jürgen fauth’s muckworld

“Music is a virus,” company HR guy Simon is informed by his girlfriend early on in Nicolas Kotz’s Heartbeat Detector, based on the novel by Francois Emmanuel. In case we missed the point, one of Simon’s superiors later reminds him, “music doesn’t tolerate hierarchy.” Their warnings are entirely astute: music — in a number of incarnations from techno to fado to violin quartets — is the catalyst of Simon’s slow disintegration.

Continue reading my review of Heartbeat Detector, starring Mathieu Amalric, on About.com. Heartbeat Detector opens on March 14.

La Question humaine. Nicolas Klotz, 2007. ***

Here’s the beginning of Marcy’s review, with a few heavy-handed edits from yours truly.

It’s a very special version of hell: fill an office suite with qualified executives, lock them in, and have them duke it out for a top job. Request they fill out duplicate forms, subject them to twisted mind games, offer food that has gone bad… and see how far they’re willing to go. Far below the corporate windows, G8 protests are raging in the streets of Madrid, but it’s going to get even uglier inside. That’s the premise of The Method, Marcelo Piñeyro’s unique, Survivor-in-a-boardroom contribution to the suddenly popular genre of the biting office satire.

El Método. Marcelo Piñeyro, 2005. ***

• More from Matt Zoller Seitz and James van Maanen.

Shaun of the Dead meets Saw. Employees of an international weapons manufacturer are off to Eastern Europe for a “team building weekend.” When the bus is stopped by logs blocking the road, their jerk of a boss (Tim McInnerny) has everybody walk to the lodge where they’re supposed to play some paintball. The ass-kissing nerd (Andy Nyman) can’t wait to get there, Posh Guy (Toby Stephens) lets everybody know he thinks it’s a terrible idea, and the cute American chick (Laura Harris) is busy keeping the stoner who just ate a bag of ’shrooms (Danny Dyer) from chewing the bark off the trees and seeing strangers in the woods.

Of course, our drug-addled hero is right: there are strangers in the woods; you can tell by the subjective camera. Hiding in the underbrush are murderers driven mad by the wars that ravaged their country, Yugoslavian or Transylvanian ninjas toting machetes, flamethrowers, and other weaponry manufactured by — aha! — the corporate pansies about to be butchered.

Unlike Boon Joon-ho’s polished variations on genre, this hybrid doesn’t feel all that controlled. Severance is pleasantly shoddy, and the movie knocks about like a jerky haunted house ride with a few detours to the fun house. A mildly surreal dream sequence gives way to a gross-out joke about a disgusting pie, a swinging sixties “sex lodge” fantasia follows a black-and-white Nosferatu parody — and while you’re still trying to figure out how it all fits together, well-meaning Billy (Baabou Ceesay) gets gutted, earnest Jill (Claudie Blakley) is beheaded (or was it the other way around?), somebody is burnt alive and a leg gets amputated in one of the more gruesomely hilarious scenes I’ve seen in a while.

The most outrageous and exhilarating moments of Severance zip by like Apocalypto on whippets, gory but oh so hilarious. But in the last third, the movie leans too heavily on the horror conventions it’s not quite mocking. If you’re not a fan of slasher flicks, the endless frenzied running about through leafy hillsides spiked with booby traps is bound to get a wee bit tiresome — and if you’re squeamish about crotches stabbed by Rambo knives, feet stuffed in refrigerators and human organs pierced by sharp utensils, you might not be around anymore anyway. For those who can take it, Severance packs some bloody good laughs. Severance opens in May.

Severance. Christopher Smith, 2006. ***

A more glamorous version of Who Killed the Electric Car, the exuberant story of a failure, and a good-natured indictment of corporate malfaesance and the death of the American Dream. Christian Slater, Joan Allen, and Martin Landau are always welcome; Sofia sweeps through in a party scene, and Dean Stockwell makes an appearance as Howard Hughes. In the title role, Jeff Bridges plays the designer of a forward-looking car that was too innovative for its own good. Only 50 were ever built before the big car companies put him out of business. A flying version of the Tucker appears in Revenge of the Sith:

Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Francis Ford Coppola, 1988. ***

[tags]film, francis ford coppola, 3 stars, cars, dreams, corporations, jeff bridges, preston tucker, star wars[/tags]

Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate manifesto is slightly outdated–it came out even before Seattle, and she had to add an afterword after 9/11–but her arguments about the ever-encroaching branding on our lives are still incisive, and if anything, corporations have even more power over us than they did in the late nineties. The first section, “No Space,” is especially interesting, and so is her take on possible alternatives to the corporation-sponsored “globalization.” Klein’s website.