Nighthawks (1981)

Last night I saw Nighthawks again, an early-80s cop thriller starring Sylvester Stallone. The plot is about a pair of New York undercover cops (Stallone and Lando Calrissian) who are enlisted to help stop the rogue terrorist Wulfgar (Rutger Hauer). It's an interesting film as a time capsule piece on how the threat of terrorism was dramatized in the Reagan era.

What I found most interesting, however, is the amount of focus placed on the impotence of the Stallone character. Most action heroes are men/women of action; Stallone's Deke DaSilva spends the whole movie pretty much just passively reacting and is unable to take the shot that would kill Wulfgar – he says he didn't get into the police business to kill people. Add to this the fact that his wife has left him because he didn't pay her enough attention; he has nerdy glasses and a nerdy beard; he begins and ends the film in women's clothing; and he spends much of the rest of the film wearing cardigans and tank tops. (Stallone never strips down to show off the physique on which he built his career.) Before becoming a cop, we learn that DaSilva had been a Vietnam war hero with 52 kills to his name, suggesting that that experience had totally scarred him ... and making DaSilva an interesting precursor to John Rambo, who Stallone would play the following year in First Blood.

I often think that action thrillers these days are filled pretty boys pretending to be larger than life heroes: Ben Affleck, Keanu Reeves, Will Smith, Paul Walker, Maaaatt Daaaamon. There doesn't seem to be many, or any, leading men left who have the weight of experience or the presence of tough guy actors like Lee Marvin, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Clint Eastwood, Warren Oates, or even Stallone. The narratives that have been built up around these older actors in the popular consciousness is that they were Real Men, symbols of American brawn and masculinity. But it's interesting how frequently they played broken, vulnerable, and impotent. Their cool factor, I guess, is that they each had a persona of being guys that had nothing to prove to anyone but themselves, which gave them room to explore and subvert American myths of masculinity – a subject that Hollywood action cinema has always been about. I'm not sure I could say the same thing about the current crop of action stars.

Paris, je t'aime (2006)

Any anthology film comprised of 18 short films from as many different filmmakers is bound to be hit or miss. Paris je t'aime is no exception, although the good does outweigh the bad. It's worth seeing, and if you like it I'd also recommend Paris vu par, an obvious inspiration made in the 1960s by a group of French New Wave directors.

Watching 18 films in a row was a little bit of an endurance test. The film, however, is tailor made for YouTube, so I've included links to YouTube rips of the various shorts...

The weakest shorts, in my opinion, were: Wes Craven's "Père-Lachaise", Nobuhiro Suwa's "Place des Victoires", Vincenzo Natali's "Quartier de la Madeleine", Olivier Assayas' "Quartier des Enfants Rouges", and Joel & Ethan Coen's "Tuileries". Christopher Doyle's "Port de Choisy" was also a bit of a misfire, but it was so beautifully shot and so extraordinarily peculiar that it has stuck in my memory.

I thought the strongest entries were the ones that were either simple and sweet or structurally and formally ambitious...

Alfonso Cuarón's "Parc Monceau" was very effective in its simplicity. It mostly just revolves around a conversation between two people (one of whom is Nick Nolte) and was shot in a single long take (continuing Cuarón's experimentation of the long take in Children of Men). The film does the best job of all the films at eavesdropping on a slice of Parisian life, and it has a few unexpected surprises up its sleeve.

Sylvain Chomet's "Tour Eiffel" does the remarkable job of making mimes endearing and lovable, and it has a visual style all of its own.

Gérard Depardieu's "Quartier Latin" is both a love letter to Paris and a love letter to acting. It stars two of Cassavete's favorite actors, Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, as an old couple going through a divorce who meet at a Parisian bar. The chemistry and sense of history between the two is sizzling.

Oliver Schmitz's "Place des Fêtes" has a playful and ambitious flashback structure and feels like a perfectly conceived short film: it has the structure and tragedy of a film noir, but its tone is breezy, sweet and romantic.

Tom Tykwer's "Faubourg Saint-Denis" was one of my two favorite films, and was structurally and formally the most daring. It's about a romance between an actress (Natalie Portman) and a blind guy (Melchior Beslon), and it creates even more of an adrenaline rush than Run Lola Run. Few short films are so densely packed with images, ideas, and emotions.

Alexander Payne's "14ème Arrondissement" was my other favorite. It best captured the essence of "Paris, je t'aime" in its story of a lonely, middle aged, working class Denver woman coming to Paris on vacation. I particularly liked how Payne paid homage to Jean-Paul Sartre and subtly riffed on Sartre's existential novel Nausea. The film is structured around a voiceover that reads aloud (in rudimentary French) the woman's diary entry, mimicking the diary style of Nausea; but Payne inverts the moment of existential despair in Sartre's novel by replaying it as a moment of quiet transcendence as the woman sits on a bench and takes Paris in.

Sicko (2007)

I found Sicko to be a very uneven film. For the most part, I thought it was simplistic and underwhelming, but there was an aspect of the movie that was also quite subtle and compelling.

By lionizing the socialized health care systems in Canada, France and the UK, Michael Moore didn't really paint a convincing, real world picture of the alternatives to the US model. My own personal experiences with the NHS in England match up pretty closely with how it is portrayed in the movie, and I agree with Moore's opinion that the UK system far surpasses that of the US, but I also know that the NHS is not without fault. Showing some of the downsides of his examples of socialized medicine would not have diminished Moore's argument. On the contrary, it would have made the argument richer and more convincing, and would have better informed audiences about the real issues of the debate. Instead, Moore goes more for the gut, with an approach that favors an emotional punch. I think this is both his weakness and his strength.

It's his weakness because it makes it easy for the right to dismiss him and focus solely on his biases (even though he has no obligation to be fair and balanced). It makes him an easy target, where a strike against Michael Moore is also a strike against socialized medicine. I think it's also his strength, however, because he's doing what the mainstream news media in the US does – that is, taking complicated political situations and turning them into simple emotional ones – but he's redirecting this strategy towards conclusions that are much more progressive than you would ever see in the mainstream media. In other words, while Sicko comes across as an emotionally charged catalogue of HMO horror stories that are designed to get your blood boiling, it ultimately wants you to consider a larger and more complicated set of issues about the role of a social democracy in the United States.

Moore did a similar trick with Bowling for Columbine, which used a sprawling look at American gun culture as a way into its main theme: how the US population is controlled and manipulated through the installation of fear. If Marilyn Manson was the unlikely mouthpiece for Moore's theme in Bowling for Columbine, in Sicko it is British MP Tony Benn. Benn's discussion of the ways in which democracies use the mechanisms of power to diminish solidarity among the people is the core of the movie, and all of Moore's stunts and emotional manipulations in Sicko are working toward making us experience that feeling of solidarity. The feeling of solidarity and of duty towards the rest of society is something that is deeply embedded in the British character: as Benn notes in the movie, there would have been a revolution if Tony Blair had tried to abolish the NHS. Moore is arguing that the same feelings of duty and solidarity are intrinsic to Americans too. The difference is that the US government wields its power over the mechanisms of democracy in a very different and much more sinister way.