True Memoirs of an International Assassin (2016)

08 Saturday Apr 2017

Tags

Action, Andy Garcia, Assassination, Comedy, Drama, Jeff Wadlow, Kevin James, Kim Coates, Review, Revolution, The Ghost, Venezuela, Zulay Henao

D: Jeff Wadlow / 98m

Cast: Kevin James, Andy Garcia, Kim Coates, Zulay Henao, Maurice Compte, Andrew Howard, Yul Vazquez, Leonard Earl Howze, Rob Riggle, P.J. Byrne, Kelen Coleman, Katie Couric

Sometimes you just want to sit down and watch a movie and not have to think about it. Sometimes all you need is a movie that you don’t expect much from, or a movie that you’re pretty sure isn’t going to live up to any expectations you may or may not have, and just be that movie, the one that you can watch without waiting for this moment or that moment to happen. A movie that, when it’s over, you can say, “Okay, that did the trick, I needed that.” A movie that can be as awful as it likes, and it doesn’t make any difference. All it needs to do is keep you occupied – mostly – for an hour and a half (or maybe more) and maybe help you tick the box marked “Seen it”.

A perfect candidate for this kind of movie is True Memoirs of an International Assassin, the latest “comedy” from Netflix. After The Ridiculous 6 (2015) and Special Correspondents (2016), you might think that Netflix would have wanted to reconsider their comedy projects, but True Memoirs… shoots down that idea within the first fifteen minutes, the period in which the movie is at its funniest. Would-be writer Sam Larson (James) is putting the finishing touches to his latest book. We see his lead character, Mason Carver (also James), fight off a horde of bad guys until he’s faced by one carrying an RPG. Deciding that an RPG is a little over the top, Sam has trouble coming up with an alternative. While he thinks about it, we see Mason and the (ex-)RPG carrier waiting around for the solution so that they can continue. They look like two actors on a set waiting for the next set up, or new script pages. It’s funny, and anyone watching the movie should remember this sequence well, because once it’s over, that’s as funny as the movie gets.

They say that comedy is harder than straight drama, and watching True Memoirs… is like trying to watch a comedy that has taken that particular maxim to heart and is doing everything it can to prove the saying right. Rejected by seemingly every publisher under the sun, Sam’s ambitions are kept alive by the unexpected appearance of an online publishing rep called Kylie (Coleman). She takes his manuscript, makes one very important change to the title, and the next thing he knows, Sam has a runaway bestseller on his hands. That change? It’s in the movie’s title: Sam’s book was originally called Memoirs of an International Assassin. Though his book is a work of fiction, Sam does his research, and he’s helped by his friend and ex-Mossad analyst, Amos (Rifkin) (can everyone say “lazy plotting”?). A story about a real assassin who was around in the Eighties and was called the Ghost, has found its way into Sam’s book, and now it’s non-fiction status and level of detail has people thinking Sam is actually the Ghost.

Now, if you’re watching this on Netflix – and chances are more people will see it there than will buy it on DVD or Blu-ray – then this is the point at which you should pause the movie and think very hard about that last sentence. People think Sam is really the Ghost. Later on this month (the 26th to be exact), Kevin James will be forty-two years old (and looks it). In order for Sam to be the Ghost he would have had to have been a pre-teen when he began his life as an international assassin. But nobody – seriously, nobody – brings this up. Not Andy Garcia’s Venezuelan freedom fighter, not his second-in-command, Juan (Compte), not even bumbling CIA field agents Cleveland (Howze) and Cobb (Riggle). Can everyone say “stupid plotting”?

Sam is kidnapped by Garcia’s El Toro and threatened with a horrible death unless he agrees to kill the Venezuelan President, Miguel Cueto (Coates). Through a further series of encounters too tedious to recount here, Sam is also tasked with killing a Russian criminal called Anton Masovich (Howard). Aided by DEA agent, Rosa Bolivar (Henao), Sam manages to avoid getting killed long enough to put a plan of sorts into action, one that involves bugging the President, and supporting El Toro’s revolution. By this stage, the screenplay – by director Wadlow and Jeff Morris – is intent on piling on huge levels of exposition onto huge levels of exposition as it does its best to make what should be a simple enough premise into something much more unwieldy and irksome. It’s a scenario that abandons simplicity almost from the beginning, and never looks back (it may actually be frightened to).

Fans of brain-dead comedies will no doubt enjoy True Memoirs… but for everyone else, the endless machinations that keep Sam ahead of everyone else will soon become tiresome, and the decreasing attempts at making the viewer laugh will become horribly apparent. By the movie’s end, discerning viewers will be wondering if they’ve really just wasted ninety-eight minutes of their life on this farrago, while even those viewers who were looking for the kind of distraction mentioned in the first paragraph will be shaking their heads in despair. When you end up hoping for something to come along to distract you from the distraction you’re already experiencing, then it’s time to choose your distractions more carefully.

Forced to carry the weight of the movie on his shoulders, James struggles to remain cheerful throughout, and soon gives in to the script’s requirement that he repeat over and over that he’s not the Ghost, while behaving like a petulant coward (and looking for a way out of his contract). James has a proscribed gift for physical comedy, but here he’s not given the chance to highlight that gift. Instead he’s pressed more into action hero mode, acquitting himself well in a series of fight scenes that are well choreographed and surprisingly invigorating. At all other times he plays the same physically awkward, bumbling, slightly desperate character he pretty much always plays. It makes you think that if True Memoirs… was written with James in mind, then he needs to avoid these kind of scripts in the future.

Orchestrating it all is Wadlow, a writer/director who for some reason was allowed to give us Kick-Ass 2 (2013). The same stumbling approach to the material that marred that movie is repeated here, with unexplained tonal shifts thrown in for good measure, and the cast encouraged to play their roles as clichéd stereotypes, or even stereotypical clichés. Garcia is wasted in his role (and that’s not a drug reference), Compte and Vazquez are allowed to pop up every now and then and add little to the overall narrative, Henao is tasked with being earnest while the camera focuses elsewhere, and Coates is in a different movie altogether as the Venezuelan President whose real name is Mike, and who doesn’t want the job anymore. Such is the variety and the standard of the performances, it’s obvious that Wadlow gave everyone carte blanche to do what they wanted. It would have been best if they’d all said no to the script (and a working holiday in the Dominican Republic), and just stayed at home. And if they needed to, watched something distracting.

Rating: 3/10 – while comedy is definitely harder to pull off than drama, there’s no argument when the comedy doesn’t even try that hard to beat the odds; a prime example of less is less, True Memoirs of an International Assassin is an embarrassing hodge-podge of stock situations and characters that reinforces the idea that when it comes to movies, Netflix are really good at making television shows.

Araya (1959)

21 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cannes Film Festival, Documentary, El Rincón, Fishermen, Fishing, Manicuare, Margot Benacerraf, Ortiz family, Pereda family, Review, Salazar family, Salineros, Salt marshes, Salt mining, Tone poem, Venezuela

D: Margot Benacerraf / 82m

Narrator: José Ignacio Cabrujas

In northeastern Venezuela there is a barren, largely inhospitable peninsula called Araya. Home to a vast salt deposit, the area is harsh and uninviting, but it’s also home to various families that work the salt flats or fish the nearby sea. From the villages of Manicuare and El Rincón, they make a life for themselves that revolves around the collection of salt and fish each and every day, the two items that provide the basis for their community and their reason for being there. It’s hard, labour intensive work that offers little in the way of reward, but has become a generational necessity: for these Venezuelans there’s simply nowhere else to go.

Araya follows three families through the course of an average day. The Salazar family are salineros – salt marsh workers. Their day begins at six in the morning as they take the salt that has been selected overnight and pile it up into huge pyramid-like piles. It’s punishing work that has to be done so early in the day because of how high the temperature rises later. Even so, it’s hot work and the salt crystals can be damaging to the workers’ skin, causing ulcers and open sores. By late morning their work is done and the Salazar family can return home, making the six mile journey to Manicuare on foot beneath the blazing sun. Once there they can tend to work needed to be done at home before going to sleep.

Further along the coastline, the Ortiz family come down to the shoreline to cast their nets out into the sea. Even their youngest, Carmen, has work to do: she collects coral and shells. Once the nets have been retrieved, the fish that has been caught is divided up and some of it is taken to El Rincón and Manicuare for sale to the villagers. The fish is the main ingredient in everyone’s diet, and is rarely passed up.

At night the men of the Pereda family toil in the salt marshes, selecting and cutting blocks of salt for the Salazars and the other salineros to process the next day. Again, it’s hard work as they push their boats through the shallow waters and haul the blocks of salt onto them. And each family repeats the same actions the next day, and the day after that… until industrialisation reaches them, and their skills – handed down from generation to generation – become superseded by machines.

Although it has the look and feel of a documentary, Araya is intended to be viewed as a tone poem, Cabrujas’ narration deliberately written to evince a feeling not often associated with this type of “exposé” – an appreciation of the lyrical beauty that underpins the lives of the people who live in such a barren corner of the world. As such, and with the benefit of seeing the movie over sixty-five years since it was made, it’s fair to say that Araya works as both a tone poem and a documentary, and is successful whichever way it’s approached.

Part of the movie’s appeal, and one of its main strengths, is that while it celebrates the hard life these families lead, it also presents their lives in such a matter-of-fact way that there’s no room for pity or sentimentality; these people lead their lives in the way that’s portrayed, and they don’t complain about it. Benacerraf is also wise enough to avoid interviewing anyone, and by doing so, she gains more “mileage” out of being an observer than perhaps she would have done by asking a lot of pointed questions. The viewer can see all he or she needs to know about the inhabitants of Araya, as well as the obvious pride they take in the work that they do. As the movie shows more and more of the structured, unchanging lifestyle they lead, it shows how simple and uncomplicated that lifestyle is, and how suited they are to it.

Benacerraf – an acclaimed feminist filmmaker and founder of Venezuela’s Cineteca Nacional, and Fundavisual Latina – also delves into the history of the area, revealing the existence of a 17th century fortress that overlooks the area (but which is now a ruin), and which was built to provide security for the various traders whose cargoes of salt were prey to pirates. It’s difficult to see now just how busy the peninsula must have been despite its unforgiving nature, especially when the viewer sees the nearby wood, where the trees are so denuded that their branches look like withered bones. It’s images such as these, beautifully filmed by Giuseppe Nisoli beneath the blazing, cloud-free canopy of the sky, that highlights the stark, natural beauty of the peninsula.

Whether the camera is following a salinero carrying a basket full of salt on his head, or a member of the Ortiz family sorting through the hundreds of fish that have been caught, or the arrival in El Rincón of the water truck – 1,850 gallons to be shared amongst sixty houses – or the member of the Salazar family, Luisa, who makes clay pots without the benefit of a wheel, Araya is a visual feast, fascinating and poignant and continually astonishing in the way in which the peninsula’s inhabitants have carved out a rewarding way of life for themselves.

When the movie was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour. And yet it was never picked up for widespread or international distribution, an outcome that seems ludicrous now that Araya has been restored and can be seen for the breathtaking experience it actually is. That it took fifty years for the movie to be recognised for its tremendous accomplishments just goes to show how wrong the movie business can be sometimes. Thank the deity of your choice then that it’s been rescued from obscurity, and can take us back to a time and a place where life – hard, exacting, rewarding life – was lived each day by a group of Venezuelans who were probably unknown to the rest of their country.

Rating: 9/10 – hypnotic, engaging, rich in detail, affecting, beautifully shot, powerful in its simplicity – Araya is all these things and much more beside; with its poetic leanings enhancing the visuals, the movie works on several levels and succeeds on all of them.