Goats don't usually get this much to eat, but this one is high up in the Party.

The hermetically sealed theocracy-meets-Stalinist dictatorship of North Korea does not allow foreign reporters or filmmakers onto their territory. The state’s quasi-racist ideology shuns them – they might taint Korean purity. So, aside from the Chinese and Russian workers who necessarily do cross-border business, or the odd tourist from harmless countries like Switzerland, there are not many people who can talk about North Korea with the kind of first-hand experience that makes a documentary especially compelling. N. C. Heikin’s Kimjongilia skirts around those foreign middlemen and goes directly to the source: North Korean refugees who have successfully made it to South Korea. Their stories, told through filmed interviews, are harrowing, horrifying, and rarely have a happy ending.

The film, which takes its name from a flower named in honor of the Dear Leader, is built primarily around these interviews. And Heikin has chosen well: the interviewees represent a broad cross-section of North Korean society. Some, like a concert pianist and a highish-ranking military officer, come from privileged (relatively speaking) backgrounds. Others toiled away in squalid conditions as farmers. What these subjects have in common is their fate: most ended up in the system of concentration camps that crisscrosses North Korea. One unlucky soul was even born in a camp. For anyone who has read literature by authors who survived the Holocaust or the gulag system in the USSR, the picture that emerges will seem familiar. Life is, for the most part, tightly regimented, with a few little pockets of freedom. Creativity is extinguished.  The system as a whole forces people to exploit one another to survive. This is ugly but necessary viewing.

Heiken is to be commended for capturing the little details that convey some essential element of his interviewee’s humanity. The way the military officer, though controlled in his speech, wears an intense and angry look on his face when he talks about the government. The that the man born in the concentration camp tents his hands over and over while he talks – maybe to hide a mutilated finger, maybe because it’s a deeply-ingrained gesture of submission, maybe for no reason at all. The way the voice of the woman who was sold into sexual slavery in China for 5 years remains steady, even when she discusses her risky escape. With some interviewees, the camera begins with a closeup on the eye before moving down to the mouth. Such artifice can be distracting and annoying when employed too often (see the first season Errol Morris’s documentary series First Person for a perfect example of this), but here its used sparingly enough that it retains its effectiveness. (It occurred to me later that it may also be a device to obscure the identity of some of the interviewees; elsewhere the director drenches them in shadow à la Unsolved Mysteries.) It is not hard to persuade an audience that Kim Jong-Il’s government is one of the most, if not the most, repugnant governments presently in existence. The difficult task is to put a human face on what that means without overwhelming the viewer. Heiken handles this task well.

Dogs in the Worker's Paradise do not wear such decadent garments.

This also comes in part from the film’s beautiful complementary visuals. Sometimes they are ironic. There are a lot of clips from the preposterous melodramas and propaganda films produced by the North Korean government, and Heiken juxtaposes them with the stark reality that the scene in question is attempting to whitewash. Other times, the complementary visuals amplify a mood. There are abstract scenes cut into the film featuring a dancer dressed in the iconic uniform of the female cops that direct Pyongyang’s non-existent traffic. These sequences are mesmerizing. The dancer’s jerky and increasingly tortured movements visually reinforce the tremendous struggles of many of the interviewees. These sequences are also, therefore, sometimes hard to watch. But they never go on so long that they steal attention from the interviewees or distract the viewer.

Films like Kimjongilia necessarily require potted histories and other types of expository storytelling. Rather than the somber wall of text approach, Heiken livens up these necessary presentations with kinetic text, images and short film clips. This can go horribly wrong, as in Robert Barry Ptolemy’s dreadful Transcendent Man, but here they work well. The visuals are well composed and attractive without being flashy. This again is a fine line, and Heiken walks it well. These visual components share a lot in common with some iconic opening and closing credits sequences that people have come to appreciate in their own right.

If you are already familiar with North Korea and the horrific way of life its citizens “enjoy,” Kimjongilia will not tell you anything you did not already know. There are no stunning revelations or insights. What it offers is perhaps more important than that, though. Anyone can marshal statistics and data to convince an audience of one thing or another, but without a human face, the effect remains effervescent. By contrast, the interviewees in this film leave an indelible impression. You may have known the North Korean government was cruel, but not this cruel. Kimjongilia is not always an easy watch, but to restrict one’s viewing to only what is easy is to close one’s self off from the true emotional power cinema can have.

America, meet your sexiest new star.

Where to begin. “The Box” doesn’t really make any sense, the acting is inconsistent (with the notable exception of Frank Langella), the score is abominable and Richard Kelly doesn’t seem to understand how unintentionally funny some of the images he puts on the screen are. That being said, there’s a certain charm to such a ridiculous movie taking itself so seriously. And underneath the silliness, it does seem like Kelly has important things to say. He’s just not sure how to say them with his chosen medium.

“The Box” stars Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and most of Frank Langella and is very loosely based on a short story titled “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson. Matheson was an experienced writer of print and screen who wrote many of the old episodes of The Twilight Zone, and the original plot reflects the same kind of sensibilities (it was also turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone during the brief 1980s revival). The basic story is that a couple in financial straits receives a box with a button on it. The mysterious man who gives them the box tells them that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars, but someone they don’t know will die. Predictably, they press it. The mysterious man gives them the money and departs telling them that he’s off to give the box to somebody else – and he’s sure it will be someone that they don’t know! It’s a formulaic and fun short story in the tradition of O. Henry and it features a great twist, but it is not something that could be turned into a 2 hour movie. Realizing this, Kelly gets the original plot out of the way in the first half hour and uses the rest of his film to ponder deeper box-related questions: how the box works, why the guy with the box keeps going around giving it to people, who the guy is, and so on. Guess what Kelly’s answers are! Seriously, just guess. Even after watching the film I’m not sure, but they involve lightning, the NSA, the Viking program, weird looking water and aliens or god or something. Kelly’s answers are often as surprising as they are nonsensical.

Beyond the original box story, I’m still not sure I quite get what was going on this film. The film, too, does not even seem to be sure of what is going on, or even really care. In light of this apparent approach to film making, it would be easy to dismiss Kelly as a lousy second pressing of David Lynch; after all, they both deploy a set of idiosyncratic tropes in the framework of an abstruse story in service of some “greater message” that challenges the audience. But Kelly differs from Lynch in that he appears to actually want to do something more than just challenge the audience. The incoherence in the story comes off less as a Lynchian cinematic pretension and more as a simple failure to effectively communicate his ideas. With The Box, I believe Kelly tries to suggest something about free will, determinism and the nature of redemption. He just needs a better editor to bring that out of the jumble that he presents the audience with. More importantly, he also needs to find a better person or group to score the film than the members of Arcade Fire, an otherwise very talented band that composes a truly awful score.

The serious tone that Kelly cultivates throughout the film is constantly undermined by its bombastic and melodramatic score. Taken alone, the score sounds alternately like the soundtrack to a soap opera or a lost Tchaikovsky composition; as a part of this film, it intrudes on and ruins nearly every scene. The only meaningful purpose I could figure for having such a hamfisted score is that Kelly intended it to function sort of like a laugh track. Without hearing sad and mournful strings wailing away in the background, the average moviegoer would probably be confused by the sight of Cameron Diaz’s deformed foot (”Is this supposed to be arty? Creepy? Oh, there’s the sad music, I’m supposed to feel sorry for her!”). Worried, perhaps, that his metaphysical mumbo jumbo and scatterbrained plot would leave audiences confused and unsure how to interpret various scenes, Kelly beats the viewer over the head with the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer just to make sure that we “get” it.

I walked out of the theater unsure of whether I liked this movie or not. Perhaps that’s not even the right way of looking at it. The plot was certainly muddled and at times outright preposterous, but ultimately more satisfying than watching some David Lynch monstrosity where you slog through 2 hours of “provocative” imagery to find out that the secret behind the film is that some guy bought a bag of chips at a gas station in Beverly Hills – and that that “symbolizes something.” The Box, though it does occasionally entertain, is worthwhile moreso because of the issues that it prompts the audience to contemplate. There is indeed something meaningful in the core of this film, though it might not be quite as profound as maybe Kelly thinks it is. I’m just not sure whether the privilege of considering that something is worth the 9 dollars admission. It is a decent effort, and irrespective of its many flaws, it holds the audience’s attention. When an extremely ambitious film fails, it at least fails while trying something new and original. And that’s more than can be said of most movies from large Hollywood studios.

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