AN EXCLUSIVE CITYARTS CRITICS DISCUSSION OF WALTER HILL’S COMEBACK

Bullet to the Head is an event. It is director Walter Hill’s first theatrical film since 2002’s Undisputed and the most meaningful Sylvester Stallone acting vehicle since Rocky. On this occasion, I discuss the significance of Bullet to the Head with CityArts film critic Gregory Solman, author of the definitive essay on Hill’s oeuvre, as a good movie, an essay on masculinity and an advance in contemporary cinema aesthetics.

AW: Stallone’s performance as career hitman Jimmy Bobo reminded me of Charles Bronson’s streetfighter in Hill’s directorial debut Hard Times. The same grizzled features, the same masculine ethos. The plot of Bobo teaming up with policeman Taylor Kwan (Sung Kang) recalled Hill’s buddy movie 48 Hrs. Hill and Stallone’s cinema histories are combined, and the action genre is updated.

GS: It’s the ideal comparison, I agree, because Hill makes the essential emotional connections to character lesser directors ignore—directors, I might add, who are all worse at directing action than Hill, yet are no better than him with actors. I like reminding people that when Bronson’s performance stunned everyone in Hard Times, it was Bronson’s 60th movie—and Hill’s first. I won’t forget Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing, either. Stallone’s saturnine mood and weathered face are alone more interesting than his revivals of Rocky and Rambo combined, because Hill understands the power of genre and, more than anyone else in contemporary filmmaking, takes to heart F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crystalline bromide: “Action is character.” Have new filmmakers learned from Hill in Exile, or from Neveldine/Taylor, for that matter?

AW: Hill in Exile is an interesting way to describe the past decade of inept action movies. From David Fincher to Steve Soderbergh and the Bourne movies, most filmmakers don’t know how to film action with meaning or action heroes with ethics. Hill has been sorely missed. Remember the pop culture fun of Streets of Fire, which updated pop nostalgia and genre refinement?

GS: It was cinematic celebration from start to finish, and gets at Hill’s great advance in comic-book form. The sledgehammer fight anticipates the fire-axe battle between Bobo and mercenary Keegan (Jason Momoa), but beneath that lies the inevitability of one-on-one confrontation between, in this story, the two breeds of ex-military mercenary: Bobo and Keegan, who has an embittered idealism defined by codes of manhood.

AW: This movie has the best dialogue in years. Hill knows how make a few words matter. He evokes personal ethics and sums up genre ethics.

GS: He brought back his signature single-exchange scenes, too, which I love. I’m not a fan of Bobo’s final, or rather, penultimate riposte [“That’ll be the day”], though I like the recapitulation of Jack Cates, the cop in 48 Hrs., in Kwon’s challenge, and imagine Bobo to be a fan of John Wayne in general, Ethan Edwards in particular. To be clear, it’s not the line itself, or the association, but it strikes me as an over-articulation.

AW: I disagree. The Searchers is a famous cinema touchstone. I love that Hill rescued Wayne’s line from a pedestal.

The Walter Hill dialogue continues at www.CityArts.info

By Gregory Solman

In Fracknation, Irish investigative journalist Phelim McAleer finds a combustible metaphor for the contrived controversy of hydraulic fracturing in the footage of the Sautner family hustlers of Pennsylvania.

McAleer couldn’t politely interview the couple without Craig threatening a lawsuit (apparently emboldened by the radical National Resources Defense Council), and Julie threatening to pull a pistol on McAleer on a public road, where she voluntarily stopped to shout at him. (It’s rich to watch her sheepishly press a gun permit against the inside of her car window, demonstrating the Defense Technique When Not Being in the Least Threatened.) So McAleer pulls a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a taping of the Sautners, apoplectic upon hearing the Environmental Protection Agency—such a right-wing frat under Lisa Jackson—confirm the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s finding that their water tests safe and clean.

McAleer notes the irony that not having contaminated water would be considered good news to all but those looking for an Erin Brockovich ending to their woes, real or imagined, or in ideological lockstep with what is now a full-fledged anti-fracking movement, replete with its own agitprop such as Josh Fox’s polemic GasLand and Gus Van Sant’s desperately “relevant” fiction, Promised Land. For the greenshirts, only bad news is good news: Recall that the same eco-special interests were all for using natural gas when it was an empty-handed gesture, when they thought we were almost out. (Their next suggestion: Francium power—but only if actually bottled in France, in IWW-run shops.)

In Fracknation, McAleer is mostly after the would-be Michael Moore, Fox, in whose disputatious documentary the Sautners display their dubiously adulterated water and others light their taps—and a large part of the impressionable public—on fire. But that’s a well-known, ancient phenomenon having nothing to do with fracking, and everything to do with methane naturally seeping wherever it can, as surely a few of Fox’s newfound celebrity friends must know from living near the La Brea Tar Pits, where the streets spontaneously combust from time to time. (Clearly, if the greenshirt “gascists” could redevelop Los Angeles, there’d be nothing within miles of mid-Wilshire—well, except maybe environmentally sensitive Ed Begley-esque manses—an area that would be turned into a no-man’s-land preserve to hasten the return of the kangaroo rat.)

When McAleer catches up to Fox—he, too, in the Moore mode—and accuses him of recklessly associating fire-water with fracking (which has never once been proven to have contaminated groundwater, occurring thousands of feet beneath the water table), Fox says, “Yes, but it’s not relevant.” And from his perspective—which smacks of Hillary Clinton’s on Benghazi—it isn’t. Despite Fox’s pose as a friendly naïve explorer in GasLand, reinforced by a lazy narrative drawl suggesting Bill Murray’s muttering groundskeeper in Caddyshack, his project aims to stop shale gas production, by any means necessary.

The moratorium on leasing that GasLand inspired animates McAleer to work the other side of the documentary-cliché fence, matching Fox’s often sincere-sounding fracking alarmists with a Depression-era revival of plaintive, tearful farmers fearful of losing their land because their gas leases have been shut off amid already hard times. Besides them, McAleer finds plenty of residents in Dimock, Pa., who don’t appreciate GasLand’s suggestion that their homesteads are toxic wastelands, inhabited by greedy despoilers and easy marks for Matt Damon.

McAleer systematically eviscerates GasLand’s false implications and sloppy inferences (finally, not even distinguishing between oil and gas production, and instantly trotting out a Halliburton/Cheney conspiracy, the not-so-secret handshake of Club 9/11 Truth). McAleer interviews specialists who assure us that the mathematical detection of seismic activity does not constitute an earthquake (and that the greenshirts’ beloved geothermal energy is worse). He unveils collusion between biased government officials, liberal media, non-governmental organizations and their Hollywood waterboys. He embarrasses Fox, a Columbia University grad, for his woeful ignorance of physics, engineering and chemistry.

Fracknation then travels to Europe to suggest that new-school communism under Vlad Putin has a hidden hand behind the anti-fracking agenda, so that Russia can continue to use a gas monopoly in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe as a political cudgel, turning it on or off as it pleases, and charging little old ladies in Poland half their pensions for gas and electricity, bringing to mind Dr. Zhivago’s arrests for foraging firewood. (He might have contrasted their plight with the thousands of Californians driving natural-gas Honda Civics—the cleanest cars on the planet, including electrics—for an unsubsidized $1.36 a gallon, thanks to fracking, what reasonable people call a win-win.)
Fracknation’s timing is good, though it’s unlikely to crack already ossified myths or affect fracking’s prospects, when even the use of that vulgar-sounding nickname is as devious as cubic zirconia ads referring to the genuine article as “mined diamonds.” Fracking friends and foes—and the movies they love—have formed skirmish lines almost identical to those of the climate-change controversy.

So we’re going nowhere from here. But it’s heartening to see someone take on a few of the anecdotal, unscientific and politically motivated accusations against the practice, before they, too, become immune to counter evidence.

The frack list (neuropathy, fish kills, cancer, dead bunny rabbits, migraines, animal hair loss, neighborhoods erupting in flames) is already reminiscent of the hysterical global-warming compilations which currently run from “acne” to “yellow fever”—until “aardvark population decline” and “yam rust” are added by someone, anyone, somewhere. The same camps have enlisted the same recruits, including anti-capitalists out to control the economy by fiat, communist style; enrich themselves, like Qatar’s over-compensated useful idiot, Al Gore; or just feel morally superior to others and, in the sweetly juvenile manner of the Mars Attacks! teen hero, suggest, to a mariachi version of the national anthem, that “maybe, instead of houses, we could live in tepees, ’cause it’s better, in a lot of ways.”

By Gregory Solman

Despite the persevering earnestness of filmmaker Emilio Estevez, The Way wanders off a well-trodden path down too many dead ends to find the epiphany it seeks.

Dispirited and dour company among the golf buddies of his southern California suburbia, ophthalmologist Tom (Martin Sheen) undertakes a somber journey to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, to collect the body of his son Daniel (Estevez).

An all-but-doctoral-thesis anthropologist, Daniel’s novice fieldwork ended in his unseen accidental death at the start of the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage through the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where tradition places the tomb of St. James. When Tom arrives, remembering the time his son lectured him on the virtues of living in the moment rather than deliberating over choices—a philosophy impractical for medical practices that can support such caprices of children—he decides to pick up Daniel’s backpack and complete the nearly 500-mile journey his son could not, seeing the world through his eyes.

Along the way, Tom collects fellow travelers Joost (Yorick van Wageningen), a jovial Dutch hash smoker who claims to be dieting to save his failing marriage, seeing the way as a fitness trail strewn with gourmet temptations; Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), an acerbic, abused Canadian divorcée, trekking under the guise of curing her chain-smoking vice but hiding a malady of the heart; and Jack (James Nesbitt), an Irish writer suffering from writer’s block, an exasperating excess of blarney and the isolation that follows. As a group, they puncture American parochial notions of Western worldliness while still providing a welcome turn from Hollywood’s romantic fixation with an uncommitted Eastern mysticism that derides Christian experience as ignorant and ultramontane.

With a light hand, writer/director Estevez tweaks the artificiality of contemporary pilgrimages without giving in to cynicism. In one of the liveliest scenes, Tom’s companions critique false suffering and pretend poverty while hiking along a comfortably touristy trail laden with modern gadgets and credit card conveniences and retreating to luxury hotels for those for whom even a hostel means roughing it. Still, Estevez can’t—or at least won’t—penetrate any of his characters’ mysteries. Their revelations lack the profundity of reflection and their actions lack meaningful distinction.

In the case of Tom, at least, this is unpardonable. Introducing him warmly interacting with an elderly patient who wants to cheat on her eye exam by memorizing the charts, Estevez sets up a metaphor that conflicts Tom’s seeing in time against lugging the baggage of his past, presumably the memories of his recently passed wife. This dovetails with Daniel’s impertinent advice to Tom (“You don’t choose a life, Dad, you live one”) but ignores the dichotomy between ophthalmology (the practical healer who helps men see) and anthropology (the idealistic academic who dispassionately studies man). And as father-and-son fevers run, their case is mild; Daniel delivers his juvenile bromide as his father calmly drives him to the airport, and Tom complains to a colleague that gadabout Daniel checks in too rarely—hardly evidence of irreparable estrangement.

That’s crucial, because Estevez’s story implies that the lapsed Catholic Tom’s pilgrimage should be penitential. Though he shuns company and seeks silence to meditate, he rejects (but later mouths) prayer; though the self-described “Easter and Christmas” Catholic at least goes through the motions of ancient ritual practice, he adds his own skeptical twists, including the New Age sacrilege of spreading his son’s ashes along the way—a practice his church nearly exclusively forbids. That motif at least leads to an appealing excursion when a boy steals Daniel’s remains along with Tom’s backpack and the group gives chase. In the angelic-sprite storytelling tradition, they find themselves drawn into the old world of the gypsies, rediscovering a tradition of father/son honor.

Though Estevez filmed the story in a place with supposedly inspiring vistas, his vision of the Camino de Santiago remains surprisingly uninspiring, the cinematography of Juanmi Azpiroz compositionally dull. This is particularly disappointing because the Camino was last prominently visited for cinema when Luis Buñuel littered the trail with sophomoric anti-Catholic garbage in The Milky Way (1969); Estevez here shows a contrasting humanism and tolerance of his characters’ peculiarities and beliefs but doesn’t deliver visual elan.

One would expect any filmmaker in this place to balance contemplative meaning with the magisterial landscape and Romanesque architecture of millennium-old churches functioning as spiritual allegories; recall Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky or Powell’s A Canterbury Tale; Hudson River School painters like Albert Bierstadt showing the luminous hand of God among the Sierra Nevada; or even Kerouac’s Dharma Bums appreciating “the work of the quiet mountains, the torrent of purity at my feet” and “wishing there were a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.”

Estevez suitably defers to his pilgrims—even showing Joost finally blessed with humility on his knees before the statue of St. James and depicting the ghost of Daniel among the friars swinging the oversized thurible in the church at the trail’s end—but can’t make out their modern spiritual malaise through the incense haze. More’s the pity, because few filmmakers today have the passion to try.

Martin Sheen in The Way, directed by Emilio Estevez.