The Paper [1994] – A Facile yet Delightfully Energetic Newspaper Movie

 

Ron Howard’s The Paper (1994) centers on 24 hours in the life of the Sun, i.e., The New York Sun, a fictitious New York tabloid which like any traditional newspaper is torn between idealism and sensationalism. The script was written by popular Hollywood screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Spiderman, etc) and his brother Stephen Koepp, a veteran journalist and the senior editor at the Time magazine.The film opens with two African-American youths stumbling across a crime scene – the brutal murder of two white visiting businessmen – in a tough neighborhood.

 

The next day New York Daily News’ headlines screams: “Welcome to New York – You’re Dead”. But the Sun’s front-page story is only about a corrupt parking commissioner. The narrative then follows the hyper-active, overworked protagonist, Henry Hackett (Michael Keaton), the paper’s assistant editor, battling the hubbub of newsroom to work on a juicy tip that the black youths are innocent.

 

The Paper is an old-fashioned newsroom drama which despite opening with a bloody crime scene and a wrongful arrest keeps a buoyant, light-hearted tone. Much of the humor arises from the barely controlled chaos that threatens to topple over Henry’s professional and personal life. The round-the-clock newsroom pressure is clearly getting to Henry as his very pregnant wife, Martha (a zippy Marisa Tomei) demands him to take the steadier 9-to-5 job at New York Sentinel. In fact, the interview for the job is also scheduled that day. 

 

Martha herself was an ace-reporter, and dreads the feeling of putting her career on hold in order to rear the child. At work, Henry Hackett has to put up with a motley bunch of eccentric people, from the world-weary, chain-smoking editor-in-chief, Bernie White (Robert Duvall) to a paranoid, bellyaching, gun-toting columnist, Dan McDougal (Randy Quaid). 

 

However, Henry’s chief rival at work is the ambitious and condescending managing editor, Alicia Clark (Glenn Close). Alicia doesn’t receive any of the newsroom camaraderie Henry enjoys. But Bernie declares that being in the management side, if Alicia liked by the reporters then she’s not doing a good job. Henry and Alicia are at each other’s throats upon deciding how to headline and pursue the two black youths’ story. Alicia argues that the lead story for next day should be the subway derailment, or else they could get the pictures of the black teenagers and run a screaming headline, “GOTCHA!” Hackett argues for doing a follow-up on the murders, and sends his reporters to dig-up more about the case, based on a tip he receives from an interesting source.

 

In between, Henry escapes from the hothouse atmosphere of the Sun to attend his interview at the prestigious Sentinel. The top guy at the paper (Spalding Gray) refers to Sentinel as the beacon of journalistic integrity, and patronizingly dismisses Sun as ‘the cute little paper’. Henry seems to be fiercely loyal to the Sun, since that comment only pushes him to steal a ‘tip’ regarding the bloody double murders that incriminated the black youths. More than loyalty, the narrative also makes it clear that Henry doesn’t want to step into the bigger, labyrinthine reporting world of Sentinel. To add more emotions to the story, Koepp also shoe-horns a sentimental subplot involving cancer-ridden Bernie and his estranged daughter, Deanne (Jill Hennessy). 

 

Though The Paper is less mawkish than your average Hollywood drama, it does withhold clichés, too neat outcomes, and a bit false character trajectory. The script is slyly sexist, especially in its treatment of obdurate Alicia and a bumbling photographer (Amelia Campbell). Moreover, the narrative didn’t delve into any social issues it was discussing: racial profiling or luridness of tabloid journalism. Nevertheless, the Koepp brothers do get lot of things right: the tabloid newsroom lingo, the bedlam environment (even the air-conditioning repairmen add to the clutter), a journalist’s stress of juggling between multiple responsibilities, the pullulating cynicism, and insensitive wisecracks (foreign crises only matter if New Yorkers are personally involved). 

 

The film also largely works due to Ron Howard & cinematographer John Seale’s dynamic staging of the intense 24-hour period. The director totally cocoons the viewer into the world of ‘chasing-deadlines’ journalism. Howard uses the spirited performances of a wonderful ensemble cast to perfectly toggle between tension and humor. Furthermore, Howard’s touch gives a more heartening sense to the sentimental aspects which is one of his strengths as witnessed later in films such as Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, and Rush. 

 

Overall, The Paper (112 minutes) is an eventful, fast-paced, and upbeat Hollywood ensemble drama set in a busy newsroom. 

 

The Interview [1998] – A Taut, Solidly Crafted Police Procedural

 

At dawn one morning in Melbourne, police force led by Detective Sergeant John Steele (Tony Martin) bust into an apartment of a middle-aged man, who is slumbering in his recliner surrounded by stack of news papers, gold fish bowl, and other miscellaneous things. Detective Senior Constable Wayne Prior (Aaron Jeffrey) holds a gun to the man’s head and humiliates him. After searching the premises, the police bag up certain items and take the man to the station for interrogation. He is driven across town to the police station and thrown into a dank interrogation room. 

 

The man named Eddie Fleming (Hugo Weaving) is jittery and pertrified, giving us the vibes that he is possibly a harmless loner harshly subjected to police brutality. To accentuate such line of thinking, the Senior Constable Wayne does his best (or worst) to establish himself as the ‘bad cop’, while Detective Steele scalds Fleming with his sinister looks, mildly channelling the desperation of a cop pressured to zero-in on a suspect. But what’s the case and why Steele is so sure that the bewildered Fleming as his guy?

 

The notion that an innocent man has found himself behind the iron curtain of a twisted police investigation is what offers the initial hook in Craig Monahan’s debut feature The Interview (1998). The film is dubbed as Australia’s answer to The Usual Suspects (1995), although The Interview doesn’t simply rely on an earth-shattering twist at the climax. Writer/director Craig Monahan’s treatment is more concerned with the wily techniques employed by an investigator to ensnare their suspect. It deals with deeply complicated bureaucratic conflicts and how the world of criminal investigation really works. 

 

Unlike Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, this film is not just one long story of how a seemingly innocent man manipulates his surroundings. The manipulation exhibited here is multi-layered and not one-sided. Moreover, like many contemporary crime dramas, The Interview doesn’t keep throwing twists to gratify the unsuspecting viewers. It is very much grounded in logical reasoning and simply uses the unprecedented narrative developments to smartly challenge our perceptions. 

 

The Interview unfurls over a single day as the Detective Sergeant and Senior Constable interrogate Fleming for hours to stick their single charge upon him: car theft. That seems a too simple a charage to go through the trouble of breaking into a guy’s apartment. Initially, Fleming outright dismisses the charge and the vulnerability expressed by his eyes makes us feel sympathy for him. The car belongs to a Mr. Beecroft who has gone missing. Fleming explains that he is living on the dole. He has lost his house and estranged from his family. He laments that the police is doing this because no one cares about him. But Steele has his reasons to trap Fleming, and of course he believes more crimes are waiting to be unearthed if he proved the car-theft charge. 

 

Elsewhere, the observer is being observed. Steele and Wayne are under the scrutiny of Internal Affairs due to the duo’s questionable investigative tactics. More hints about a wider ring of corruption within the force are also cited. These sub-plots play a crucial role when Fleming begins to say shockingly extraordinary things. Revealing more details now would only spoil the neat tricks aligned by Monahan. 

 

The expertly evasive script written by Monahan and Gordon Davie (an ex-cop) is blessed with the intricate knowledge of police institution. The writing understands the art of reveal, where the transformations of characters are imbued bit by bit. Both Weaving and Martin’s characters begin as one-dimensional archetypes but gradually evolve over the narrative. The precious information are doled out in a manner that constantly makes our sympathies switch from one side to another. Amidst all this, the writers haven’t neglected the plausbility of the situation. All the bureaucratic in-fighting and tense cat-and-mouse games are executed with a firm understanding of the technicalities of criminal investigation.

 

Shot in a darkly-lit, claustrophobic chamber-like room and a huge table, pitting the accused against his accuser, the film could have easily become monotonous or evoke the feeling of watching a filmed stage play. But Monahan’s inventive and precise directorial skills generate a deeply atmospheric tone right from the opening scene, i.e., when Simon Duggan’s camera starts exploring the physical space of Fleming’s apartment with its fishbowl and white curtain. He particularly keeps the imagery dynamic throughout the heated conversations between Weaving and Martin. Eventually, the pivotal dynamics established between these two actors further strengthens the impressive efforts behind the camera. 

 

Eddie Fleming is undoubtedly Hugo Weaving’s best performance, alongside Proof (1991), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), and the scene-stealing turn in The Matrix franchise. Weaving’s alternately teasing and appealing behavior works as the perfect portrayal of a man who could be either guilty or innocent. Tony Martin as the no-nonsense detective is equally brilliant. Altogether, The Interview (104 minutes) is a riveting thriller built around a complex, perception-shifting narrative and an enigmatic protagonist.

  

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Birdboy: The Forgotten Children [2015] – The Quest for Freedom in a Strangely Horrifying World

 

Pedro Rivera and Alberto Vazquez’s Spanish animated feature Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (‘Pscionautas, los ninos olvidados’, 2015) is a gloomy yet beautiful impressionistic parable of survival in an unrelentingly cruel world. Based on the graphic novel by Vazquez, the film revolves around a group of emotionally damaged anthropomorphic animals living in an isolated island-town, which has lost much of its residents to an explosion at the toxic industrial plant. Hordes of surviving ‘rats’ form their own kingdom amidst the industrial trash-heap, calling themselves ‘The Forgotten Children’. 

 

 

The scruffy rats live by a creed, spelled out by their leader: “The future is past. Garbage is the present. Blood is our law.” The other titular character ‘Birdboy’ has clearly become a recluse after the industrial disaster, pursued by a demonic force and also by the fascist police chief. The rest of the well-to-do talking animals of the town suffer from existential crisis and talks of moving away without actually doing it.

 

Birdboy’s slight story-line is told in the form of complex vignettes as each characters’ emotional journey is loosely interconnected. But what makes the film remarkable is its smorgasbord of hauntingly surreal imagery. Although the character drawing - often placed before muted backgrounds - and the realization of ecologically damaged town looks hand-drawn, the simplicity somehow works in bringing depth to the striking visuals. The story is largely centered on three teenage friends, hoping to escape the rubbish-scape and seek a better life in the big city. 

 

Dinky, the smart white mouse, remains nonchalant towards her devoutly religious parents, who intend to crush her ambitions. Sandra is a bunny, who hears evil-voices. Then there’s Zorrito, a compassionate little fox always stereotyped as cunning and thief. Dinky is in love with the elusive and secretive Birdboy. Unbeknownst to the otherworldly terrors and authoritarian police chief (a straight-faced, sadistic canine), Birdboy, a sort of besmirched super-hero devotes himself to finish the task of his dead-father: to restore life in the island. Rounding up this array of colorful characters is a pig fisherman/drug-dealer whose mother's dying body hosts a hideous spider-creature. 

 

 

In ‘Birdboy’, the existential ennui boosted by the environmental decline, drug culture, depression, and vapid life-style, is not only directed towards the anthropomorphic characters. The residents also possess sentient objects like a time-obssessed walking-alarm clock, a lonely piggy bank, and an obnoxious yellow inflatable raft shaped like a duck. These designs of ‘objects with feelings’ inject a tone of comic absurdism that matches well with the directors’ uncanny visual ad thematic preoccupations. 

 

Elsewhere, Rivera and Vazquez imbues a darkly surrealistic tone into the fantastical world that’s remniscent of the works of Jan Svankmejer, Priit Parn, Guillermo del Toro, and Tim Burton. Moroever, the realization of Birdboy’s secret natural paradise (a giant tree nesting countless number of birds) contains the warmth of Hayao Miyazaki’s drawings. Although ‘Birdboy’ is stuffed with outre elements, the characters do confront much of the real-world problems: drugs, violence, ostracism, bullying, and police brutality.

 

There are few outlandish features, conjured just for the sake of it: for example, a Little Baby Jesus squeeze toy that bleeds from eyes or Jonathan, a dog dressed to look like a boy or the glue-sniffing, copper-searching rat scavenger. Such array of oddness thrown within the vignettes threatens to make ‘Birdboy’ either disconnected or overstuffed. But thankfully, the medley of hallucinatory and expressionistic visuals keeps us consistently captivated. Serene as well as intense, Rivera & Vazquez’s compositions of watercolor-style skies, nightmarish macabre interior structures, and endearing character designs stand as a testament to their superme animation artistry. 

 

Keeping in line with the dystopian atmosphere, many of the wide-shots has blank spaces or colorless gaps, which duly accentuates the bleakness. The relentless suffering and violence heaped upon the characters may seem exhausting from a storytelling standpoint. Nevertheless, the distinctly diabolical imagery makes ‘Birdboy: The Forgotten Children’ (76 minutes) a truly unforgettable animated feature of recent times.

  

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Glory [2016] – A Universal and Timeless Tale of Bureaucratic Nightmare

 

East European cinema possesses the knack for offering subtle and powerful tales about people getting thrown under the wheels of apathetic bureaucracy system. Their film-makers (especially the auteurs of the Romanian New Wave) simultaneously employ rough-hewn naturalism and a methodical narrative with preordained gallows humor and well-engineered symbolism. Bulgarian directing duo – Peter Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva’s – second feature film Glory (Slava, 2016) is one such mordantly funny and deeply heart-wrenching tale of systemic corruption and injustice. 

 

Tons of literature and movies may have persistently warned us on how the modern bureaucratic and economic systems are inhumane to the extent that they privilege the nonhuman traits over the human. But still, when a movie gets the grimy realism right, filled with small details and nuanced observations, as in Glory, it happens to be more than a bland recitation of bureaucracy’s long list of negative atttributes. It provokes us to willingly see things from the vantage point of the besmirched protagonist and furthermore to fully grasp the complexness of political/bureaucratic power.

 

Kristina Grozeva and Peter Valchanov have shot together several short films, which were screened at different international film festival. Particularly, the duo’s 2012 short Jump was nominated at the European Film Awards. Their first feature film The Lesson (Urok, 2014) was inspired from a newspaper story and made on shoe-string budget without any state funding. The Lesson revolves around a strict school teacher who wants to teach a lesson to the unknown student, stealing money from classmates during the break. 

 

But a large, unforeseen personal debt bestows a hard-to-digest lesson upon the teacher herself. What ensues is a stark examination of the enduring immoralities in the post-communist Bulgaria. Glory follows an entirely different story but deals with similar themes, and also developed from a small news story. In fact, the directing duo have been planning a third film to once again explore the grim lives of working-class people, which is being dubbed as the ‘Newspaper Clippings’ trilogy.

 

The protagonist of Glory is much-less privileged and more ostracized than the female teacher character in The Lesson. Middle-aged Tzanko Petrov (Stefan Denolyubov) is a railroad linesman. His dishelved looks, stuttering, and hermit-like living draws lot of ridicules in his immediate circle. But Tzanko is content with living in an isolated, dilapidated house with his pet rabbits. Apart from the rabbits, Tzanko feels deep connection with his analog watch (made by Russian company Slava aka Glory), a gift from his deceased father. During working hours, he carries six kilo-heavy wrench to tap and turn the bolts in the railway tracks. He silently passes fellow workers siphoning gas from a railcar. His routine patrol is disrupted when he discovers millions of euros scattered across the tracks. Tzanko honestly reports the money to the authorities, but as they say, ‘no good deed goes unpunished’.

 

The transport ministry is already facing tons of problems. The minister is accused of financial improprieties by a tenacious investigative reporter. So the minister’s PR hotshot Julia Staykova (Margita Gosheva) sees Tzanko’s honest act a god-given opportunity. To distract people’s attention from the financial scandal, she and her heartless cronies, decide to exploit Tzanko’s noble gesture. The railroad worker takes a day off and arrives in time for a pretentious ceremony, where he would be valorized by the minister himself. Tzanko’s cheap suit and temperament evokes lot of condescending comments from Julia and her cohorts. 

 

Right before the ceremony, Julia removes the man’s own watch in order to receive the new one provided by the minister. Tzanko finds that the new watch is a cheap digital one, which runs slowly. To make things worse, Julia misplaces the guy’s keepsake inherited from his father. Frustrated by the bogus gift and Julia’s hostile reaction, Tzankov’s quest for ‘Glory’ only seems destined to turn more ominous.

 

Played by the brilliant Margita Gosheva (protagonist in ‘The Lesson’), Julia Staykova is a much complicated antagonist than what the plot-line may make it sound. In a darkly humorous subplot, we see Julia and her compassionate husband Valeri (Kitodar Todorov) attempting to attain embryonic fertilization. The scenes of Julia undergoing fertilization treatment while being constantly distracted by work-related rapid-fire phone calls, goes for a deliberately symbolic touch. Yet watching Julia in her frenzied, chaotic reality kind of stops her from becoming a cartoonish bad girl. The character is very much grounded in reality, which makes her wilfulness to duplicate and manipulate events more distressful. 

 

Directors Kristina and Peter ably suggest the Tzanko and Julia’s polar opposite nature, by encompassing one in cocoon of silence and natural sounds, while the other is incorporated within noisy, manic atmosphere. The directors metaphorical tools like the wrench, watch, rabbits and the symbolism involved in using a European flag (in the scene Valeri forces Julia to inject herself in the office) may feel pat and transparent. Nevertheless, the methodical precision with which the duo stages these scenes and the superb performances manages to absolutely capture our attention.

 

In the end, Glory (101 minutes) is an irresistibly powerful commentary on the class inequalities and chaotic bureaucracy.

  

Trailer