'The Numbers Station'

Grosse Pointe Blunt

It was late on a Sunday night, and it was either this film or the Tom Cruise movie 'Oblivion' on offer. 'Oblivion' is over 2 hours long, while 'The Numbers Station' is a mere 1 hour 29minutes. That sealed the deal.  Afterwards I was able to watch episode 3 of 'Vikings' on SBS catchup TV.

It's a film that came and went with nary a bit of promotion in Australia. It's hard to be heard in the din and clamour for more and more comic book superhero movies, but sometimes a film is simply too small to get any purchase on the zeitgeist. It's a bit of a shame because it means that the thoughtful little films that made cinema truly wonderful are more likely to be missed, and then become infrequent.

This film isn't one of those deep and meaningful little films, it just seems to be a little pot-boiler made by indies.

What's Good About It

It's a tense little thriller, mostly set in one location. So it must have been relatively low budget. Considering the relatively low budget, it was a credible little action thriller. A bit of shooting, a bit of fighting, a bit of tense stand offs, and all the other trappings. It has one good trick in it.

What's Bad About It

The political landscape that affords the story is left deliberately blank in this film. This helps to make the conflict rather abstract, but at the same time robs us of the ability to empathise with the cause. Without a cause there's no rationalising away the feeling of "why are they doing all this any way?" It's the dead opposite of 'A Few Good Men' where Jack Nicholson gets up and tells the court why he's such a brutal bastard. This movie progresses on the assumption the cause doesn't matter but having watched it, I sort of disagree.

Maybe part of the problem of the creeping fascism engulfing the West is that it really does not allow itself to be opened up for inspection and dissection. It's a lurch to the  brutish side of life without nary an explanation. Plenty of films touch upon this as a problem but this film sort of blithely slips by, thus making it a more or less empty exercise.

What's Interesting About It

There's a bit in it where John Cusack's character Emerson describes his psychological profile. It's surprisingly similar to Martin Q. Blank's profile, as told by Martin Q. Blank in 'Grosse Pointe Blank'. I was thinking that maybe this film was the sequel to 'Grosse Pointe Blank'. It might have been, had it had a modicum of humour. Instead it's decidedly bleak and largely mannered - The affectations of the genre are a bit on the nose instead being turned on its head.

An Odd Look

It's not every day you come across a film that has a truly odd look,but this film has it. It is strangely grainy and under exposed in parts and yet some of the colours like yellows and greens seem to be saturated. So much so that it's hard to believe it was shot on 35mm. If somebody said it was a RED camera or some kind of digital format like the one used on 'Drive', I'd believe it.

Movie Doubles - 'The Factory' & 'The Raven'

O Look, A John Cusack Movie Double

Yes, it is that, but it's worse than that: it's a "John Cusack in two crappy psycho serial killer movie" sort of Movie Double. What's the attraction here? I dunno, but I watched these movies back to back, pretty much by luck of the draw on Fetch TV. I'd seen everything else interesting except these two, so I thought, "I know what I'll do, I'll watch them together and do a movie double".

So here we are. What have we got? We've got Mr. Gen X on the trail of a serial killer in both movies. And he's trying not to redo Ed Dakota, but I'm not sure he gets that far.

The Serial Killer As Classic Monster


The Serial Killer genre continues to get many entries. This probably dates back to 'Psycho' by Hitchcock, although there is an argument to be made that the serial killer genre is a kind of monster movie sub-genre. Horror films are built on the joy of repeating the thrill and in many ways this is exactly the means by which films provide their entertainment value.

Like the shark in 'Jaws' and the vampires in any number of vampire movies, the intermittent manifestation of a grave physical threat has a great tradition in narratives. The mechanism of the serial killer thus fits the type. And just as the overwhelming over-expression of the vampire movie has brought us self-conscious parody like 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'  or inversions like 'Twilight', the Serial Killer movie has moved from the classic Psycho' model to prosaic discursiveness like 'Dexter' and in the instance of these two films, vivid explications of serial killing as a gesture.

All of this leads one to suspect that our civilisation has hit a very decadent phase where we make solid entertainment out of inherently sociopathic topics. After all, positioning the narrative to explore the nature of serial killing as anything other than pathology is in some ways a brutal kind of decadence.

Serial Killers Are A Writers' Dream

One thing to understand about serial killers is that unlike spree killers, they have a way of killing intermittently. This helps writers pace the story greatly because if you can pace it so that the killer strikes every ten pages, you can pretty much lay out your script along those signposts. This is true of 'Silence of the Lambs' as it is true of 'Zodiac' or any number of serial killer movies.

Writers do work to a rhythm, and it helps to have what Syd Field referred to as a 'whammo' every ten pages or so. Most well-executed Hollywood fare offers a whammo every ten minutes or so to keep the audience locked in, with each one raising the level of tension. A good movie can add a layer of profundity on to each 'whammo' until the climax-'whammo' really hits home hard.

Serial Killers are great because the 'whammos' are invariably corpses and what could wind up the tension more than a gloating message from the serial killer? Still, it's amazing that John Cusack went and did two of these back to back, having already had 'Identity' in his resume.

So...here's the spoiler alert before I go any further.

What's The New Mary Jane?

'The Factory' has one twist that makes it at once unlikely as well as unlike most serial killer movies. The missing girls are not necessarily killed. They're impregnated by the serial killer specifically to harvest babies in an underground dungeon. That's the twist. I don't know if you find this compelling. I didn't exactly find it compelling, but I did find it weird. It's a little like Babylon A.D. where at the heart of all the evil is this sacred child, and just like that, at the heart of this rather grim tale about missing-girls-presumed-dead, is a sordid desire to procreate.Freudians rejoice!

The big twist in 'The Raven' is that it is a crazed fan doing the killing, but in a deeper sense it is Edgar Allan Poe's own imagination that is doing the killing, by providing the scenarios in his fiction, which are then put into practice. It's more compelling when you're watching it but when you finish, you wonder if that is all that great a twist. The one thing to take away from it is that there is a gulf between the world of fiction and reality and those who claim that violent video games cause spree killers like John Holmes and Adam Lanza are clutching at straws. It's not the video games, it's the Assault Rifles readily accessible in their communities. If anything, 'The Raven' draws a firm line between psychopaths and their weapons. The ideas only give them an imagination they wouldn't otherwise have by themselves. The 'how' is probably not as important as the 'what' and the 'why'.

Other than that, both films are doing their best to put something new into the very tired format of the serial killer movie, but it's hard to say if either one quite gets there. In the absence of the radically new addition, it comes down to an issue of style unlike, say 'Zodiac' which maps out comprehensively the unknown territory surrounding the mystery of the Zodiac killer; these films simply go through the formula, putting up cultural signposts along the way.

Which One Looks Better?

Without a doubt 'The Raven' comes in ahead of 'The Factory' for looks. Unfortunately it's not as creepy as it should be. 'The Factory' actually scores higher on the creepiness scale. The villain(s) in 'The Factory' are a lot more unhinged than in 'The Raven', even though the latter inflicts us with Gothic gore, there's something too stately about it to feel creepy. We're too decadent for that now.

Oh, and for the record, it's incredibly hard buying John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe. It's a terrible bit of star-casting, but it's probably how it got its money. The end titles look great, but it's too little, too late by then.

Life, Death Rebirth

The even more warped vision of 'The Factory' is how it couches the serial killing as function of a desire to bring children into the world. The title alludes to the serial kidnapping victims being turned into baby factories. In that sense, the status of the serial killer is a lot more ambiguous than some of the other serial killers we have seen on screen. The more accurate way to couch it is perhaps that the killings are byproducts of serial kidnappings; but this distinction seems largely academic seeing that the kidnapped women do end up dead.

The religiosity of the villain is also distracting in as much as it doesn't really offer up any kind of motivation and merely tells of a sick human being misguidedly thinking they are in the right.

Dying Is Easy

I think it's Sylvester Stallone's adage that dying is easy comedy is hard. There's something to be said for that insight that dying a glorious death in the cause of good on screen will always win some punters. Making them laugh is probably a lot harder. In both films John Cusack dies. With 'The Raven', it's inevitable because the film kicks off saying it's the last 10 days of his life so if you have any rudimentary understanding of the English language you're told he's going to die and the rest of it is about the 'How'.

It's a little more surprising in 'The Factory' but he dies towards the end of that one as well. It comes as something of a surprise as the twist happens, but it also reduces his character to the cliche sheriff who goes blindly into the cabin where the psycho-killer awaits. While it wouldn't have been a better film if he got the villains and survived, there's something quite disappointing about the whole dying on screen business in this film. It could be because his turn as Ed Dakota in 'Identity' was so good. This film is nowhere near as good as that film.

Age Gets Us All

The last time a John Cusack made money might have been 'Hot Tub Time Machine'. Since then it's been 'Shanghai', 'The Factory' and 'The Raven', and 2 out of three of those have gone straight to DVD while the last one is getting pasted on Rotten Tomatoes.

About 5 years ago, a writer who works on the fringes of the Hollywood machine declared that the days of John Cusack being able to hold down a lead were over. I thought it seemed a bit premature, but he hasn't done any favours for himself with 'War Inc.', '2012' and these gaggle of flops. Maybe the writer was right. In any case Branch Rickey said that it's better to sell early than late. I'm seeing the wisdom in that call.

It's hard to believe he had a stretch where he was doing really interesting films like 'Being John Malkovich', 'High Fidelity' 'Max' and 'Identity'. The recent output is not looking good there.

'Shanghai'

Let's Re-Live The Nightmare

Shanghai on the eve of World War II has been done in quite a number of films. It's the big setting in 'Empire of the Sun'; the opening sequence in 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'; as well as a more serious and sombre 'Shanghai Triad'. As between-the-wars romanticism goes, there's something very dark and depressing about the whole setup. Gong Li has of course been in both films. Unlike Paris or Berlin between the wars, Shanghai between the wars was decidedly the product of European colonialism, and so the Chinese people get to play parts where they are the oppressed. One imagines it must be a masochistic joy because most instances show how evil the Japanese are in their concession.

I'm not disputing they weren't - It just seems odd that they don't want to talk about what else happened in the other concessions, and why there were concessions. In any case, I might be the worst person to be watching this film.

What's Good About It

Chow Yun-Fat's long past it, but he's in it; and I'm a fan. John Cusack looks really past it in this film but he's in it. Ken Watanabe's in it and he's always interesting. Gong Li is long past it too, but she's in it. The cinematography is moody and noir.The production design is quite good.

Ken Watanabe plays a guy called Captain Tanaka. Pay that.

What's Bad About It

Nothing that happens in the film is of any real consequence. About halfway into the film, you think John Cusack's character is potentially uncovering the planned attack on Pearl Harbour, but he's not. He's tracking down the opium addicted wife of a Japanese officer. It's a pretty pissy little pay off for all the elaborate running around of all that shooting, punching, and stabbing.

The film is a bit of a chore to sit through for such small stakes. It doesn't offer enough fun to be a movie-movie and it doesn't offer enough to chew upon for it to be an interesting film.

The action is boring, the special effects are dodgy, the dialogue is a bit arch, the characters are a little dull, and all too much like stock characters bumbling around. Nothing fresh, nothing new, nothing interesting.

Plus I'm sick of seeing idiotic Japanese soliders. The soldiers weren't the dumb ones. It was the staff officers attached to line officers who were the particularly dumb ones.

What's Interesting About It

How can they make such a bad movie out of all these good ingredients going in?

Grist For The Mill(s)

Kerry Packer's Call Girl

It's old news that there are allegations that Heather Mills was a call-girl. The new bit is that Kerry Pack may have been one of her clients, as well as Adnan Kashoggi.

A new documentary outs Kerry Packer as a "sugar daddy" of Heather Mills when the ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney was working as a high-class call girl, according to London's Daily Mail.

Denise Hewitt, who says she worked as a £10,000 escort with Ms Mills in the Eighties, makes the claims in a program to be aired on the UK's Channel 4.

Ms Hewitt, 44, is quoted as saying: "We went into high-class prostitution behind closed doors and nobody knew about it...[billionaire arms dealer Adnan] Kashoggi, Kerry Packer and one of the Royal princes of Saudi, they were the big fish and there were a couple of others that were classed as Heather's sugar daddies.

"We used to get a lot of jewellery as gifts - rings, watches, Bulgari bracelets, cars. The world was our oyster. We enjoyed it.

"No one knew what we did and we didn't expect it to come out. I don't look on it as sleazy."

Hooray for the freedom of press. This woman does attract a lot of vitriol. Down in the page concerning her public image on Wikipedia is this paragraph:

Criticism of the press coverage
The extent and nature of the British press coverage of Mills has been criticised. Publicist Mark Borkowski writes in the Independent on Sunday that, "Not since the cult of Myra Hindley have we encountered so much vitriol aimed at one woman."[55]. Feminist writer Natasha Walter has compared the coverage to that of Britney Spears.[56]while Kira Cochrane, writing in The Guardian, has said that "every misogynist epithet available" has been used against Mills. "She has somehow become the vessel through which it is acceptable for both pundits and the public to express their very worst feelings about women."[56]

It may be true, I don't know. When I quickly think about it, she strikes me as the archetypal 'Second Wife'. She seems to bask in the light of publicity yet we're not entirely sure how she came to prominence in the first place but for her looks. She's earned some kind of credibility through losing a leg and still insisting on her largely appearance-driven celebrity-hood, which is odd. Then she marries a Beatle for money, and insists on a huge settlement in the divorce - a demand the judge laughed out of court; then her ex-lover comes forwards with sordid stories of electric dildo collections. What's not to dislike?

What I find interesting is how of all these famous people with whom she brushed shoulders, none of them have really defended her except Sir Paul during their marriage. Which got me to ponder this question: Is a night with Heather Mills at the peak of her beauty worth AUD$25,000? For $25,000, you could perhaps do a lot more different things than shag Heather Mills in her 2-legged-phase of her *career*. It is distinctly possible that people simply do not like somebody who so blatantly can put a price on themselves - which is essentially what prostitutes do - which makes them uncomfortable in accepting her.

Never Meet Your Heroes

Over the years I've liked John Cusack. I admire his work greatly. He's got a charming presence on the screen which is hard to dislike, and he has a way of saying things in a way that we would all like to say them with much charm as we would take a tilt at hypocrisy or social mores. He's a Gen-X phenomenon all on his own, managing to mix a weird kind of conceit with a self-effacing humour. In a perfect world, we'd all like to be characters that John Cusack plays and deliver lines to our lives with much charm and sardonic wit.

So it comes as a bit of a let down to find out that he's a total and utter prima donna, who is insufferable and dislikeable for being so unlike his screen persona.

Travelling to oversee the Canadian production of The Factory with fellow writer Morgan O'Neill last year, Leyden said the American star cost the production with his diva antics and lateness.

"John Cusack was one of my favourite actors until I met him," Leyden said yesterday.

"I have to say one thing - and this is my favourite line when people ask me what I think of John Cusack - he plays nice guys on film. So, read between the lines."

Prodded by a radio interviewer to dish more dirt, Leyden accused Cusack of often arriving "hours late" for work.

"He cost us a lot of money and he was getting his biggest pay day on this film.

"He was getting paid a lot of cash and he would just be two hours late to set, wouldn't apologise for keeping everyone waiting in the snow . . . a real prima donna.

"Everyone thought he was a really nice guy (prior to filming) and all I can say is that it was a really nice day when he wrapped," Leyden said.

There you go. He's certainly not the first star not to live up to his screen persona, and you do take this stuff with a grain of salt. The lesson of the story? NEVER meet your heroes.