Reviews

In the opening minutes, I thought this documentary would be about another school shooting -- and it was, but not the kind I assumed. Valentine Road exhaustively documents the events surrounding the murder of an openly queer (and stunningly brave) middle school student by one of his classmates, a killing at the intersection of numerous questions of homophobia, race, education and justice. One of the many talking heads says early on that every adult involved in the situation failed to do their job, and that's just about right.

There are moments when the film demonizes the killer, showing close-ups of an intimidating hooded figure, but also moments where he comes across as tragic, the victim of parental neglect and a social environment that lead him to hate. This makes the latter part of the film, dedicated to the murderer's trial, somewhat awkward -- it's hard to root for any possible outcome.

Valentine Road allows each side a chance to explain themselves, with the only common ground being a tremendous well of pain. Most of the speakers don't acquit themselves well, with several winding up blaming the victim for just being too flamboyant. Formally, it's a fairly ordinary TV documentary, with some thuddingly unsubtle touches. The closing montage set to "Same Love" is particularly cringeworthy, and leaves the viewer with an easy-to-swallow message of gay acceptance instead of the lingering complexities of the case and the seemingly insoluble question of how to respond to such an act of violence. But for presenting those complexities for most of its running time, Valentine Road is definitely worth watching.

The Wild Bunch probably has one of the best opening scenes in American cinema. We see a group of army men riding into town, a symbol of order in the once-chaotic American West, but at the same time there is a sense of foreboding, a sense confirmed by the nearby children playing with a pit of ants and scorpions. As it turns out, the soldiers are actually bank robbers in disguise, and the scruffy figures sitting on rooftops are what passes for the forces of law. But there are no heroes here, just violent animals scrambling for any advantage or momentary pleasure.

And so the robbery ends in a violent shootout in which seemingly half the town is caught in the crossfire. This shootout is shocking both for the level of violence which it openly displays in a genre accustomed to bloodless shootouts in which the bad guy fell down clutching his chest and for the people to whom the violence was directed. Women and children are shot down in the street, with neither side displaying an ounce of compassion. There is none of the order of pistols at high noon, simply a wild hail of bullets that quickly becomes an end in itself.

It's perhaps unrealistic to expect any film to maintain this level of brilliance and shock over two and a half hours (although the best can manage it). Shortly after the shootout, the titular wild bunch go down to Mexico, and the movie turns into something like Vera Cruz without as much charm. There are still some great sequences, and Peckinpah maintains a brilliant visual sensibility throughout, drawing on Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western style.

At its root, The Wild Bunch is a critique of the Western hero and the idea of redemptive violence that drives both genre film and American foreign policy. Here violence always escapes the intent of its perpetrators, and becomes an entity in itself, a kind of free-floating virus that is both horrible and erotic. The film ultimately relents on the amorality of its heroes -- by the end we have the American outlaws avenging the good Mexican by shooting down the bad Mexican. It still turns into chaotic carnage, but this carnage is much easier to contain within the Western's moral tropes. Like many directors of his generation, Peckinpah sets out to critique violent masculinity, but can never really escape its orbit, and the aestheticized violence in the film seduces as much as it repulses.

This is not a movie that everyone will like, but it's an important part of film history, and unlike many important parts of film history it still holds some of its power to surprise and shock today. At the very least, everybody should give it a try.

Until the Light Takes Us unfolds in an elliptical, almost mournful manner, full of empty and sometimes surreal shots and strange associative leaps in its argument. Beneath all of the directorial flourishes (which unfortunately still don't make talking heads interesting) is a chronological narrative about the rise of black metal in Norway, a musical movement which quickly spiralled outward into a cultural sensation and an increasingly violent subculture. All of this history, however, is constantly connected to the movement's intellectual and philosophical ideas. You may have heard of the most shocking events related here, but what really surprises is the mindset of the artists involved.

The film's best decision is to take black metal seriously. Rather than playing this material as grand guignol, or indulging in the tabloid fixation on Satanic imagery, Until the Light Takes Us treats the early days of black metal as a kind of bohemian cultural movement full of creativity. This portrayal gives the documentary a tangible sense of loss. What is lost is not just people, but also the sense of potential that black metal represented. There's a really clever scene where a musician travels to an art show based off black metal imagery, and is totally alienated by a culture that has rendered even the most profane image harmless.

Until the Light Takes Us makes a turn that's both clever and disturbing halfway through, when we realize that most if not all of the artists we've been getting to know for the past half hour are violent fascists. It complicates our earlier sympathies and makes us question the validity of the outsider-artist narrative. Of course, by the end we've descended into full-on murder, best captured in an absolutely unforgettable scene where convicted murderer Varg Vikernes tells a highly questionable story of killing his bandmate in the same manner you would describe going to the grocery store.

This film doesn't have much in the way of new material for those who are familiar with the events and musicians involved. But it deserves points for managing to both sympathize with the devil and realize what the implications of that sympathy are.