Mermaid (2016) /Burn after Reading (2008)

Mermaid (2016)

In looking up Warcraft's record-making run in the Chinese box office I came across mention of the picture that had previously held the record and I decided to sample some Chinese pop culture by watching China's previously highest-grossing film Mermaid (2014).

The film was enjoyable. It was directed by Hong Kong movie veteran Stephen Chow so it several perfect slap-stick sequences, just imagine all the 'phallic sadism' enabled by a guy whose is octopus from the waist down, the film's heroine also gets her fair share of golf clubs to the head. The rom-com plot is too thin (CEO dates mermaid, learns not to pollute the seas) to pack any emotional punch but occasionally the film splices in real footage of sea-life being slaughtered which adds a drop of blood to the movie that suggests something deeper than the final shoot-out/chase can give us. The CGI is early 2000s quality but this does not bother me and the sequence where the mermaid skateboards down into the rusted-out wreck of oil tanker is a real slice of movie wonderment.

For a supposedly 'communist' or at least 'state capitalist' country there was nothing to reflect this. Aren't  'young millionaire entrepreneur' and 'sappy environmentalism' considered the opposite of state-run industrialization? If it wasn't for the certificate of state-approval that opened the film there is little to separate this movie from 100s of American films except the quality of the slap-stick. The couple even fall in love singing some Chinese-version of Frank Sinatra's "My Way". That the real footage montage prominently featured the JAPANESE slaughter of dolphins (the credits confirm this) may explain the environmental angle.

Highlights: That rusted out tanker and the self-deprecating opening with the mustached guy as the fake mermaid.

Burn After Reading (2008)

Reading that this was the Coen Brother's funniest film since the Big Lewboski I decided to try it out. It starts and ends in CIA HQ and involves some stolen intelligence but it is not really a black comedy about national security - if only! It is a black comdey bout the bottomless vapidness of the Americans who live in the shadow of that community. There are fewer targets more ripe from this treatment than the bloated, filthy noveau-rich, unaccountable. post-911 'national security' complex (read How Wartime Washington Lives in Luxury or listento it) but this film does not have the teeth for that and  seems set in the 1990s with it's CDs, computer dating and nostalgia for the Cold War. This is film where most of the spies are detectives hired for impending divorces.

Shallow people doing stupid things is not that fun to watch - I did think about it the next day though. There is a braveness to the film in that all the actors are playing parodies of the themselves. Brad Pitt is an ADD himbo, George Clooney is a preening good ol'boy,  Frances McDormand is obsessed with getting plastic surgery to fulfill the Hollywood norm, John Malkovich is narcissistic alcoholic, Tilda Swinton is the sour ice queen. The parts write themselves and  it  almost plays like a Hollywood roast. There are no kids to be ground up in all the impending divorces and murders - its strangely bloodless.

Two highlights - both involve sledgehammers: Watching Clooney take a sledge-hammer to his treasured DIY 'dildo machine' climaxes the pointlessness of these sterile lives. And watching David Rasche (TV's Sledgehammer) reprise his Donald Rumsfeld role from the superior 'In the Loop' (2009).  Rasche's brief scenes with Oz's J.K. Simmons as his boss were fun. Sort of like Greek gods, softened by modern bureaucracy, watching the vain mortals scamper around, clueless themselves, burning the bodies and buying the breast implants. I'd watch a TV starring them.