jürgen fauth’s muckworld

It sounded like a good idea: a retro Thai western, a pastiche of long-forgotten styles that’s part melodrama, part over-the-top gunslinging, all bathed in madly oversaturated colors. The tears of a waiting lover blur the inscription on a photograph; sad cowboys play forlorn melodies on their harmonicas; villains with pencil-thin mustaches laugh hearty belly laughs. Duels begin with Sergio Leone super close-ups, and then the gun barrels flare in staccato edits. Body parts go flying, and the heartthrob hero can shoot around corners. Even if you’ve never seen a Thai western in your life, most of this will seem mighty familiar from somewhere. (John Woo, Douglas Sirk, George A. Romero, and Lash La Rue have all been rightfully fingered as influences.)

But good looks and a wealth of allusions only get you so far. The pleasures of Tears of the Black Tiger lie exclusively in its winking, high-camp evocation of older movies and styles; there’s not much worthwhile beneath the ironic postmodern attitude. No matter how many lotus-decorated flashbacks and Bangkok beach walks the lovers take, their woes aren’t gripping enough, and scenes without emotional connection stretch out long past their welcome. The shootouts amuse but don’t thrill, and the few attempts at low humor fail–probably because everything is a meta-joke already. Opens Friday.

Fah talai jone. Wisit Sasanatieng, 2000. **

Rotten Tomatoes
[tags]wisit sasanatieng, film, thailand, western, pastiche, postmodern, 2 stars, melodrama, sergio leone, douglas sirk, george romero, lash la rue, john woo[/tags]

I fully support all of Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic experiments, whether it’s highly personal weirdness (Schizopolis), big-budget romps (Ocean’s 11), remakes of Russian scifi classics (Solaris), or minimalist melodrama (Bubble). So when he makes a 1940s noir with period technology, I’m very much there. The Good German is set in the heart of what’s called “the Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow: bombed-to-rubble Berlin in 1945, which is a place very much like Casablanca a few years earlier. Nobody can be trusted, everybody’s for sale, and everybody wants to get the hell out. Clooney comes in as war correspondent, Tobey Maguire plays a hometown boy who might not be as apple-pie as he seems, and Cate Blanchett is the German dame with a mysterious history. It all looks fantastic, and what Pynchonite wouldn’t be a sucker for a plot that involves rocket scientists, the Potsdam conference, and the Mittelbauwerke?

But The Good German has a deadly weakness, and it’s the script. We don’t feel for Clooney, we don’t understand Blanchett, there is little chemistry between them, the tangled plot is so confusing you have to figure it out over dinner afterwards, and Maguire (the best thing about the movie) leaves the story much too early. It’s ok if noir doesn’t make sense right away (Raymond Chandler famously had no idea who killed one of the characters in The Maltese Falcon), but at least the emotions have to be readable. In The Good German, it’s all a blur.

Finally, there are the Casablanca references, which overwhelm the movie. Sure, other films are also alluded to (The Third Man, Psycho), but The Good German starts as faithful recreation of a period movie with contemporary attitudes (more sex than they showed in ‘45 etc), but by the end you feel like you’re watching just another post-modern pastiche–and by god, as much as I love Casablanca, it’s been copied, ripped off, and parodied enough. 

The Good German. Steven Soderbergh, 2006. **

• Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
• Official Site

[tags]steven soderbergh, film, 2 stars, noir, crime, berlin, germany world war ii, george clooney, cate blanchett, tobey maguire, the maltese falcon, thomas pynchon, rocket science, casablanca, psycho, the third man, raymond chandler, postmodernism, pastiche[/tags]