Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop

Directed by Rodman Flender

Opens June 24

Despite the multimillion dollar contract buyout (and similar if significantly less sweet position landed a few months later), Conan O’Brien’s battle with his bosses seems uniquely resonant in our current financial moment. Though the majority of people outraged by NBC’s treatment probably couldn’t quote one of his jokes or cite a character that’s been on his show in the past five years, the betrayal felt universal. Thankfully, so does the pleasure to be had in this documentary.

Very little of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop‘s briskly paced 89 minutes dwells on his departure from the Tonight Show or the motivations behind the nationwide tour he launched immediately after, film crew in tow. It turns out the answer is in the title, but O’Brien’s compulsory need to create, perform and be funny rings true in the sweetest, most unpolluted sense. Be it in a room with his writers, demanding that everyone speak into a banana or have their comments ignored, or in some weird Midwestern concert hall in front of thousands, he brings the same blend of absurdist and incisive humor, all the while transmitting a great deal of kindness and intelligence.

Like in any good roadshow movie, there’s a lot of musical performances, and peeks behind the scenes with assistants, friends, fans, and fellow celebrities, hearkening back to verité classics like Gimme Shelter in self-contained snippets that beg to be shared with the uninitiated. (Though they’re far too numerous to mention, a particularly choice moment is when he plays “Dueling Banjos” while making fun of Jack McBrayer.) There are also frequent instances where the frustration and exhaustion of such a commitment becomes evident. But in an age where cynicism and puerile irony runs unchecked, it’s kind of beautiful to see someone love something so much he could do it until he drops dead.

Viva Riva!
Directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga

The fact that one of the most vivid, ambitious cinematic offerings of 2011 comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a country that never had an indigenous film industry and hasn’t had a movie theater in at least a dozen years––should inspire more filmmakers than any self-congratulatory tale that Tarantino or Rodriguez ever spun.

A viciously tragic spin on the traditional trickster narrative, writer-director-producer Djo Tunda Wa Munga’s Viva Riva! adopts Nollywood’s bombastic swagger and preoccupation with everyday problems from corruption to power outages, but without its typically slack acting or evangelical denouements. Riva (Patsha Bay) returns home to the DRC after ten years in Angola, pockets fat with cash he got from stealing a barge of crude in the midst of a nationwide fuel shortage. During his multi-evening homecoming party, he sets his sights on the one prize that could possibly top his last conquest: the impossibly sensual Nora (Manie Malone), kept woman of gangster kingpin Azor (Diplome Amekindra). But while Riva’s busy thinking with his dick, club-hoping and antagonizing Nora with his macho romantic overtures, a much more sinister threat to his livelihood is pursuing him: the mercurial Angolan gangster Cesar (Hoji Fortuna) and his cronies, who Riva ripped off. With the Commander, a blackmailed Congolese lesbian, as their guide, the gangsters mercilessly burn, beat and shotgun their way back to Cesar’s oil.

The ease with which brutality comes to most of the characters—with the notable exception of the Commander––speaks to the DRC’s continued reality of roving militias. During one interrogation, the owners of a roadside cafe turn up the radio as a trucker is beaten to death by Cesar’s men, but are still horrified by what they’re witnessing. Similarly, the freedom with which xenophobia flows cynically belies the myth of pan-Africanism: despite wearing a diamond-encrusted medallion in the shape of the continent, one of Cesar’s cronies routinely slurs the DRC, as does Cesar himself: “Your country is the worst shit pile I’ve ever seen. Maybe you should’ve stayed colonized.” (This comes after he’s been stripped and imprisoned in a flea-bitten cell by local police, simply for being Angolan.)

But as a counterpoint to all this violence is something rarely glimpsed in African film, past or present: sexuality. Bouncing waistbeads are unapologetically on display, shown without any sense of leering voyeurism; Munga’s camera hints at scent and touch, a rarity in any language. From the Commander’s prostitute-lover to nightclub gyrations to cunnilingus through a window grate (absurd, yes, but a turning point in Nora’s feelings for Riva), it’s sensual panoply that’s just as affecting and genuine as the violence. When’s the last time you saw oral, not as a joke or merely hinted at, in Hollywood?

Opens June 10

United Red Army (2007)
Directed by Koji Wakamatsu

The panicked refrain “This isn’t revolution!” echoes throughout Koji Wakamatsu’s expansive, 190-minute docudrama about the student movement in 1960s and 70s Japan. In each instance it’s shouted by a different character, but always far too late to turn things around. It’s obvious, today, that these socialist militants failed; neither glowing hagiography nor glowering condemnation, United Red Army is about the why of that failure—in exacting detail, and with plenty of time to think it over.

Wakamatsu never gives the film over completely to one stylistic impulse. Beginning with a fast-paced history of the events leading up to the formation of the URA, blending stock footage of student protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty with reenactments of intercine battles with two-by-sixes, United Red Army becomes a more conventional, character-driven narrative of the group’s paramilitary training exercises in the Japanese alps. Tinkly, sentimental music plays as the corpses of those beaten to death during the party’s many purges pile up, honoring melodramatic tradition. Yet, a la Carlos, there’s a just-the-facts approach to characterization, extending from performance and costume to the voiceovered backstories and onscreen bios. While Wakamatsu avoids editorializing, the ages of the characters, flashed on screen at during their first appearances and at their deaths somehow becomes incredibly affecting. Nearly everyone is under 24, driving home the pointlessness of the deaths of 15 radicals, all executed for age-reflective, insgnificant ideological infractions. They destroy themselves before the outside world gets a chance, and for no good reason. This impotent self-destruction and eventually becomes darkly comic, with the URA leadership insistingupon endless “self-criticism”sessions for members perceived as threats to their authority, for doing things that people in their early 20s do, like wear makeup and have sex. Radical student leader Hiroko Nagata’s (Akie Namiki) propensity to stare icily out of windows is eventually reminiscent of the evil queen from Disney’s Snow White: half cartoon, half psychopath.

After trawling through the endless brutality of these sessions, defections and the infamous Asama-Sanso shootout, a 10-hour standoff at a mountain vacation lodge), the movie becomes a rapidly scrolling, text-only timeline that follows the URA’s activities from the mid-70s to today, from hijackings in the Middle East to the arrests of long-wanted ex-radicals. Finding another movie that emanates such complete cruel absurdity is rare; finding someone who believes United Red Army is essential viewing is probably rarer. It’s difficult viewing for even the staunchest Marxist, and not just for the excruciating sit time: pathology is rarely palatable. With extremely low-lit shots, it’s often difficult to discern what’s going on—but even that, ultimately, wouldn’t make the URA’s actions any more intelligible.

Opens May 27 at IFC Center

Rubber
Directed by Quentin Dupieux

Not unlike some bacon-wrapped date, Rubber flawlessly incorporates opposing tastes with its gorgeously photographed opening salvo: a cop car slowly crawls down a dirt road, sideswiping a line of wooden folding chairs. After toppling the last chair, the cop exits and delivers a speech directly to the camera about how in movies, as in life, so much of what is, is that way for no reason. But rather than descending into nihilism, it’s clear Rubber will celebrate the unified field as the list of examples quickly slide into absurdity: “Why was E.T. brown? No reason… Why did a perfectly talented pianist like Adrian Brody hide in a dumpy apartment for years? No reason!” As the cop drives off, the camera pans to reveal a group of people with binoculars who stare impatiently into the surrounding desert. For a while we watch them, and then we are treated to what they are trying to view, though not as they see it: a tire. Inexplicably, it picks itself up, and, like a drunk or a child, wobblingly rolls through the scrub, occasionally falling. Eventually it bumps into a discarded beer bottle, and, with a power as inexplicably as its sentience, explodes the empty with its mind It then goes on to explode a tarantula, a crow, and a man’s head. The formula-malevolent semi-consciousness, dusty signposts of Americana, explosions-remains amusingly absurd throughout. Or will, at least, for those connoisseurs of the Adult Swim-style comedy of bludgeoning repetition. (There’s no such thing as guilty pleasures, just pleasure, people!) In between each paroxysm of tire-fury are moments of expansive silence, which exists somewhere between Kiarostamian meditation on landscape and pregnant pause.

While all this is going on, the audiences showcase a range of impulses — to anthropomorphize and gender the tire; to shush their fellow-viewers’ commentary and insist upon silence; the one guy who tries to videotape it for his wife — in short, things you may very well be doing as you watch it. Preoccupied with getting their money’s worth (and what they want out of the viewing experience), they fail to notice the nonexistent physical boundary between their world and that of “the story” or their suspicious viewing conditions, with fatal consequences. These layers transform Rubber from complete waste of time to more nuanced medium-fuckery, a la Week-end. The lead cop’s consistent breaking of the fourth wall (which occurs because he’s lazy and wants to go home) also seems to beg this comparison, sans solemn self-importance. Rubber may not be everyone’s comedic go-to, but certainly it’s a sui generis indie that doesn’t portend to be anything more than its 86 minutes — except, of course, for the sweetly brilliant Kraftwerk-influenced score, composed and produced by the director himself.

Opens April 1