Son of Saul

Members of the Sonderkommando.
Picture from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The very first frame of Son of Saul, the Hungarian film that won Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars and the Grand Prix at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is remarkably hazy until Saul, a Hungarian Jew at Auschwitz, approaches. Saul is played by Geza Rohrig, and throughout most of the film, the camera intently focuses on him, either on his intense face or the X on his back, which signifies that he is a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish forced-labor units who aided with the disposal of gas chamber victims of the camps. Within ten minutes, we are witness to this, but we only hear it; the camera remains on Saul.

In the horrors of the Auschwitz, the bodies of the dead are "pieces". Saul, when collecting bodies to be cremated, discovers one teenage boy gasping; he barely survived, until a Nazi suffocates him. Saul is fiercely determined to properly bury this child, even though it is strictly forbidden. He risks, as one fellow prisoner warns, of failing the living for the benefit of the dead.

Terry Gross interviewed both Rohrig and Laszlo Nemes, the director and co-writer of Son of Saul last year. Gross read them a quote from Nemes discussing the casting of Rohrig. Nemes had claimed that Rohrig is "at once old and young, handsome and ugly, ordinary and remarkable, deep and impassive, quick-witted and slow." Rohrig wittingly responded that he agreed with half of that. The quote couldn't be any truer. All of these are accurate descriptions of how Rohrig appears and the performance he creates. The character of Saul has seen too many atrocious episodes in one of human history's most disturbing events. There is a cut on his lip; his eyes are pink, presumably from shoveling human ash into the river; and everything is of terrible fury around him, even if we cannot fully see it. The cinematography switches between chaos and calm. A hundred things happen simultaneously, but Saul is the epicenter.

Some have argued that 2015 was a year of gimmick film making. Three other foreign films used what could be described as gimmicks: Room from Canada partially took place only in one room, Victoria from Germany impressively is one single take throughout multiple parts of Berlin, and The Tribe was filmed entirely in Ukrainian Sign Language with no subtitles. Sometimes Son of Saul too feels gimmicky, with how focused the camera is on Saul and not his surroundings, and it isn't as unforgettable as Room.

That being said, it's a film that should be watched, and its warnings from history should be heeded. Every time a Holocaust movie is made, it's inevitable that it is said that "never again" will the world allow such a thing to happen. And yet it may be happening all over again.

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Head

I imagine most young teenagers of the late 1960s—the ones too young to appreciate Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the ones who really dug the zany, Marx Brothers-style comedy of the two seasons of The Monkees—probably were confused out of their mind after watching Head, the 1968 counterculture cult film co-written by Jack Nicholson.

Head is probably the strangest movie I have ever seen. And it's not just strange—it's bad. It would have been bad for the young fans of the Monkees, it would have been bad (or good, I suppose) for music lovers who readily dismissed the group as frauds who couldn't play instruments. It would have been bad for older folks who were utterly confused by young Baby Boomers and their values. And it would have been bad for Baby Boomers who had no idea how to articulate what they stood for.

It's not uncommon for a reviewer to transition at about this point in the review to the plot of the movie. Three paragraphs in—surely that would make sense to do so at least now. That would be pointless here, for I have no idea what the plot is. I know that the movie starts on a bridge and the Prefab Four—Mickey Dolenz, Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith—madly race by. Then we go to a war scene, because remember, this was the 60s. Then they're in the desert. It actually hurts a little trying to remember all the arbitrary scenes. They don't amount to anything. Supposedly, the four and the writers were high at the genesis of creating the story, but no amount of LSD would give any meaning to Head. Why is it called Head? Is it naughty? Philosophical? I have no idea. Maybe "that's the point." How hackneyed.

There are a variety of cameos—Terri Garr, Nicholson, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, to name a few–but none of them do anything to make the film any more enjoyable. Instead, the movie almost immediately becomes an exercise in trying to sustain oneself until the next song, most of which are pretty good. Chief among them is "Circle Sky," written by Nesmith, and his second best overall after "Listen to the Band." The four of them, in maybe one of the few scenes that tries to make an iota of sense, rush to the stage dressed uniformly in white, and Nesmith begins belting out the lyrics. One gets a good sense of Monkeemania through this scene, as it was filmed as a live concert. The second best song is probably "Porpoise Song," one of the several Gerry Goffin and Carole King compositions for the group during their run. (King and Toni Stern also contribute the lovely "As We Go Along" to the album.) But the next best musical scene is Jones' "Daddy Song," written by Harry Nilsson (another writer of Monkees music). Jones channels his theater experience in a high-energy dance with crisp choreography as the camera consistently switches between him in his black suit and him in his white suit.

As you can see, while the movie itself might be a bit of a mess, what gives it any bit of goodness is its soundtrack, one of the group's best, an album that is so appreciated that it was ranked 25 in Rolling Stone's greatest soundtracks of all time list. But the album is roughly half-an-hour long, leaving about another hour of the film to suffer through.

Nicholson and co-writer and director Bob Rafelson (one of the creators of the show) had better success with movies like Five Easy Pieces two years later. But for many, Head was the end of the Monkees, "career suicide" as some have called it. But as Nesmith explained, by that point the Monkees were a pariah, and the film, according to him, was a "swan song." The group soon broke up, going on to varying degrees of success. Jones, for example, was the big heart throb of the group, but other than appearing on a famous episode of The Brady Bunch, his solo career never really took off. Nesmith arguably had the greatest success: executive producing Repo Man, winning a Grammy for "Elephant Parts," being instrumental in the creation of MTV, inheriting his mother's huge fortune from inventing Liquid Paper.

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For the band as a whole, though, reruns in the 1980s brought the group to new fame with new fans. They occasionally reunited and they released an album in the 80s and another in the 90s, neither of which were much good. Fortunately, though, this year the band turned 50 years old, and they recently released an album called "Good Times!" that is their best in decades. Featuring songs by their old collaborators Neil Diamond, Nilsson, Goffin and King, and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, it also includes songs by younger musicians who grew up on the Monkees, like Rivers Cuomo and Ben Gibbard. It's really a treat to listen to. The album is appropriately named; many likely think of the good times they have had listening to the Monkees over the years. Watching Head, though, probably isn't one of them.


The Best Monkees Songs, According to Me

50. The Monkees (Theme Song)
49. This Just Doesn't Seem to Be Day
48. Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day
47. Your Auntie Grizelda
46. It's Nice to Be With You
45. Love to Love
44. Salesman
43. Good Times
42. A Man Without a Dream
41. All of Your Toys
40. Me and Magdalena
39. Mommy and Daddy
38. Someday Man
37. Tear Drop City
36. The Kind of Girl I Could Love
35. Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again
34. Daddy's Song
33. As We Go Along
32. I'll Be Back Up On My Feet
31. Star Collector
30. P.O. Box 9847
29. D.W. Washburne
28. She Hangs Out
27. Daily Nightly
26. Take a Giant Step
25. Goin' Downy
24. No Time
23. Mary, Mary
22. You Told Me
21. Porpoise Song
20. Tapioca Tundra
19. What Am I Doing Hangin' Round?
18. You May Just Be the One
17. Cuddly Toy
16. She Makes Me Laugh
15. Circle Sky
14. Words
13. Papa Gene's Blues
12. Pleasant Valley Sunday
11. Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)
10. Listen to the Band
9. Randy Scouse Git
8. Saturday's Child
7. She
6. Valleri
5. A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You
4. (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone
3. Daydream Believer
2. Last Train to Clarksville
1. I'm a Believer

Honorable Mention: Sweet Young Thing

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Suicide Squad

Let's cut to the chase: The good news is that Suicide Squad, the third entry in the D.C. Extended Universe, is not nearly as bad as this spring's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. The bad news is that it is still bad. What could have been a fun movie about antiheroes being truly heroic, an antithesis to the overly moody previous D.C. films, is instead a fairly formulaic, rather dull flick that tries to play it safe and yet results in another miss.

Viola Davis plays Amanda Weller, a government official who concocts a bizarre plan to form a task force containing the worst of the worst super villains ever known. These malefactors, she believes, might just be able to do some good for once. In return, the villains get some time deducted from their sentences. If they disobey or try to escape, they die. Fortunately for Weller, if something goes wrong, they are, as Deadshot says, the patsies.

Deadshot could be described as the Suicide Squad's leader, if they needed one. He's a hired assassin who's never missed, and who first appeared in D.C.'s comics in 1950. Here, he's played by Will Smith, who is just as charismatic as ever but who has not been the lead in a blockbuster since Men in Black 3 from 2012. The other two big stars in the film are Margot Robbie, Smith's co-star from Focus, and Oscar-winning "method actor" Jared Leto as cinema's most notorious clown, the Joker. Leto has some big shoes to fill, as fans have argued for years whether the best on-screen portrayal of the Joker has been from Jack Nicholson, Mark Hamill, or Heath Ledger (or, I suppose, Cesar Romero). Leto does not come close to them. It's not a bad performance, per se, but during the best moments it feels like it's simply a repeat of all the stuff we've previously seen. Leto's method acting doesn't save the performance; I'm not sure what sending rats and used condoms to his co-stars during filming did to enhance his acting. And yet it's not nearly as disappointing as how Robbie as Harley Quinn, the Joker's lover, is squandered; despite a pretty good performance by the always good Robbie, this is a role that, as Alison Wilmore of BuzzFeed describes, is "made into damaged dolly jerk-off material."

It would be hard to argue that this movie isn't anti-women. At one point, one of the villains (good guy villains, I mean) punches a woman and then says, "She had a mouth." And it's a comic relief moment. It is 2016, right?

On a better note, considering how devoid of diversity Hollywood is these days (#OscarsSoWhite), this might be one of the most diverse movies around: Smith, Davis, and Adewale Skinnuoye-Agbaje, covered in makeup as Killer Croc, are black; Jay Hernandez as El Diablo, who throws fire from his fists, is Latino; Karen Fukuhara plays a swordswoman bodyguard and is Asian-American; and Adam Beach as Slipknot is Canadian First Nations.    

But most of this movie is a mess, and most of the blame for this could fall on David Ayer, its writer and director. I'm not too surprised. Training Day, which he wrote, is very overrated, and Fury, which he wrote and directed, borders on trash. End of Watch is barely tolerable. There are some positive aspects of his direction, though. With an eclectic soundtrack that includes "Without Me," "You Don't Know Me," "Bohemian Rhapsody," and "Fortunate Son," he at least shows us that he has good taste in music. And the visual effects and color palate are mostly spectacular.

Suicide Squad is not as bad as I was expecting, but it's still bad, and considering that Suicide Squad is essentially strike three for Warner Bros. in their efforts to try and match the powerhouse that has been Marvel Studios, I'd say it's time to call it quits. No Justice League, no Wonder Woman, perhaps not even a stand-alone Batman film directed by and staring Ben Affleck. It's time to retire the costumes.

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