Movie Review: Cold Comes the Night

One of the pleasures of the Hawaii International Film Festival, which just wrapped up in Honolulu, is the chance to see films before they get a wider release. For example, Cold Comes the Night, starring Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, which screened Oct. 18. Director and co-writer Tze Chun and producer, Mynette Louie (who has Hawaii ties), were on hand to answer audience questions after the screening—another pleasure of film festivals, meeting the filmmakers.

Bryan Cranston and Alice Eve in Cold Comes the Night

Their independent film has been picked up for domestic and international distribution this coming January by Sony Pictures,  every young filmmaker's dream.

I wish them well. It's quite a coup to score Cranston, whose popularity alone will draw an audience, but I suspect those audiences will be left cold. While Cold Comes the Night is gorgeous to look at, the storytelling is a mess. I could stop there, except that I'm fascinated by the kind of mess it is, because it's something I see a lot of in independent film—great visuals, weak writing.

As filmmaking technology has gotten cheaper and the art form has democratized, we seem to have a generation of homage-makers who know what looks good and excel at replicating the visual style of the films they love but who are less skillful with plot, characterization or internal consistency. If I was feeling churlish, I'd say that they've seen too many good movies and read too few good books.

Example 1: In Cold Comes the Night (spoilers ahead!), Cranston plays Topo, an aging, half-blind Polish career criminal who has stopped for the night in upstate New York's crappiest motel, run by single mom, Chloe. Topo and a companion are traveling north to deliver a package to the shadowy underworld of Quebec (is there such a thing? yes, there is!). The companion does something bad and the small town police impound the Jeep in which the package is hidden.

Topo takes Chloe and her little girl hostage and forces them to take him to the impound lot. There's a great, tense scene where Topo sends Chloe into the lot to break into the Jeep. By now, Topo and other characters have established quite clearly that whatever this package is, it is hidden behind the car stereo in the Jeep's dashboard. Chloe breaks in, pulls off the stereo face, feels around in the small space behind it—but the package is gone. The entire action of the film is the pursuit of this package.

When we see this package later, it is a bag of money. A big bag. Like, airplane carry-on big. Bowling ball bag big. Gym bag big.

There is no physical reality in which this much money was ever stashed behind a car stereo.

An envelope of diamonds would've fit, or a thumb drive full of Vital Information—but not this bag. To me, that's beyond a continuity error, that's just careless disregard for storytelling. I suspect if Chun and his co-writers ever worried about this, they set aside such a minor detail for the sake of the smart visual which bookends the film: A bloody $100 bill, blown by the wind against a kitchen window, encapsulating the film's noir theme of criminality colliding with domesticity. And how much money is worth killing over? A big damn bag full.

Example 2: Topo is well established as a ruthless man, perfectly willing to shoot Chloe's little girl if it will get him what he wants. As he and Chloe pursue the Big Damn Bag of Money, there's a scene where they are confronted by two characters trying to stop them. Topo shoots one dead, with a single shot. (Isn't he half-blind? Nevermind, his evil is as accurate as ever!) Then, inexplicably, Topo merely subdues the far more dangerous of the two opposing characters and leaves him tied to a radiator.

Why, why, why? Because obviously this guy has to be the loose end, the wild card, who delivers the final, fatalistic shoot-out Chun wants for his film, whether or not this makes any sense within the context of the story Chun himself chose to tell. Naturally, this shootout is the source of the bloody $100 bill flapping ominously against the window of normal life.

But it all looks terrific.

Well, I don't mean single out Chun. Like I said, I see the triumph of style over storytelling in many a sincere, earnest, heartfelt independent film effort—and I wouldn't for a moment second guess that Cold Comes the Night is such an effort; that Chun, as he told us during the Q&A after the screening, really put his love of crime films into his movie. (Surely, one sees this sort of thing in mainstream movies, too, it just feels more disappointing in an independent film somehow, where there is supposedly a higher value placed on storytelling.)

Aspiring directors and screenwriters, do yourselves a favor: read J.R.R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories." No matter what genre you're working in, you are engaged in the work he addresses, which is creating an imaginary Secondary World which, in order to be believable and transporting for the audience, has to be as internally consistent as our Primary World, or the deal is blown.

See the trailer for Cold Comes the Night here.

World's Best Museum Caption

Seen at the Honolulu Museum of Art:

The corresponding item does not disappoint. It is indeed a “plaque with yak.” Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to find this Seussian sign for yourself. I offer no prizes, let your quest through the galleries be its own reward.

Also, check out “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawaii Pictures” while you’re there. Interesting side-note: both of these 20th-century masters where brought to the Islands by commerce, with O'Keeffe invited out by an advertising agency for work that would be used in Dole Pineapple ads, while Adams' second trip was at the behest of Bishop National Bank (now First Hawaiian Bank) to shoot for a book on Hawaii the bank was producing. I don't think mid-century America gets enough credit for being a time when high-brow culture and middle-brow culture worked comfortably with one another.

Speaking of Seuss, the museum is also running its Artists of Hawaii 2013 exhibit, until Nov. 24, including the acrylic paintings of Ryan Higa, whose line work and flat color blocks of bright pastels always struck me as heavily influenced by Dr. Seuss books, especially the color palette of I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sellew. 

Kapiolani Modernism

Enjoyed a terrific tour today of the mid-century modern standouts along Kapiolani, between Piikoi and Atkinson. Some 70 people turned out for the tour, organized by the Hawaii chapter of do.co,mo.mo_us (that ungainly abbreviation standing for "International committee for the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the modern movement.")

We converged on the Design Within Reach store at Ala Moana Center, where architectural historian Don Hibbard gave us an overview of Kapiolani Boulevard's history before we hit the street for a guided tour of 12 buildings put up between 1938 and 1971.

Things I never knew until Hibbard told us: There was no Kapiolani Boulevard until it was paved out of swampland around 1924 to 1928. It was the first major street in Honolulu to be designed for the automotive era, and you can see this in the way lots were used—freestanding buildings with eye-catching exteriors, each surrounded by its own parking lot. The street started as two lanes and has been steadily widened, right up to the monkeypod trees that were planted along its length.

The docents had done their homework for each building. Even better, the architects themselves were on hand for two stops, with Frank Haines telling us about the Kenrock Building (1951) and Sid Snyder, who worked with Vladimir Ossipoff, filling us in on Ossipoff's Hawaiian Life Building (1951). Here's Sid now, with his drawings:

I've been living on or near Kapiolani Boulevard for seven years and never noticed some of the details that were pointed out to me today. For example, on the Ewa side of the Seaboard Finance Building (1956)—you know, the building by the driveway to Republik nightclub—rough wooden forms were used to give the concrete wall a basket-weave grid that echoes the square panes of dark-tinted windows on its other sides:

Today's event was dubbed "Kapiolani Boulevard: Honolulu's Miracle Mile," and I admit, I found that a head-scratcher. I've never heard it called that in all my life! But as Hibbard explained, it was Paradise of the Pacific, predecessor to today's Honolulu Magazine, which dubbed it that in a 1949 article about the street's exciting new developments. The nickname hung in until about the the mid-1950s.

I missed the ’50s. Most of the ’60s too. All of my life, Kapiolani has been one of Honolulu's dumpiest thoroughfares, and, while it's getting better, some stops on the tour are still stuck in that mode. That building next to 7-11 which, until recently, was home to adult toy store Backseat Betty's? When built in 1948, it was the squeaky clean Alexander Brothers Building, enhanced with tens of thousands of dollars worth of now long-lost neon. And that run-down glass box with Jazz Minds in the back and a succession of x-rated peepshows up front? In 1949, that was the shiny, new Boysen Paints building. (Which, incidentally, has the same cladding of thin, reddish-brown Arizona sandstone bricks as the Kenrock Building because both were designed by Cy Lemmon. He liked the stuff.)

Can you imagine some innocent, young 1948 newlyweds standing in the Boysen Paints showroom, picking out colors for their first home? Can you imagine them thinking, "Oh, I can totally see this place becoming a porno palace!" And yet ... it did. To be fair, Jazz Minds classes up the joint a lot, especially given that its corner of the building was, 20 years ago, home to the phenomenally decadent Wild Horse Showroom.

All I can tell you is, they didn't show horses there.

But pendulums swing and Kapiolani is changing. I was stunned today to see that the Walgreens-which-used-to-be-Tower-Records was just torn down. Coming soon, a new Walgreens building. I hope its architects looked around the neighborhood for inspiration. If Kapiolani really is turning around in the near future, we might end up with a fascinating street on which first generation modernism stands side-by-side with examples of the early 21st century Modernism Revival that's so much the rage these days.

Architecture buffs, check out more photos and details from the day at docomomohawaii's Facebook page. And keep an eye out for the group's monthly talks, too.

Postscript: Within the past few weeks I've experienced two cultural moments at Ala Moana Center. I was among the 100 or so people who descended upon GameStop for the midnight release of Grand Theft Auto V—poised to be The Biggest Entertainment Event in the History of Forever with $1 billion in sales already. And then this lovely day of architecture history hosted at Design With Reach. Interesting that each event had similar turnouts.

I know it's fashionable, among a certain sensitive, highly educated demographic, to bemoan shopping centers as temples of mindless consumerism, as cultural wastelands, as examples of All that is Wrong with America. Well, get over yourselves, sensitive people. Malls are our Forums and I predict that, to survive in an age of social media and online shopping, malls will have to make themselves essential for actual face-to-face encounters between live humans with common interests. And this will be awesome.

Advertising Fail: Burger King

So I pull up to the drive-thru of a University-area Burger King today and I see this bit of promotional material:

I'm unconvinced that linking anger to a resurgence of desire for an ex is a good way to sell a burger. Unless you're appealing to the people who drown their frustrated, broken-hearted, self-loathing in pepper jack cheese, jalapenos, crispy onions and thick-cut bacon.

Remembering Tom Clancy

I was working at the USS Bowfin submarine museum in Pearl Harbor through high school and college when Tom Clancy emerged as a bestselling author in the ’80s, so naturally, his suspenseful tale of a rogue Soviet submarine skipper defecting with his state-of-the-art ballistic missile submarine was irresistible. The Hunt for Red October (1984) and Red Storm Rising (1987) felt like passports into the real world of modern espionage and warfare, even though they were fiction.

These books also meant something to me as a young writer. First, there was Clancy's style, simultaneously journalistic and cinematic. Crisp, active sentences efficiently take the reader around the world, from the White House to the Kremlin to the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, or the stateroom of a ship's captain, alone with his worries. Second, there was Clancy's origin story—don't all superheroes have origin stories?—of the anonymous insurance salesman turned bestselling author, seemingly overnight.

It wasn't that simple for Clancy, of course. Here's a great interview with Deborah Grovsenor, the Naval Institute Press editor who took a chance on publishing The Hunt for Red October when that house mainly published textbooks and histories. We wouldn't see a similar breakout from niche publishing to mass market until J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books took off when brought to the U.S. by just-for-kids publisher, Scholastic.

A careful student of world events and military technology, Clancy put a lot of ideas into his fiction that made him seem prescient. Now that he has passed away, folks are rounding up his uncanny "predictions." For me, one of his most perceptive insights formed the basis for his depiction of a limited World War III in Red Storm Rising. The book now seems like a Cold War time capsule, playing out a war between the Soviet Union and NATO in Western Europe. However, the incident that started the war could be lifted from today's headlines: the book opens at a Soviet oil production facility where some of the staff engineers turn out to be jihadist terrorists. They shoot up the Russian engineers they had worked alongside for years, then blow up the facility, taking themselves out in the process. The loss of this key facility sends the USSR into a massive energy crisis, just before winter, forcing the Kremlin to launch a war for resources.

So there was Clancy, way back in 1987, warning that Islamist terrorism could very well go beyond the random hijackings of the 1970s to cripple the global superpowers themselves. It's the kind of "what if" that makes Clancy now seem like some kind of prophet when, really, he was simply paying attention.