By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Pride, Unprejudiced: THE WAILING; SWISS ARMY MAN

Posted Tuesday, October 4th, 2016 - Comments Off on Pride, Unprejudiced: THE WAILING; SWISS ARMY MAN
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Swiss Army Man

Near an empty beach, castaway Hank (Paul Dano) is preparing a noose to hang himself when a magical corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washes up. Sundance-awarded for best direction, the necrophile picaresque Swiss Army Man (A24 blu, $19), the studiously whimsical debut of writer-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, could be called by many other names, not limited to “Harry Pooter” and “Swept Away By An Unusual Destiny On The Blue Seas Of July.” Imagine Cast Away, if it co-starred a multi-purpose corpse instead of a volleyball, and was co-directed by students of Zach Braff and Michel Gondry, and was as impressed as any small child is with farts and poop. (A provisional version of the book “Everyone Poops” is illustrated with shit onto the pages of a bible.) Multiple references to Jurassic Park, E. T. and Superman didn’t elevate the conceit of life after death after death to resonant cultural myth for me, but the film’s final line, spoken by a secondary character, is rich: “What the fuck.” I’m sorry I missed the buzz rising as the credits rolled at its Sundance premiere inside the 1,250-seat Eccles auditorium.

The Wailing

South Korean directors have met mixed success with recent English-language efforts, from Bong Joon-ho’s global win, Snowpiercer, to Park Chan-wook’s producer-shredded failure Stoker. But even with economic hiccups in the local industry, there’s still room for younger filmmakers to grow and learn, and in the case of writer-director Hong-jin Na, break out with a genre mash-up of occult terror and the police procedural that’s idiosyncratic, culturally specific, and simply, smashingly good, approaching greatness with sprawling, but simmering ambition. The high Gothic invention of the masterful The Wailing (Goksung) (Well Go Blu, $30) bristles in ways that Na’s lightly perverse, action-rich, blood-infused, genre-diddling crime thrillers, The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010) barely anticipated.

What makes Na’s headlong mass of movie madness, one of the few films featuring demonic possession to ratchet upward from The Exorcist? He begins with rain-slashed, subtropical distemper of mood in a rural village settled into a mountain range, and persists with a magnificent maelstrom of paranoia, featuring scenes of viscid, visceral aftermath like “Hannibal”’s bloodiest scenes squared, tosses in neighborly distrust, profane banter and insults, dark omens, bedeviled dreams, overt Biblical portent and doomed police investigation. Working from the point-of-view of multiple characters, all equally confounded, adds bursts of inspired, bleak comedy, a wretched hermit known as “The Jap,” poison mushrooms, and takes his time across a two-and-a-half hour running time to allow us to settle into the nightmarish landscape before, well, kinda-sorta, the zombie Day of Reckoning is upon us. And what a lovely apocalypse it is, with its succession of gallery-worthy photographic finery.

Na told the English-language Yonhap News that he took twenty months to write the carefully calibrated screenplay, including seven months alone to tune the climactic half hour, then a year of postproduction, and the detail of this vivid, whipsaw rollercoaster ride validates the intense effort of the writer-director and his actors and his special effects crew at every turn. The Wailing is splendidly controlled but also enthrallingly bonkers: many movies and myths might clang in your mind as you watch, but there’s hardly a moment you’d dwell on those thoughts, because Na is prompting other questions: the nature of evil, can it be known, is it knowable? Why would you want to approach its nature? The Wailing is a chilling investigation in more than one sense.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon