your minds,” said Noé in an interview concerning negative audience response to Irreversible.
By far the most striking element of Gaspar Noé’s style would be the floating, swooping, swooning camera that buzzes around on a crane for extended periods of screen time. Without regard to the framing of the actors, Noé’s camera flies melodically about the room, as in the opening shot of Irreversible, or throughout a city as in the bulk of the film Enter the Void.
This floating, flying camera seems to be Noé’s signature move, and a phenomenon he explored and pushed right past the breaking point in Enter the Void. Here the flying camera represents a spirit inside “the void,” searching lackadaisically for something as it travels from scene to scene slowly piecing information together in the otherworld.
Enter the Void opens with a stroboscopic psychedelic title sequence that attempts to induce the feeling of being under the influence of a hard drug, as the main character is also on. Tarantino called this title sequence, “Maybe best credit scene of the decade. One of the greatest in cinema history.”
As the film opens in a Japanese hotel room, we find that the entire world, every shot is the point of view of a young western man, who happens to be a local drug dealer there. This strict and formal forcing of the camera to show his first person experience takes some getting used to as everything unfolds in real time. The film continues this strict formalism even as the boy is shot to death in a bathroom stall by anti narcotics officers. His spirit then floats away from his body and into “the void” where it hovers just above the city for the remainder of the film, jumping from scene to scene as he attempts to belatedly understand his place in the universe.
The only time Noé breaks this POV rule is during a flashback sequence of the boy’s childhood, where an automobile accident killed he and his sister’s two parents.
Much of the film revolves around his surviving sister, who is a strip dancer in a sleazy local club. Actually, a bit too much of the film revolves around this relationship, as the POV is taken to new absurd heights in the skirting of the issue of incest. The camera/boy’s POV actually goes all the way on its journey to be reborn, apparently as his own nephew, and the obvious biological processes that would entail.
The reincarnation plot apparently derives from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is referenced at the beginning of the film. The plot then shows a literal version of a spirit that is ejected from one body and then finds a new opportunity to be reborn on earth.
This is a fitting usage of the flying / floating camera technique and a brilliant move by the director. But, the narrative comes to a crashing halt just after the boy is killed, near the beginning of the movie. At that point there is no obvious plot for viewers to latch onto or understand. He is simply dead and floating around — for what purpose? Because Noé doesn’t clue in the viewer as to what is eventually going to happen, a gaping disconnect renders the middle of the film rather meaningless and frankly boring. It appears as an extended series of floating camera sequences to no end. Only much later is the sister/reincarnation goal brought into the story. The effect is to overuse the flying camera in the service of trivial or side issues, and to avoid the main throughline of the story for far too much screen time.
Noé has been quite unsuccessful financially with his efforts. If BoxOfficeMojo is to be believed, both films performed poorly, and Enter the Void may have lost a huge amount of its budget. Noé may have assaulted his potential audience a little too brutally. That website omits DVD and other rental tallies, which are hard to locate. Perhaps Noé and his style will be vindicated by the “long tail” of on-demand streaming over the coming years.
His imdb page lists no upcoming new feature at present.
A great little indie movie about an old man and his robot. Frank Langella plays an alzheimers victim losing his memories and unable to cope on his own. Enter the robot, and then Frank starts getting his life and his thoughts back together. Only Frank’s thorughts revolve around being a cat burglar. Extremely funny moments, and the robot steals the show.
One look at the trailer for this freak show and I knew it was something I had to see. This was the other, other side of LA that usually doesn’t even end up in indie low budget films. These dregs seem to have one purpose, and that’s to make us feel better about our own lots in life.
Essentially, a mentally-ill epic loser, who can’t even seem to dress himself, winds up with a dead body, an institutionalized brother urging him to kill himself and assorted other problems, but he’s looking for happiness in the Swiss Alps.
Not for everyone.
This is outstanding real history that will never be taught in schools. Iran Contra Scandal investigated. The drug connection exposed. The lies demolished. The Iran Hostage fiasco: George HW Bush’s deal to keep the Iranian held US hostages imprisoned until Reagan was installed in power. The film names names and gets the sources. Crucial US history:
COVER UP: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair
Women are treated as inferior and incomprehensible by the medical establishment, the government, the laws. Into this warped society a new doctor enters, with modern ideas of germs and science. The world will never be the same.
This delightfully naughty period piece pits the modern world against the stuffy, ignorant aristocracy of old. Highly recommended.
