FILM REVIEW: THE RAID 2

A scene from The Raid 2. 

Spray cans of whoop ass

By John Esther

Three years after the 2011 film, The Raid: Redemption, writer-director Gareth Evans returns with the highly anticipated, vehemently violent sequel, The Raid 2. 

Essentially commencing where The Raid: Redemption finished, the sequel finds the protagonist, Rama (Iko Uwais) going undercover to infiltrate a crime syndicate and bring everybody down, especially the crooked cops at the top. 

As Rama falls deeper and deeper into his undercover role, he begins to lose his senses of what is right and wrong, incrementally becoming more punitive toward his aggressors. Of course, in a society where cops and government officials are as crooked as the gangsters, who can tell what is right and wrong? The only thing to know for sure is how to survive and fight another day.

As gratuitously violent as any insane person would want it to be, The Raid 2 makes the balletic violence in 300: Rise of an Empire and the ejaculatory explosions in Need for Speed look like bloody adolescent-minded masturbation (even more so than before). Here in The Raid 2, faces are bludgeoned, legs are snapped, heads are smashed, arms are amputated, etc., via baseball bats to the head, hammers to the throat, knives to the chest, etc. There is also a lot of death-by-furniture. Only the insecure need a gun to fight here in Jakarta, Indonesia. 

For a while the martial arts choreography make the violence somewhat entertaining, or thrilling at least. Perhaps it is psychologically appealing? There is something deeply existential about seeing Rama trapped in a situation, facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles and then watch him think, or respond, using his mental and physical skills, his way out of the situation. Who does not wish he or she could master the environment like Rama?

However, after a while, the violence becomes a means unto itself in this 150-minute film. Each fight becomes prolonged and belligerent, thrusting the earlier thrills of the film into plotting mechanics as Rama must work his way through a game of death until all evildoers are vanquished. Ultimately, the martial artistic choreography becomes bloodthirsty pornography. 

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DVD REVIEW: BEDWAYS

 Hans (Matthias Faust) and Marie (Lana Cooper) in Bedways.

Here we come

By Don Simpson

In a dilapidated and sparsely furnished Berlin apartment, an aspiring director named Nina (Miriam Mayet) and her two thespians -- Marie (Lana Cooper) and Hans (Matthias Faust) -- screen test for a yet-to-be-scripted film. The video project is is based upon a simple premise: Nina intends to capture authentic feelings, authentic love and authentic sex.

Nina attempts to maintain full directorial control by maniacally manipulating her actors as if they are puppets and she is pulling their strings. The borders between fiction and reality are promptly blurred as Marie and Hans try to decipher what their director really wants from them. According to Nina, Marie and Hans should not play themselves or anyone else -- but what does that mean?

The sexual histories between Nina and both of her subjects further complicates the on- and off-camera scenario. The project quickly evolves into a warped seduction in which Nina pushes everyone’s emotions, including her own, to the limit. Nina, Marie and Hans experience a titillating tilt-a-whirl of emotions and desires, a disorienting ride that thrives off of jealousy, grief and anger.

Can cinematic authenticity be faked? Do Marie and Hans really need to fall in love with each other in order for Nina’s film to succeed? Can two people fall in love in front of the unblinking kino eye and an authoritative voyeur?

Nina is not the only voyeur in the equation as German filmmaker RP Kahl often positions the camera statically at distance in order to form a voyeuristic perspective for the audience. The camera does occasionally venture in for a closer view of the sexual encounters as if to verify for the audience that the penetration is authentic -- like Nina, his onscreen avatar, Kahl is incredibly fascinated by cinematic realism.

By utilizing the film-within-a-film narrative format, Kahl creates a world in which it is practically impossible to decipher when the actors are acting for Nina and when we are witnessing the actors’ reality. In doing so, Kahl discusses how cinema blurs the identities of its actors and contemplates the relationship between their on- and off-screen persona.

Bedways is an experimental chamber piece that concentrates on three actors encased for the most part in one location. This incredibly intimate narrative technique is cleverly juxtaposed with the mental and spacial distancing of intimacy and sex. One of the more telling scenes -- that purposefully bookends Bedways -- is when we witness Hans and Nina masturbating in separate rooms while observing each other via monitors; eventually they reach their limits of torture, the separation becomes too much, and Nina commands for Hans to come to her.

A worthy attempt to merge the worlds of art house and erotic cinema (a la Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience; Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs; Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and Chloe; the films of Joe Swanberg; etc.), Bedways aptly blurs the definition of erotic cinema by giving us a well-crafted and incredibly dramatic film with some penetrating sex thrown in.

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