Adult dramas get lots of respect but struggle for audiences in a film culture targeted at teens and video-gamers. Genre films films get no respect but lots of ad dollars and, usually, big audiences. When genre films aim for adult sensibilities, they usually wind up with neither. That’s surely what happened with David Mamet’s Redbelt, a classic fight film relocated from the boxing ring to the world of Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts with the hero’s journey of a samurai adventure. The film never really got the respect it deserved or the audiences it should have, but it’s pure Mamet. As I wrote in the Seattle P-I: “David Mamet’s stage reputation is built on his glorious dialogue, pushed far beyond any sense of realism into a verbal symphony of intertwining solos built on staccato bursts of profane words elevated to terse poetry. But when it comes to Hollywood, his most interesting films are his genre picture – heist films, murder mysteries, con movies, all generally male-centric narratives that he reworks with his own brand of professional pride, machismo and male honor. It’s a man’s world and he revels in it.”

Redbelt - Learning the moves

It’s glorious pulp fiction elevated to genre art, full of Mamet’s cynicism about the corruption of big business and his romantic ideals of men dedicated to a higher purpose, and defined by Mamet’s trademark dialogue and his distinctive take on the machismo of the fight film genre: the confidence of strength, the courage of modesty, and the professional grace of a fighter who uses the least amount of effort and movement to achieve his goal.

The DVD does the film justice, with featurettes that take the film and its ambitions seriously (the onstage “Q&A with David Mamet” hosted by Kent Jones at a New York screening of the film, is just the thing that Mamet fans will love), and featurettes that delves into the art and culture of Jiu-jitsu and mixed martial arts (just the thing for fight movie fans).

I review DVD in my MSN column here. I also interviewed star Chiwetel Ejiofor for GreenCine.

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I interviewed Garth Jennings, director of “Son of Rambow,” for the “A Moment With” series in the Seattle P-I. You can find that short feature, a selection of choice bits from the 20-minute phone interview, here. Here is the complete, edited interview.

The film premiered at Sundance in 2007 and opened the Seattle International Film Festival last year. What took so long for it to get released?

We had things work out in regards to the licensing of the “Rambo” clips and it just took a while to… It was all very amicable, and it’s all worked out great, but it just took a while to go through that procedure. It’s just one of those things. You’ve seen it now and you know that there are quite a lot of clips in there. Anyway, it’s done now and we’re quite happy that it’s coming out.

The film opens with Lee Carter bootlegging “Rambo” with a bulky home video camera. Will you put a disclaimer on the film reading: “We do not condone the bootlegging of movies”?

Or don’t touch any live wires, don’t drive cars unnecessarily into walls… There’s quite a lot of things we could actually pre-warn people about. Hopefully they’ll work it out for themselves.

Will shows the resilience of a cartoon character when he executes the stunts for Lee, being launched into the air from a catapult and such, but as it continues they become more vulnerable. Like when Will jumps into the lake and then it turns out he can’t swim and he comes close to drowning.

That was always the plan, was to start off very much like Singin’ in the Rain, where Gene Kelly is trying to make it as a stunt man, like “I’ll do anything,” and it’s all great, he doesn’t get hurt, but gradually he goes along and by the end most things turn out to be disastrous.

They become a little more mortal by the end.

Exactly.

To me, they are protected by this innocence as they start enacting these stunts.

Yes. I think that’s the thing. We wanted to try and capture that whole idea of when you’re young, you don’t consider the consequences too much. So at first they get away with it, it’s only later that… You can’t keep doing that sort of thing and not get hurt.

I love the way you hand-draw the effects when Will runs home from seeing “Rambo.” It works over the world with his imagination, with the same images and style we see in his drawings.

Yes, yes. It was lovely doing that. It was a young chap called David O’Reilly, who we met through our work on the film Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. He did some of the animation on the guide book. He was very talented. No only is a good animator, he’s a brilliant illustrator. He was able to do everything, whether it was a book or a flip-book or a sketch book or explosions in a field, he did everything.

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I sounds crazy when you say it – David Mamet writes and directs a martial arts drama – but it’s a superb match of sensibility and genre. In so many ways, Redbelt is both a revival and a complete redefinition of the kind of film that Jean-Claude Van Damme cranked out in the eighties, the kind of thriller that pit fighters in matches in underground leagues and our honorable hero overcomes his disdain for such bloodsport to take revenge for the murder of a brother/friend in the ring.

Mamet, of course, latches on to the philosophical grounding of martial arts that is always given lip service in such films, and then either ignored or bent to fit the revenge plots. But he also embraces the machismo of the genre, but in his own way: the confidence of strength, the courage of modesty, and the professional grace of a fighter who uses the least amount of effort and movement to achieve his goal.

I wrote about the film for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here:

David Mamet’s stage reputation is built on his glorious dialogue, pushed far beyond any sense of realism into a verbal symphony of intertwining solos built on staccato bursts of profane words elevated to terse poetry. But when it comes to Hollywood, his most interesting films are his genre pictures — heist films, murder mysteries, con movies, all generally male-centric narratives that he reworks with his own brand of professional pride, machismo and male honor. It’s a man’s world and he revels in it.

“Redbelt” takes Mamet into territory no one otherwise would have predicted, the martial-arts thriller of honorable expert fighters, international competition and sinister organizers who corrupt the process. The sport here is Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, but Mamet hews to the samurai code, with Iraq vet and poor but proud Jiu-jitsu instructor Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor, all quiet dignity and modesty) as his honorable warrior in a dishonorable world.

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Just a couple of capsule reviews this week. First up, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s lovely Flight of the Red Balloon:

The shadow of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 fantasy “The Red Balloon” hovers over Hou Hsiao-hsien’s drama…. Hou’s first film made outside of Asia is his most emotionally turbulent, yet he remains, like the balloon, outside looking in, a compassionate but distant observer capturing it all with a graceful restraint and floating beauty that ultimately carried me away with it.

I liked Love Songs almost as much:

Christophe Honore continues his tribute to the French New Wave (begun with the SIFF 2007 feature “Dans Paris”) with this playful, polysexual romantic musical…. Honore drops the brightness and joy of the form into the chilly, gray winter of Paris to explore love and loss and intimacy. It is a joy, from the cute songs and sudden bursts of comedy to the profound and affecting sadness of one lover mourning the death of another while finding the strength to go on.

You can read both reviews here.

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