This Is Drivel

We’re Not Broke is a mess of a documentary. I can’t figure out which one of several stories the film’s makers are trying to tell: Multinational corporations don’t pay income taxes, or; multinational corporations are corrupting politics, or; grass-roots organizations are reigning in the corruption of government by multinational corporations.

I think that last one might have been what they were shooting for, the only trouble with that being, it didn’t happen. Occupy Wall Street hardly makes the news anymore as anything but a mob of homeless people, not that that isn’t important, but is it affecting the back-room machinations of multinational corporations? I have to doubt it, even after watching We’re Not Broke. And the flash-mob US Uncut remains largely unknown to mainstream America even while other flash mobs get a million YouTube hits for singing and dancing in food courts across the country. Make a documentary about why that might be and you’d have an interesting story.

We’re Not Broke had one or two good ideas, the best one starting from the idea in the title. Governments aren’t broke. They’re not businesses; they can’t go broke. They can spend more than they take in, and most of the time they do – I’d love to see a documentary that dissects how they get away with that.

Or, I’d love to watch a documentary spotlighting the political drama queens who planted, nurtured and brought to fruition the whole “We’re broke” meme of right-wing government, with special emphasis on where that meme came from and how it was supported by the mainstream media. We’re Not Broke started off going in that direction, but very soon devolved into a series of talking heads bantering about how dangerous these developments are.

Then it forked off in several different directions, illustrating corporate greed with dancing dollar signs and political corruption with a bass-heavy soundtrack. It was an emotional appeal, where I was hoping to find a well thought-out explanation supported by extensive research. If I wanted to watch an emotional appeal, I could turn on Fox News or MSNBC and get it any time, any day. That’s why I don’t watch television news, and that’s why I wouldn’t recommend a documentary like We’re Not Broke.

The discussion at the office one day was what kind of action movies we liked. “I like blowing-shit-up movies,” one guy said. “I could watch shit getting blown up all day.” One gal liked action movies with lots of sex in them. One guy liked action stars that beat the crap out of everyone and everything. I like action movies with lots of plot twists in them.

Sleepless Night is a movie that braids together just about every kind of action movie you can think of. There’s not so much blowing-shit-up, and practically no sex at all, but just about everybody in the movie shoots somebody else, gets shot, beats the crap out of somebody, gets the crap beaten out of him (or her – there’s one her, and she’s a tough little thing), and there are so many plot twists that by the end of the movie the story turned into a big, lumpy, doubled-over knot.

But ZOMG, what a story! I’ve never seen so many double-crosses crammed into an hour and a half of film time, or seen the bad guy get his comeuppance in such a subtle way. Subtlety is not what I expect in an action movie, but there was a surprising amount of it here in the way the various lines of the plot were spun out, then tied up. A fast, fun, engaging and enjoyable action movie, just when I thought the genre was all but played out.

Also, the leading man’s name is a stand-up comic named Tomer Sisley. How cool is that?

It looks as though we’re doomed to see at least one really boring movie each day of the film festival this year, and yesterday it was The Day He Arrives. It wasn’t as bad as Keyhole, thank goodness – that’s a bar set so low that it’s going to take a limbo master of a movie director to get under it.

Sungjoon, the central character in The Day He Arrives, is an out-of-work movie director, wandering like a hobo through the streets of Seoul in an anorak while chain-smoking from a bottomless pack of cigarettes. “I guess I’ll just wander around for a while,” he says in a voice-over, “doo-dee-doo-doo-doo. Oh, hey, I think I’ll get something to eat. Doo-dee-doo-doo-doo.” He meets three film students in a bar, they all get drunk, he gets really drunk and yells at them and runs away. He ends up at his old girlfriend’s apartment. She’s really mad at him because he barged in drunk. He cries in her lap. They fuck. “You’re such a beautiful person,” he tells her. “I love you. I want you to be happy. Here’s some cigarettes.” He leaves. She sends text messages to his phone. He never answers.

“I guess I’ll just wander around for a while,” he says in a voice-over, “doo-dee-doo-doo-doo. Oh, hey, I think I’ll call my friend.” His friend takes him to a bar. “Hey, the bartender looks like my old girlfriend!” He woos the bartender. In whatever universe this is, wooing her means abruptly kissing her in the street, apropos of nothing. Just as abruptly and for absolutely no fathomable reason, she falls in love with him. They fuck. “You’re such a beautiful person,” he tells her. “I love you. I want you to be happy.” He doesn’t give her any cigarettes, the chintzy bastard.

What I took away from the film was that emo film directors smoke a lot, can mooch all the liquor they can get down their necks off their best friends, and are inexplicably adept at taking sexual advantage of lonely women. Also, film critics love movies about them, especially when the movies are shot in black-and-white.