PThe Act of Killing

Opens Fri., Aug. 2 at Varsity. 
Not rated. 122 minutes.

“It was like we were killing . . . happily.” The speaker is Anwar Congo, a dandy and former gangster reflecting on his movie-fed youth in mid-’60s Indonesia. He was one of the paramilitary forces licensed by the new military dictatorship to dispatch over one million “Communists”—a catchall meaning anyone who’d previously supported President Sukarno, with special emphasis on ethnic Chinese. Like Armenia and Rwanda, Indonesia belongs to that second tier of genocides outside modern European borders. During 1965–66, world attention was focused on Vietnam. The TV cameras weren’t rolling, an oversight that director Joshua Oppenheimer now corrects in the most unsettling fashion.

There are no mass graves here dug up by backhoe, no old newsreel footage, no historians or interviews with the families of the bereaved. Instead, Oppenheimer somehow ingratiated himself with Congo and his cohort, convincing them to make a movie that would garishly, heroically re-enact their past misdeeds. His method is patently a con, like the recent stunt documentary The Ambassador; he’s a liar in search of the truth. His naive yet murderous subjects frequently ask his opinion, off-camera, as if he were a sympathetic participant in the project. Outside Indonesia, they will be judged more harshly, but Oppenheimer bites his tongue on set. (A few graphics and intertitles supply the necessary context.)

What’s the efficient approach to killing without too much mess? Congo cheerfully demonstrates his method with the garrote, baling wire with a wood handle, wrapped around an actor’s neck. Watching Oppenheimer’s video playback, he says the costumes are all wrong—white pants would show the blood. Reshoots will be required. And maybe he should dye his hair. In the studio and a few bizarre outdoor tableaux with grinning showgirls, the perpetrators ritually restage their murders and massacres—it’s celebratory for them, perhaps cathartic on some level, but you could never imagine Nazis being treated in this grotesque, ironic manner. (Instead of the banality of evil, we have the kitsch of evil.)

Would Eichmann or Mengele or their foot-soldiers ever admit they were wrong? We live in a different era, of reality-TV confessions; people now behave according to, or cop to, whatever gets the best ratings. One of the killers says, “ ‘War crimes’ are defined by the winners.” He and Congo can express their remorse—whether genuine or just another act for the camera—from the safety of the winning side. Fifty years later, they know they won’t be prosecuted for their deeds. We watch the same movie, astonished, while they just smile. Brian Miller

PBlackfish

Opens Fri., Aug. 2 at Seven Gables.
Rated PG-13. 83 minutes.

My childhood hero Namu was the second killer whale kept in captivity (he came to the Seattle waterfront on my birthday in 1965), and we owe him a lot. The world understood almost nothing about these fantastic creatures until Namu proved how bright, social, and instinctively friendly killer whales are. That was good. The problem was, everybody saw how the trainable and lovable animals could be used to make money. And that has led to a decades-long controversy that ought to have been settled by now.

Blackfish should be the final word on the subject, even if it probably won’t be. This relentless documentary circles around the 2010 death of Dawn Brancheau, a supremely experienced SeaWorld trainer who was killed in a performing tank by Tilikum, a 12,000-pound whale. But that death is the starting point for a film that makes a couple of general thrusts: Killer whales should not be kept in captivity, and the sea parks that own them have done a suspiciously incomplete job of informing their trainers and the public about how they operate their businesses.

The argument is devastating—enough so that SeaWorld has issued a statement denouncing the movie. Interviews with former SeaWorld trainers paint a sad picture of a happy-face culture that sugar-coated the containment of giant wild animals; because of the industry’s expert PR spin, the trainers themselves would hear only vague rumors about injuries in marine parks. (SeaWorld isn’t the only player, but is the most prominent.)

Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite looks into fatal incidents at Victoria, B.C.’s Sealand of the Pacific and Loro Parque on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The 1991 Victoria incident also involved Tilikum, which brought about the sale of the unfortunate whale to SeaWorld, for whom he has been a steady performer and sperm donor. Blackfish frequently visits Puget Sound for interviews with local experts as well as visions of healthy killer whales plowing through their fenceless natural habitat. (Tilikum was captured not in local waters but in the North Atlantic, in 1983.) Cowperthwaite also charts the development in our understanding of the mammals, from the scare-mongering Jaws ripoff Orca (released in 1977) to today’s evidence about their highly developed brains. No mention of Free Willy, oddly.

As if all this weren’t difficult enough to watch, Blackfish has an unpleasant undertone of voyeurism—I began to cringe every time we went to newsreel footage, wondering how much horror we were going to see in this particular example of whale-on-human violence. I’m not sure how you make this film without showing those things, but it’s worth noting that an exploitation movie like Orca creates a similar kind of tawdry suspense.

Still: If Blackfish outrages people, so much the better. The case is closed, and whales and dolphins are too high on the evolutionary scale to keep captive. We learned a lot from Namu and his followers, and now we know better. Robert Horton

Grabbers

Runs Fri., Aug. 2–Thurs., Aug. 8 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 94 minutes.

This lighthearted Irish creature-com lays out its premise a little earlier than needed. That being: Tentacled, bloodsucking aliens are spawning on the beach of a small island where the two cops (or Garda) don’t even carry guns. But the ocean-dwelling “grabbers,” as they’re called, find alcohol toxic—so let’s all get drunk to defend ourselves! This is not a movie to fret about unsavory Irish stereotypes, though it’s full of colorful village types, from the pub-keeper to the priest to the fisherman who pulls up the first writhing beast and unwisely stores it in his bathtub.

Director Jon Wright and writer Kevin Lehane draw equally from the Jaws and Gremlins playbooks, killing off a few named characters but mainly going for laughs. The bigger, male monster remains hidden for the most of the film (it can roam inland in the rain, pinwheeling on its many limbs). Its smaller, egg-laying mate is treated more for comedy: When she springs into face-sucking mode in the lab, our panicked heroes use brooms, chairs, and a rolled-up magazine to drive the thing off. The mood here is essentially Keystone Cops go Gaelic.

Local constable Ciaran O’Shea (Richard Coyle) is an alcoholic barely competent to do his job on an island without any crime. (Of his qualifications, he says, “I watch a lot of Columbo.”) Subbing as his partner is no-nonsense Dublin officer Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley). She naturally disapproves of feckless Ciaran, and you can predict how their relationship will evolve—particularly after teetotaler Lisa has to get soused to inoculate herself against the monsters and their crawling grubs. Grabbers uses its CG budget sparingly but effectively. The real production value lies in the coastal scenery of County Donegal. You can see why aliens would want to visit. The local tourist slogan could be, Come for the blood, stay for the pints. Brian Miller

The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear

Runs Fri., Aug. 2–Thurs., Aug. 8 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated.
101 minutes.

If minimalism was an economic necessity for filmmaker Tinatin Gurchiani—she had a few thousand dollars to spend on her first feature—it also fits her purpose. Her documentary is a narrow-gauge look at a sliver of real life in small-town Georgia in the former USSR. Gurchiani visits a rural community in the Caucasus and puts out a call to young people who might want to appear on camera. The very first fellow we see onscreen is much older than that demographic, an early indication that curiosity about being in a movie trumps all other considerations. He admits he has never done a film, but has always thought he might be good for, say, Jean-Claude Van Damme sorts of roles; he’s got some of those moves. Can he do the midair splits, asks the offscreen director? In the past, yes, answers our modest-looking villager, who looks more like a figure from a 19th-century lithograph than from a chopsocky action picture. He’d have to start practicing again.

The sneaking suspicion that “I would be good in movies” is voiced by more than one subject, overshadowing the ethnographic aspects of Gurchiani’s film. Having met some of these folks in interviews, we then see them in their lives, which vary from mundane workaday duties to a dramatic account of a young woman who finds the mother who abandoned her years earlier. The Machine doesn’t explain itself—was the young woman planning to seek out her mother before the movie crew came to town, or was this something proposed by the filmmaker? Is the incident playing out as it would have without cameras, or is the drama heightened for our view? Even without these questions, The Machine has conventional documentary strengths: It’s a precise if low-key look at a corner of the world where life goes on in timeworn ways despite the realities of digital cameras and Van Damme pictures.

By looking closely at these people (her fellow Georgian citizens), Gurchiani makes them movie actors. The camera reveals sincerity, guile, and anxiety just as it does with professionals, even if an accident of birth has relegated these folks to a farm community half the world away from Hollywood. The film’s simple method has shortened the presumed distance between the superstars and the rest of us—or it’s exposed how pervasive is the wish to be seen in a screen culture that touches every part of the world. Robert Horton

Still Mine

Opens Fri., Aug. 2 at Harvard Exit.
Rated PG-13. 103 minutes.

You could call this Canadian melodrama of octogenarians aging in place the anti-Amour, since it embraces all the affirmative sentiment that Michael Haneke eschews. Instead, building upon a true incident in New Brunswick, writer/director Michael McGowan posits a much gentler entry into the great senescence. Married 60 years, Craig (James Cromwell) and Irene (Genevieve Bujold) live in the same decrepit farmhouse where they raised seven kids. (Only two figure in the story, thankfully.) Still spry at 87, Craig fells timber on his 2,000 acres and mills planks in the woodshed. As Irene exhibits signs of memory loss, he decides to retire the cows and crops to build their final dream house—small and efficient on one level, using his land, lumber, and construction know-how.

In this scenic coastal province full of self-sufficient rural folk, in a country that’s famously (if stereotypically) polite and reasonable, who’s the villain of Still Mine? The pasty bureaucracy that oversees land use and construction! “Why would I need a permit?” asks a flustered Craig, his project half-completed. “This is my land.” In an American movie infused with Tea Party anger, an armed standoff might ensue. But there are no guns or threats here; Craig’s lawyer (Campbell Scott) gives him reasonable advice; and Craig’s adult children are gently rebuffed for trying to help. “I can manage,” he insists, and Cromwell’s unfussy but affecting performance fits that flinty, independent spirit. Craig and Irene are loving but not frivolous; they’re old enough to have been shaped by the Great Depression. Nothing gets thrown out, and there’s a distrust of filigree and pomp. Together, Cromwell and Bujold create a poignant portrait of marriage under constant, faithful repair—if one partner falters, the other picks up the slack (doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats be damned).

That said, Amour and the similar Away From Her were much better entries in the genre of decline-with-dignity. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel offered comedy outside the cemetery gates, and Still Mine gives us stoic fidelity, if little drama. Craig and Irene’s approach to dotage may not be viable down south in our overregulated states, but isn’t it nice to think they could live ever happily after? Brian Miller

E

film@seattleweekly.com