The Seventh Art

It's Alive...

2011-05-29T16:38:00.013-04:00

...Just at a new location. After nearly four years, I've switched over to a new platform. The Seventh Art, along with its meager archives, can now be found over at www.archiveofshadows.com.

Four Lions (2010)

2011-03-31T22:38:00.009-04:00

The biggest success of Christopher Morris’s Four Lions lies in how easily it gets its audience to embrace its central conceit. The film follows five would-be British jihadists whose attempt to pull off a suicide bombing in London is constantly thwarted by their overwhelming stupidity. Think of the group—which features one white convert who refers to himself as Azzam al-Britaini—as the Keystone Cops of terrorism. They can’t agree on a target (one suggests a mosque), stumble through every attempt to procure explosives, and in a particularly hilarious subplot, are summoned to Pakistan for training only to inadvertently deliver a hammer blow to Al Qaida.

Morris is working in high satire here, but he does it with a great deal of humanity, to the point that we root for these oafs to pull of their misguided jihad in spite of any semblance of political correctness we might try to bring to the material. Not only that, but the script is full of the kind of subtle humor that keeps its characters from ever becoming too cartoonish. Consider Omar (Riz Ahmed), the group’s least dimwitted member, who we see is constantly at odds with his more traditional Muslim neighbors. In one hilarious scene, he and his wife—a liberated woman who seems more modern and independent than many of her Western counterparts—blithely laugh at the conservative hangups of a peaceful Muslim who tries to warn Omar away from violence. Guess which one the authorities think is a terrorist. In another scene, Omar provides his young son—who excitedly awaits his father’s martyrdom—with a retelling of The Lion King that paints it as a story of revolt against consumerist oppressors. In both cases, Morris is able to weave a sense of irony into the film that keeps it from ever feeling like its relying too strongly on shock value.

It’s scenes like these that keep the film afloat in its more repetitive moments, when it seems to languish a little too long in the gang’s boneheaded antics. At times, Four Lions does border on feeling like a great short that’s been expanded into a just good enough feature. Ingratiating as the characters’ stupidity is, once we’ve come to expect them to fail, the story loses a bit of its edge. Still, this film is full of the kind of deft satire that made films like Dr. Strangelove so vital. The ability to make light of such a seemingly horrific scenario is something worth appreciating. It’s the same kind of boldness the guys at South Park—a show always ahead of the curve comedically—showed when they made an episode that depicted Osama Bin Laden as a Looney Toons-esque buffoon. In the same way, Four Lions uses its bumbling characters to strip the suicide bomber of any power by rendering them dull, ineffective, and ridiculous at the same time that they’re oddly sympathetic. That central opposition might not ever be resolved in any satisfying way, but just creating it is certainly an achievement in itself.

Centurion (2010)

2010-10-12T00:28:00.003-04:00

The Romans vs. Picts action thriller Centurion might seem like nothing more than B-movie schlock, but there’s no denying that it’s got a few things going for it. At the top of the list is its star Michael Fassbender, a promising actor who’s made a name for himself recently with roles in films like Inglorious Basterds, Fish Tank, and Hunger. It also doesn’t hurt that it was directed by Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday), the British horror auteur whose three previous films have shown him to be one of the few filmmakers around who actually respects and understands the history and fans of the genre. Throw in Olga Kurylenko as a mute warrior princess, the striking scenery of the Scottish highlands, and a little true history (the film is based on the legendary disappearance of Rome’s Ninth Legion), and there was a chance for Centurion to be memorable. But while Marshall’s hand for directing bone-crushing violence and tense chase scenes certainly doesn’t disappoint, the end product turns out to be the most generic genre exercise he’s attempted yet.

Fassbender stars as Quintus Dias, a Roman centurion serving in the legion during Hadrian’s ill-fated attempt to conquer the modern day United Kingdom. As the film opens, the takeover has turned into something of a quagmire, thanks to unforgiving weather and the presence of the Picts, a group of savage Celtic warriors who use guerilla tactics to repel all invaders. After their Ninth Legion is slaughtered in a surprise attack, Dias and a ragtag group of survivors take off across the countryside with a small war party led by the trident-carrying Etain (Kurylenko) on their trail.

This cat-and-mouse chase aspect of the film appears to have been the necessity of a small budget more than any kind of bold stylistic choice, and Marshall makes it work as best he can. He delivers on a few nice moments of tension, particularly a battle in the woods that leads to a Butch and Sundance nod where the characters are forced to jump off a cliff into a rushing river. Still, the attempt to make the small group of soldiers represent the entire strata of Roman society is hackneyed at best, and at its slower points the movie seems to be about nothing more than guys running through the woods with swords. A few attempts are made at building character—hell, they even introduce a beautiful witch living alone in the woods to add some sexual tension—but none of it ever amounts to more than the requisite pre-death talk of wives and future plans of starting farms and retiring from the soldier game. The striking scenery of the Scottish highlands is often the film’s saving grace, but beautiful as those hillsides may be, I eventually got tired of watching the characters sprint across them during long helicopter shots.

As it turns out, the film’s best moments all come early on, when Dias is still with the Ninth Legion and their charismatic leader, General Titus Virilius. As the General, Dominic West (probably known to most as McNulty from The Wire) steals every one of his scenes, and his presence in the film only succeeds in making it clear how uninteresting and incomplete a character Dias ultimately is. This portion of the movie also features the film’s best action scene, when the Ninth is ambushed on a forest road by an army of Picts. Marshall’s eye for carnage is spot on, but he tends to sacrifice coherence for gore a bit too often, to the point that the battle eventually degrades into one close up of a stabbing and throat slashing after another, with no real regard for continuity or the spatial positioning of any of the characters in the frame. That the blood is often CGI only adds to the confusion, as it has a tendency to make every action scene seem just a little too much like a video game. Still, no one could say Marshall doesn’t have a gift for portraying the brutality of ancient weapons, and throughout the film he continually ups the ante on creative ways for his characters to die by the sword.

Unfortunately, new and interesting uses of a trident can only carry a movie so far, and in the end Marshall fails to bring something new to this genre in the way he has with his other films. If anything, his big accomplishment here is that Centurion has none of the vaguely jingoistic underpinnings that taint so much (American) action cinema. Neither side—Picts or Romans—is presented as being morally superior to the other, and a bit of last minute double-dealing calls into question any easy ideas of heroism or victory. In Marshall’s world, there seems to be no constant righteousness or cause, and death only begets more death. That might not seem like much, but it’s pretty heavy territory for this kind of film to venture into, and hints at how Marshall just might be the next John Carpenter. Centurion, then, seems to be a sort of transitional film for him. Given more money for the production, it’s hard to say what kind of big budget madness he might have been able to concoct, and given less he probably would’ve spent a little more time building tension and writing decent character interaction. As it is, I can't help but think that Centurion had just enough of a budget to be mediocre.

A Prophet (2009)

2010-08-28T13:36:00.006-04:00

There’s an old argument that troubled kids only truly learn to be criminals once they’re sent to prison. Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film A Prophet takes this idea to its logical extreme, showing us how a French Muslim named Malik (the excellent Tahar Rahim) turns from a naïve street thug into a mafia kingpin during a seven-year stint in the joint. It’s a sprawling film (among other things, it’s been compared to both The Godfather and the epic TV series The Wire), and Audiard never misses a step in his depiction of the intrigue and violence of the French prison system. It’s only when he tries to build a larger thematic arc around his story that he falters—but as an engrossing crime thriller, A Prophet is near perfect.

Tahar Raheem plays Malik El Djebena, an orphaned street kid who’s sentenced to a seven-year prison sentence for attacking a police officer. Once on the inside, he’s approached by a group of Corsican mafiosos led by Cesar Luciani (Niel Arestrup), and forced to perform a hit on an Arab snitch. From there, wide-eyed Malik ingratiates himself to the prison’s criminal element, serving as the “eyes and ears” of Cesar’s outfit by moving seamlessly between the Muslim and Italian inmates.

Audiard’s style is impeccable, especially in the way that he constructs the prison’s hierarchy. He never throws his audience a lifeline to easily understand the narrative, but the immediacy provided by his camerawork and the seamless editing by Juliette Welfing ensure that the audience is never too overwhelmed. Unlike a lot of crime films, the pace here never gets bogged down in details or unnecessary exposition. For Audiard, action is story, and as Malik continues to perfect his reputation as a criminal operator, the film only keeps raising the stakes. Once Malik starts getting day-long work releases for good behavior, the intensity of the story ratchets up considerably, showing how our hero manages to pull of it assassinations and prisoner exchanges by day, only to return to the safety of a prison cell at night.

The film’s greatest asset is its performances, particularly from Raheem, Arestrup, and Adel Bencherif as Ryad, Malik’s contact on the outside. Raheem’s performance is especially impressive considering that we’re never given much information about who Malik is or what motivates him. He arrives in jail as a blank slate, and it’s only through the things he does and the decisions he makes that we begin to understand the breadth of his conviction and ambition. He’s nearly matched by Arestrup as Cesar, the slick old lion of the Corsican mafia, who manages to be at turns both despicable and utterly pathetic. The relationship between he and Malik serves as a lynchpin for the majority of the film’s character-based drama, and despite Cesar’s cruelty, there is something almost heartbreaking about the way things end between them.

Audiard’s approach to constructing his criminal underworld is impeccable, but he plays fast and loose with his themes, and his attempt to construct some sort of overarching thesis around Malik’s actions never quite pans out the way it should. For example, the fantasy sequences between Malik and the ghost of Ryeb, the man he kills early in the film, add almost nothing, and a series of scenes that try to establish Malik as the “prophet” of the title are particularly muddled. But as a portrait of the prison system and the inner workings of the criminal underworld—that is, as an intensely realized, dynamic genre film—A Prophet is unmatched. It may not add up to more than the sum of its parts, but those parts prove to be more than enough to build a compelling film.

Winter's Bone (2010)

2010-07-26T16:57:00.013-04:00

The independent film Winter’s Bone follows Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a destitute Ozarks teenager on the hunt for her crank-cooking, absentee father in the backwoods along the Missouri-Arkansas border. It's a film that's been praised for its realism, but this seems a bit off base. Winter’s Bone is certainly a good film, but it works more as a kind of larger-than-life, southern gothic thriller than it does as a Ramin Barhani-esque exercise in site specific cinema. At its heart, this is a well-observed genre film that often transcends the familiarity of its story thanks to its excellent performances. And while the sense of place that the film manages to cultivate is certainly worth noting, it’s the complex character interactions and director Debra Granik’s unique eye for the grotesque that are truly most memorable.

Granik shot most of the film in muted grays and blues, and this dour color palette, along with the handheld camerawork and Dickon Hinchcliffe’s original score, helps to build an almost constant feeling of dread. As Ree delves into the local underworld of trailer park chemists and speed freaks, Granik succeeds in building the kind of menacing, trust-no-one atmosphere that’s usually only found in suspense and horror films—and to great effect. The missing person case at the center of the story has led many to compare Winter’s Bone to a noir detective film—Daniel Woodrell, on whose book the film is based, is known to refer to his writing as "country noir"—and this is true enough. It views that genre through the prism of the Ozarks in the same way that a movie like Brick used a high school setting. But along with the detective story, Winter's Bone makes heavy use of horror tropes, particulary in the way that it builds tension and makes use of mystery. It has just as much in common with Last House on the Left as it does The Big Sleep, especially by the time we get to a late scene involving a chainsaw.

As in many horror films, certain players are often mythologized and built up by other characters long before they’re actually shown onscreen. It’s a classic technique for building tension and a sense of foreboding, and Granik plays it to perfection, especially in the case of Teardrop (John Hawkes), Ree’s meth-addicted, caged tiger of an uncle. With his jailhouse tats and his mercurial, just-as-soon-kill-you-as-look-at-you demeanor, it’s Hawkes who’s the film’s most memorable character, and Granik honors him by giving him a wonderful, hauntingly unresolved last scene. He’s nearly matched by Jennifer Lawrence, a 19-year old actress whose previous major credit was, of all things, The Bill Engvall Show. She brings a quiet dignity to Ree that is unusual for someone of her age to be able to pull off, and whether she’s skinning squirrels, chopping wood, or acting as a caretaker for her two young siblings and her mentally ill mother, she always seems totally authentic. Likewise, her command of the grit and flow of the backwoods dialect seems effortless, especially when compared to the kind of “aw shucks, ya’ll” histrionics so many Hollywood actresses seem to fall prey to when they try to go full redneck.

It’s this kind of attention to detail that helps Winter’s Bone maintain a veneer of authenticity, even in the cases where the set design seems all too staged. In many scenes, the filmmakers seem to be going out of their way to achieve a sense of realism through decoration—every coffee table is perfectly littered with crack pipes, guns, beer cans, and spent cigarettes, and every yard seems to have just one too many cars up on blocks—but it’s actually their excellent attention to character interaction that ends up getting the job done. See the way Ree’s neighbors, knowing she and her siblings are hungry, bring over some spare deer meat for them to eat (and after Ree had previously admonished her brother by saying “Never ask for what oughta be offered”), or a wonderful scene between Ree and a benevolent Army recruiter. In each case, Granik succeeds in building a world that operates by its own rules, moral codes, and blood ties, and it’s through this that a true sense of place emerges. After all, classical detectives like Sam Spade never invoked the name of a common cousin, or spoke about how he and another character “share some of the same blood,” as a means of getting the information he needed. In Winter’s Bone, these ties serve as their own kind of currency.

This intricate network of familial connections and sense of community—however perverted it may be—are the most interesting things on display here, and they definitely help to overshadow the film’s faults—particularly the ending, which, save for the possible fate of one key character, is a bit too easy. Still, there’s very little in Winter’s Bone that isn’t earned, and despite its generic trappings, there isn’t an exploitative moment on display here. The attempts at realism certainly aren't among its strengths, but that's not the point. It works precisely because of the familiarity of its story. If there's any transcendence to be found in Winter's Bone, it's in the ways that a universal tale—the gumshoe on the trail of the missing person—is reinterpreted by such an exotic environment.

The Eclipse (2009)

2010-07-06T13:37:00.007-04:00

The theme of being haunted is pervasive in The Eclipse, a beguiling Irish film from director Conor McPherson. It’s likely to be categorized as a horror film—and with good reason—but the hauntings on display here are more than just supernatural. Characters are plagued by memories, grief, romantic encounters, and guilt, and that emotional horror often proves to be just as gripping as the more classic “gotcha” moments, which are few in number but always unexpected and remarkably effective. The result is a horror film in the vein of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant or Repulsion, a story where the terror is borne not out of violence or visceral shocks but out of character, conflict, and emotional stress.

The Eclipse’s main character is Michael Farr (Ciaran Hinds), a wood shop teacher from a stormy village on the Irish coast. Farr has yet to come to terms with the death of his wife a few years earlier, but he busies himself with his two young children and his work at the town’s annual literary festival, where he volunteers as a driver. When the film opens, Farr begins dealing with another kind of specter in the form of his wife’s invalid father (who, by the way, is still alive), whose ghost begins to manifest itself inside his house and in his dreams. He finds the perfect counsel for his problems in Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), a popular writer of ghost stories who is in town for the literary festival. Their relationship flourishes thanks to their shared experience with the paranormal, but it’s complicated by the presence of Nicholas Holden (Aiden Quinn), a bestselling American writer who claims to be “haunted” by a brief affair he and Lena had months earlier.

Director Conor McPherson’s background is in the theater, but there is nothing stagey or stuffy about The Eclipse. Playwrights have a tendency to attempt to accomplish too much through dialogue, but McPherson’s approach is nothing if not uniquely cinematic. He lets his exposition build through small character actions and sly uses of set design, and his camerawork is entrancing, full of luxurious tracking shots and morbid framing that often recall Kubrick’s The Shining. The film’s moments of pure horror are few and far between, but when they come they are genuinely terrifying, thanks in no small part to some chillingly effective sound design. Still, McPherson’s boldest stylistic choice is the way he refuses to conform to any kind of traditional generic construct. He has a very particular story he’s trying to tell (specifically, the ways in which people choose to confront and move past grief) and he has no reservations about using everything from drama, horror, romance, and even slapstick comedy in order to get at it.

McPherson’s cause is no doubt helped by the exquisite trio of actors he has at the center of the film. Hjejle and Quinn are both wonderful, especially Quinn, who is clearly having a great time playing the pompous Holden. He’s a character we’d love to hate, but Quinn brings an emotional truth to the role that complicates any easy conclusions we might like to form about the kind of man he is. Still, this film ultimately belongs to Hinds, the wonderful Irish character actor who is a reassuring presence in any movie in which he appears. He’s an intimidating figure, but he brings a gentleness to Farr that is completely disarming, and this helps him succeed in gaining the audience’s trust right from the start. Any time you have a horror film with a genuine emotional core, it’s easy for the attempts at suspense to feel out of place, or worse yet, to cheapen the drama. But Hinds is so believable and so genuine that his performance manages to heighten everything around him.

At scarcely an hour and thirty minutes long, The Eclipse doesn’t waste a single scene. Its emphasis on character over plot is likely to lose some viewers, but those who are able to adjust to the story’s peculiar rhythms will be entranced. It’s structured like a great short story in the way that its characters, themes, and style are all so expertly intertwined. But at the same time there is a distinctly mysterious, evasive quality to the ideas it presents (like the provocative notion of a person’s ghost appearing prior to their death), which only seems to grow in complexity and meaning after the story is over. You’re not likely to be able to get The Eclipse out of your head easily—it’s the kind of film that will haunt you.

Collapse (2009)

2010-07-01T15:05:00.006-04:00

One of the most ubiquitous types of modern documentary is the “everything you know is wrong” movie. These are films which shun any attempt at objectivity in favor of giving a very specific viewpoint, usually in the vein of explaining just how screwed we all really are. We’ve already had movies about how our government is corrupt (No End in Sight), our economy is broken (IOUSA), our food is toxic (Food, Inc.) and our lives are controlled by private interests (The Corporation), and that’s just to name a few. Now comes Collapse, the most recent documentary from the director Chris Smith (American Movie), which synthesizes all these arguments into one Grand Unified Theory of paranoia about just how severely our modern world is under attack from forces beyond our control. It’s definitely some heavy stuff, but it’s also endlessly fascinating. Not only does Smith give us a stunning primer on the major problems facing the 21st century, but he also provides us with an intimate portrait of a man on the edge, a modern day street preacher whose obsession with saving the world seems to constantly be at odds with his own wellbeing.

That man is Michael Ruppert, a former L.A. narcotics cop who’s well known in certain online circles for his work as an investigative reporter/conspiracy theorist (depending on who you ask). A chain-smoking everyman with a bad comb over and a few extra pounds on him, Ruppert has made his name thanks to an investigative newsletter and website he ran called From the Wilderness. From predicting the financial crash to breaking the story of the cover-ups surrounding the death of Pat Tillman, Ruppert has been on the cutting edge of the underground news cycle for several years—something he claims has made him public enemy number one of the powers that be. Considering Ruppert and the film’s basic hypothesis—that overpopulation combined with a looming energy crisis and the illusory nature of the financial system is likely to lead to large-scale societal collapse—this probably isn’t all that surprising.

Make no mistake—Collapse is Ruppert’s movie. The entirety of the film’s original footage consists of one long Errol Morris-style interview with him. As Ruppert expounds on his theories about peak oil, government corruption, and the looming collapse of the financial system, Smith uses stock footage and charts and graphs to articulate his points, along with black and white intertitles (“OIL,” “ELECTRICTY,” “COMPOUND INTEREST,”) to help organize the monologue. Ruppert’s theories are certainly provocative, but the majority of his argument shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s spent more than a few hours trawling the internet. What’s really compelling about Ruppert is the way he’s able to synthesize all of these issues (his take on the financial system, for example, is as succinct as it is devastating) and convincingly explain what their long term effects might be. Smith’s film doesn’t go out of its way to fact check anything he says, but it’s easy to see why Ruppert might intimidate those in power: he’s scary-articulate, well-read, and comes from a respectable family of former military/CIA workers. He’s the kind of guy you’d like to write off as a crank (and many people have), but he’s just so damned erudite, so rational even when presenting his most bizarre theories, that you can’t avoid letting at least some of his ideas seep into your subconscious.

It’s no surprise that Ruppert’s personal character helps dictate how you interpret his message, because at it its heart, Collapse is nothing if not an in-depth character study of a man who has dedicated his life to signaling the alarm about where he believes our planet is headed. It’s especially telling that Smith includes no other interviews outside of Ruppert. None of his critics are given the space to rebut him; none of his ideas are backed up by scientific testimony. It’s just Ruppert. And even though he’s a compelling interview, you can’t help but begin to think that Smith is giving him just enough rope to hang himself. Early in the film, Ruppert is unflappable, listing off bullet points and quoting scholars and scientific facts as though he’s reading them from a book. But as the film progresses he starts to loosen up a bit. His rant becomes more profanity-laced; he smokes more; he even cries on camera. Whether this was a natural progression or just a bit of clever editing on Smith’s part is hard to say, but it is incredibly revealing. We start to see just how personally invested Ruppert is in his quest. By this point we’ve already learned about the sacrifices he’s made in its service (he claims to have been shot at; his office has been burglarized; he’s been harassed; and we’re told he’s in financial trouble), but it’s when we begin to realize the psychic toll it’s taken on him that it becomes clear that Collapse is really more about the man than it is the message. Ruppert’s theories of societal collapse may or not prove to be true, the filmmakers seem to be saying, but there’s no denying that its effects are already far too apparent in his own life.

"A Memory of a Memory": The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)

2010-06-08T23:22:00.008-04:00

If there’s one thing the movies have a unique capacity for conveying, it’s memory. Whether good or bad, recollections of the past tend to stress the emotional, the visual, and the visceral—often at the expense of the truth of what really happened—and what more concise summation of the cinema is there than that? In its better moments, director Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes proves this sentiment quite elegantly. This is a film that is haunted by memory; a film where the triumphs, tragedies, and missed chances of years prior serve as the backdrop for a mystery that has burdened the characters and helped shape the people they’ve become when the story opens. The main character’s decision to reach into the past and try to get closure makes for some truly compelling, wonderfully cinematic drama, and it’s only the filmmakers’ compulsion to neatly tie up every loose end—to remember every detail—that ends up making it all just a bit too clever for its own good.

The film follows Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), a retired Argentine court officer who reopens a long-abandoned case with an eye toward writing a novel about it. Through some excellently framed flashbacks, we’re taken back to 1974, when then-federal justice agent Esposito was assigned to the rape and murder of a young schoolteacher. Campanella has a gift for plotting the police procedural aspects of the story, and it’s entrancing to watch how the young Esposito, along with his supervisor, Irene, and his perpetually drunk colleague, Sandoval, got sucked into the case. As the evidence piles up, the story unfolds as part thriller, part fugitive chase story, and (rather unnecessarily) part history of Argentina’s transformation into a military dictatorship. Throughout it all, the film continually flashes back to the present day, as Benjamin tries to consult Irene, now a judge, on his book, all the while skirting around the prospect of rekindling the latent relationship they let slip their fingers years before.

The Secret in Their Eyes was the surprise winner of last year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, and it’s easy to see why: it’s got the slick production values of a Hollywood film (Campanella is best known for directing American dramatic television) and a nuanced, literary story adapted from a book by Eduardo Sacheri. But where the film really succeeds is in the powerful performances of its main actors. The most prominent is surely Ricardo Darin, a renowned actor who seems to be Argentina's answer to George Clooney, but he’s matched by Soledad Villamil, who plays Irene with a tenderness and intelligence that helps her steal more than a few scenes. As Sandoval, the excellent Guillermo Francella is often used for comic relief, but his performance is helped by the script, which provides more than a few scenes that elevate him from just the boozy office jester to perhaps the most sympathetic, tragic character in the whole of the film.

Campanella, who is otherwise a bit guilty of making his presence known with his flashy camerawork, allows these great performances to speak for themselves. You could easily picture a lesser production having a stilted narration to help describe the emotions Esposito experiences during the lengthy flashbacks, but Campanella is confident enough to let his actors tell us all we need to know with awkward pauses, nervous laughs, and fleeting glances. This is especially true of the platonic romance between Irene and Esposito, both in the flashback scenes and in the present day. It’s to Darin and Villamil’s credit that they’re able to make the regret of the years spent longing for one another feel palpable—and even with some pretty egregious old age makeup holding them back.

The Secret in Their Eyes moves along like a dynamo during the flashback scenes, and while they’re still building, even the present day stuff doesn’t feel intrusive. But like so many films that start in medias res, it is a little jarring when the tale set in the past reaches its peak and the audience suddenly finds itself thrust back into the present day. It’s a tough way to plot any story, since the writer is essentially forcing two separate endings into the same script. Ironically, things here aren’t helped one bit by the fact that the climax to the flashback story seems entirely fitting and complete. Once we’re left with just the present day story, Campanella tries to get around any dramatic letdown by saving his biggest and most absurd plot twist for the last few minutes. You’re not likely to see it coming, but you are likely to think it belongs in a different movie.

Fortunately, this tendency is only peripherally present for the rest of the film, and whenever the plot drifts too perilously close to more tired dramatic territory, it’s saved by its performances and it’s director’s unabashed love for visual storytelling. For better or worse, Campanella never wastes an opportunity to embrace a filmic moment, whether an engrossing (though admittedly far-fetched) interrogation scene, or a foot chase at a soccer match that unfolds through a mesmerizing, 5-minute long tracking shot that, no doubt with the aid of some digital stitching, moves from helicopter shot, to crane shot, to steadicam—and all in the middle of a packed stadium of extras. Does such a sequence have any right showing up in this kind of movie? Probably not, but like so much of The Secret in Their Eyes, there's also no denying that it's engrossing, classically entertaining filmmaking.

Dennis Hopper and the "Russian Suicide Chair"

2010-05-30T11:57:00.003-04:00

As a tribute to the recently departed Dennis Hopper, here he is in 1983 performing a stunt sometimes called the "Russian Suicide Chair." The idea is that if you set up dynamite in a perfect circle and blow it all up at the same, the explosions create a safe zone in the middle where a person can sit and be unharmed. It's a perfect example of the one of a kind character we just lost in Dennis Hopper. The explosion is at 1:50 if you just want to skip to the good stuff.

Gangster Theatre: 44 Inch Chest (2009)

2010-05-27T17:03:00.004-04:00

Malcolm Venville’s directorial debut 44 Inch Chest plays like a 70s British gangster movie that’s been converted into a stage play. Save for the opening scenes and a few flashbacks, the film takes place almost entirely in a rotting building on the wrong side of London. Spurned car dealer/gangster Colin Diamond and four of his friends have gathered there with the intention of torturing and killing Diamond’s estranged wife’s boyfriend, who they’ve kidnapped from a posh downtown restaurant and stuffed in a wardrobe. But the overemotional Colin, still reeling from being dumped by the love of his life, is hesitant to do the deed, and needs some psyching up from his pals. This sets the stage for some of the most delightfully profane criminal shop talk since Sexy Beast (which, as it so happens, was written by the same duo--Louis Mellis and David Scinto), all of it delivered by an all star cast of British talent including Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane and John Hurt.

Like the best of David Mamet’s work, the high points of watching 44 Inch Chest (the title is never explained, but it somehow just feels right) all stem from seeing these great actors deliver such powerful language. Part of what made Sexy Beast such a perverse joy to watch was the way Ben Kingsley was able to wield dialogue like a weapon, spitting out insults and expletives like they could make a visceral, physical impact. Mellis and Scinto achieve a similar feat here, especially thanks to Dillane and Hurt, both of whom really seem to be enjoying themselves as the two more unbalanced members of the crew, Mal and Old Man Peanut. Wilkinson plays Archie, the straight and narrow of the group, while the always wonderful McShane is slyly funny as Meredith, a gay high roller with an ultra-cool demeanor and impeccable sense of style.

These characters all fall into neatly framed archetypes around the emotionally shattered Colin, who’s played with an endearing desperation by Winstone. In fact, enough of the film takes place in Colin’s head (in flashbacks and fantasy sequences) that it’s tempting to hypothesize that his buddies might not exist it all, but rather work as projections of his own fractured personality. Either way, they all form a great group dynamic, and their rambling dialogue, which tackles everything from Meredith’s sexual proclivities (Peanut makes a point of regularly calling him a sodomite) to the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah, ultimately forms one of the more elegant explorations of masculinity that has been offered up at the movies in some time. It’s rare that you get a movie that goes this deep into the emotional and romantic troubles of such hardened characters, and the fact that it’s coming from such an unexpected source makes a lot of the more tender dialogue have that much more of an impact.

This colorful dialogue and excellent grasp of character and theme is no doubt what drew such exceptional talent to this film, and rightfully so. But where 44 Inch Chest suffers is in the way of plot. All the great language and character dynamics can only take you so far--at some point we need to see these people actually do something. Throughout the film I kept thinking about what a wonderful play this story would make: take 5 total badasses, put them on a stage, and let them devour scenery for ninety minutes. Unfortunately this same approach doesn’t work so well on screen. We need to see these characters act on the impulses they set up so elegantly through dialogue, but director Venville never gives them the chance. This decision relegates 44 Inch Chest to being more of a showpiece for great acting than great filmmaking, but given that the acting is so superior it’s enough to keep the movie snappy and somewhat entrancing, even at the same time that it’s all nowhere near as rounded as it should be.

That Evening Sun (2009)

2010-04-30T13:12:00.011-04:00

One of the most celebrated stylistic devices in literature is the trick of the unreliable narrator, where the reader comes to learn that the character relating the story cannot be trusted. This kind of plot point has been translated to the movies in countless ways, but it’s most often employed in films like Fight Club, where we only learn in the last few minutes how batshit crazy our main character really is. Plot-wise, 2009’s That Evening Sun might be about as far from a movie like Fight Club as you’re likely to get, and it doesn’t even use narration. But thanks to some sly, wonderfully moving storytelling and a towering performance from Hal Holbrook, it’s able to achieve a similar effect—not through wild twists and fractured narrative, but through the revelations provided by living, believable, and tragically flawed characters whose complexities only build and unfold as the story progresses.

The film follows a man with the delightfully Southern name of Abner Meecham (Holbrook), a strong-willed, ill-tempered, 80-plus year-old Tennessee farmer who might as well be the Dixieland version of Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski from Gran Torino. As the film opens, Abner’s just busted out of the nursing home he was committed to and walked the 20-plus miles back to his sleepy tract of land. He arrives to find his house inhabited by Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon), a local ne’er-do-well who rented the place from Abner’s son with the intention of becoming a farmer and turning life around for his wife and daughter. We’re never told just how well Choat and Abner know each other, but it’s hinted that their families have a past. Whatever the history, the two immediately clash: Abner is furious that the homestead he tended with his late wife has been taken over by a “white trash…loafer,” while Choat carries a grudge about the way he’s always been treated by Abner, whom he sees as a stubborn, bitter old man. After his son (Walton Goggins) is unable to convince him to leave the property, Abner sets up camp in some old slave quarters located in a ramshackle cabin mere feet from the main house. He and Choat start doing their best to make each other's lives miserable, setting the stage for a Southern Gothic feud that’s destined to turn violent.

The biggest pleasure of That Evening Sun is the way the narrative and the characters unfold as leisurely as the humid Tennessee afternoons depicted in the film. Each player is like an onion where the layers are slowly peeled away to reveal new traits and elements, which keeps our view of them in perpetual flux. Director Scott Teems does a magnificent job of building the drama by continually setting up character roles and then immediately subverting and complicating them. We’re led to believe that Abner represents the proud, gentlemanly Old South and Lonzo the slovenly, troubled redneck, but as the story progresses and the themes of manhood, familial responsibility and redemption start to build, we come to realize that each man is not so easily pinned down. What’s more, they’re probably more alike than either would like to admit.

This is most apparent in a key scene late in the film, where a line from Abner’s son suddenly throws into doubt nearly everything we know and believe about him and his idealized relationship with his wife (played in some artfully handled flashbacks by Holbrook’s actual spouse, the late Dixie Carter). Rarely is there a film where the viewer’s total understanding of characters and themes is so radically changed simply by the utterance of a single, seemingly innocuous line, but that is exactly what happens here. (One person in the nearly empty theater in which I saw it actually gasped aloud when they heard it.) It’s a subtle moment, and Teems, working from a short story by the celebrated writer William Gay, wisely underplays it to the point that I’m sure that no small amount of viewers will miss it entirely.

Of course, none of this would work so well if it weren’t for a universally excellent cast led by Holbrook, a criminally underrated actor who turns in what might be one of the very top performances in a long and storied career. He doesn’t deliver a false line in the entire film, and every word he speaks feels like it has the weight of a full lifetime of love, loss, and hardship behind it. Still, at the same time that Abner is a flawed and fully realized character, we are consistently—and wisely, I might add—kept at an arm’s length from him. We’re not told why he was put in the home or how his wife died for a good portion of the film, and when these revelations come, they act as the major catalyst for the way our understanding of the conflict is refigured and reinterpreted.

Holbrook gives the standout performance, but he’s nearly matched by McKinnon, a deeply talented actor whose chameleon-like qualities have established him as a phenomenal artist at the same time they’ve kept him effectively hidden from the mainstream. He’s as hyperbolically good as ever here, turning in a performance that wouldn’t have been out of place in his 2004 directorial debut Chrystal, another languidly-paced Southern drama that’s similar in tone and style to That Evening Sun. Carrie Preston is understated and touching as his long-suffering wife, while Mia Wasikowska (of Alice in Wonderland fame) has an equally interesting turn as his daughter, a shyly sweet girl whose bemusement with the ornery Abner makes for a few quite funny scenes. Rounding out the cast is the great Barry Corbin as Thurl Chessor (this film deserves an award for colorful character names), Abner’s charmingly detached neighbor. You might remember Corbin as Ellis, the cat-keeping philosopher-hermit that Tommy Lee Jones visits at the end of No Country for Old Men. He was great in that film, and he brings a similar kind of homespun wisdom and pitch-perfect diction to his role here.

Teems’ direction is unobtrusive and understated throughout—he realizes how good his cast is—but he deserves credit for the way he manages to build mood and atmosphere through his gorgeous widescreen landscape shots and slow camera moves. His fleeting cutaways during Abner’s reveries about the past are also exceptional and wonderfully staged. This preoccupation with the lyrical does make for the film’s one noticeable flaw—an ending that is perhaps a bit too unfinished for its own good—but this kind of philosophical open-endedness should always be appreciated, especially in a film that is otherwise as narratively straightforward as this. That Evening Sun is haunting, thematically complex, character-driven, and literary in the best since of the word—all of which make for an experience that is truly moving. Most important of all, though, it achieves it all without ever sacrificing one ounce of authenticity. And that, simple as it may sound, is not something you see too often.

Flame and Citron (2008)

2010-04-22T18:03:00.004-04:00

Most people in the U.S. probably haven’t heard of the film Flame and Citron, but in its native Denmark it was a cultural phenomenon, as it backed up its sprawling story and record-breaking budget with an equally epic take at the Danish box office. It’s a moody, noir-ish tale about two reluctant heroes of the Danish Resistance (something else we’re not familiar with stateside) who went by the code names Flammen (Flame) and Citronen (Citron, or Lemon). Together with a small but dedicated group of underground freedom fighters, the duo became notorious for “liquidating” Nazi officers and the Danish traitors who collaborated with them. As Flame says at one point: “all we can do is shoot them one by one, until there are none left.” And indeed they do. The resulting film is an entrancing drama that plays like a lovingly crafted historical portrait with a dash of Leon: The Professional thrown in for good measure.

Getting the information, manpower, and materials to perform these assassinations often proves to be a Herculean effort, and makes up a good part of Flame and Citron’s storyline. Back room deals are made, documents are forged, equipment smuggled. We learn about it all through a narration provided by Flame (real name: Bent), a headstrong 23-year-old with a shock of red hair and a deadly serious demeanor. He’s the triggerman on the jobs, while Citron (Mads Mikkelsen, in the film’s best performance) is usually the driver. Citron, we’re told, has been in the resistance since its early days, and to look at him, with his perpetually greasy hair and weary pallor, you’d think he carries the weight of its success on his shoulders. He and Flame are the two stars of the resistance, and while their whole outfit is built to run like a Swiss watch, mistakes are often made: innocents are shot, trusted allies turn traitor, and Bent’s girlfriend, a femme fatale-ish secret agent, proves to be both his worst enemy and the only person he can trust.

This murky atmosphere, where bonds are tenuous and people must be taken at their word, provides Flame and Citron with many of its best moments. Among these is a conversation Bent has with an erudite German whom he is sent to kill, and who may or not be on his side. In a nice twist, the man goes on a rambling Socratic dialogue as a means of talking Bent out of pulling the trigger, and in the process touches on many of the film’s major themes. For these, director Ole Christian Madsen takes a page from Jean Pierre Melville’s legendary 1967 eulogy for La Resistance, Army of Shadows, in examining wartime morality and what is won and lost in the process of resorting to evil methods to combat evil. Likewise, the inner politics of the resistance movement are also highlighted, though perhaps with less subtlety: each meeting between the duo and their bosses in Sweden plays less like a historical document than it does like an action movie prerequisite, with Flame the loose cannon who would much rather reach for a Sten machine gun than a peace treaty any day.

Still, Flame and Citron is ultimately less about the inner workings of the Resistance than it is about the plight of its two main characters. Thankfully, Mikkelsen and Thure Lindhardt, as Flame, are up to the task of really carrying the dramatic heft. By this same token, the script manages to pile on just enough character development that when the action scenes do come—most notably a Scarface-esque last stand that has to be seen to be believed—they actually mean something. This is not to say that the film doesn’t occasionally veer into the kind of treacly territory native to both the historical drama and the action movie, but thanks to the strong performances, it does manage to largely stay grounded in the more honest, human drama. All flaws aside, Flame and Citron is well worth watching. It‘s more carefully crafted and thoughtful than most movies of this genre, and it provides a cutting look at an underground battlefront of WWII that most North Americans (myself included, I must admit) probably weren’t aware existed.

A Serious Man (2009)

2010-04-18T18:17:00.005-04:00

The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is undoubtedly their most difficult film to date. Not only is veiled beneath so much Jewish dogma as to be nearly inaccessible to a goy such as myself; not only does it feature a throwaway fable set in the 19th century as its opening scene; not only does it pile on one theme and allusion after another; but it seemingly makes no suggestion about how we’re supposed to interpret any of it. Nowhere in the film is there any overt evidence of an authorial guiding hand as far as theme is concerned (what do these guys really think about religion, anyway?), which is something of an accomplishment in and of itself. The end result is that the viewer ends up feeling just as overwhelmed and beleaguered as Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik, the Minnesota physics professor at the center of the film whose entire life unravels over the course of a few days.

This existentialist approach to storytelling has been the driving force behind all the critical discourse on the film. Theories were proposed left and right, but all it takes is to read a few of the notices of the movie (like Roger Ebert’s surprisingly rambling mess of a review) to see that a lot of critics simply didn’t know what the hell to make of this thing. They seemed to split evenly into two camps. There were those who stood in awe of the film’s narrative complexity and technical precision, like Ebert; but there was also a small but vocal group, including the Village Voice’s Ella Taylor, who wrote it off as jumbled and nihilistic. Both of these strike me as pretty lazy positions to stake out, but when a movie is this perplexing it usually ends up driving people to extremes. The shock and awe crowd made a lot of vague references about the story’s relationship to Kabbalah and the book of Job. Just how similar the two really are is beyond me, but I doubt I’m much different in this regard from most of the people who’ve offered their opinion—truth be told, the whole Job-referencing business smacks of being the kind of critical thread that gets appropriated an repackaged to the point of irrelevance. As for the nihilism folks, they’re missing the point entirely. Sure, the Coens do take a sadistic delight in putting their main character through hell, but that’s something they’ve been doing throughout their entire career. Haven’t these people seen Fargo or No Country For Old Men or even The Big Lebowski?

In saying this I’m making it sound like I have some great understanding of what this movie is really getting at—which, of course, I don’t. Like the anecdote Larry’s Rabbi tells him at one point in the film, there may not be any true answer about what it all means. And maybe that’s the point. You bring to this kind of film what you will, and while I could ramble about what I think the film is saying about fate and goodness and the ways one’s morals can be compromised by circumstances outside their control, it’s hard to say if anyone else would understand or agree with me.

What I can say for sure is that there’s no doubt that the Coens, whatever you think of them, are as masterfully controlled and aesthetically aware here as they’ve ever been—on this count I guess I’m with the “standing in awe” crowd. I’ve never been their biggest fan—which is why I’m writing about this thing now instead of six months ago—but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said they were gifted filmmakers. No Country For Old Men was, for me, one of the most technically perfect movies I’ve seen in the last few years, and A Serious Man matches it shot for shot. Every angle, ever cut, every musical cue bespeaks two filmmakers at the top of their game. That it’s all in the service of something so frustratingly indeterminate is no doubt what’s turned some people off of it. Still, the fact remains that, difficult though it may be, this film is utterly hypnotic. If you can latch onto its visceral, concrete aspects, then the philosophical riddle wrapped up in an enigma at the center of it just becomes icing on the cake.

Variety’s Todd McCarthy (no longer, as of a few weeks ago, it seems) wrote in his review that A Serious Man is “the kind of movie you get to make after winning the Oscar." True enough, but considering the film’s paltry $15 million at the box office, you have to wonder if it’ll take more gold statues before the Coens can go this deep again. For the sake of film culture, lets hope it doesn’t take too long.

Save the Tiger (1973)

2010-04-01T10:41:00.004-04:00

After letting it languish on my Netflix queue for several years, I finally got around to watching 1973’s Save the Tiger, the film for which Jack Lemmon won his Best Actor Academy Award. The film follows two days in the life of Harry Stoner, an L.A. clothing company owner who’s knee deep in a midlife/financial crisis. It’s the kind of gripping, personal film that I wish got made more often, and beyond being as shining an example of the old “character over story” adage as you’re going to get, it’s proof of a few things:

1) That the early 1970s were the last truly great period of American cinema. It was a time when the country was getting over a war, directors had insane amounts of freedom, and movies like this seemed to be the norm. So many of my favorite films, from Five Easy Pieces to The Long Goodbye to The Conversation, came out between ’70 and ’74, and Save the Tiger might as well be slotted right into that list. This a movie that’s as inextricably tied to its particular milieu as Easy Rider, and it tackles a subject matter and a kind of character that movies of the time just weren’t addressing. Lemmon’s character is a WWII vet, well into his forties and stuck between the old guard (represented by his business partner Phil, who’s played to perfection by the great Jack Gilford) and a counterculture that’s still in full swing. He can’t seem to find satisfaction in either one, and he’s been reduced to musing about the good old days of his youth, when he played in a band and big league pitchers still used a wind up—a preoccupation that’s played to perfection in the movie’s final scene.

All of this is expressed in a style that’s almost literary (the film’s adapted by Steve Shagan from his novel) at the same time that it’s got some clever stylistic touches, like the dead soldiers from Harry’s past who materialize in the crowd when he gives a speech at one of his fashion shows. It’s hard to pinpoint, but movies from the seventies seemed to briefly exist in a happy medium where they were able to tackle edgy content and present imperfect characters, but still do it in a classical style that allowed actors of Lemmon’s caliber to really light up the screen. I’m not sure when that died out, but the last great example I can think of is Network, from 1976.

2) That Jack Lemmon was one of the greatest screen actors of that or any era. It’s a shame that a whole generation—my generation, as it were—remembers this guy best from the Grumpy Old Men movies, because he truly was one of the most singular screen presences of all time. Who else could claim as varied and universally excellent a resume as Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The Player, The China Syndrome and Glengarry F-ing Glen Ross? He won the Oscar for Save the Tiger, and thankfully it might be one of the few cases where an actor actually won an award for his greatest role, and not for some phoned in performance a few years before he died. Lemmon is simply pitch perfect here, and even though he’s spouting off heaps of dialogue in every scene, he never once strikes a false note. He was always the kind of actor who could chew up scenery and completely mesmerize an audience when he wanted to, but he also knew when to dial it back. This is exemplified perfectly in a late scene where Harry talks to one of his craftsmen, a holocaust survivor played William Hansen, who tells him of how he’s content in his life as long as he has his wife and a job he’s good at. It’s maybe the best scene in the movie, and even though Hansen’s stealing it right out from under him, Lemmon’s smart enough to just sit back and let it happen. Few great actors would’ve been willing to do that, but Lemmon clearly believed in this story, enough that he was even willing to waive his fee and work for scale.

3) That John G. Avildsen is one of the most unique and unsung filmmakers of his generation. Sure, he made the Karate Kid movies and Rocky, but he has never been hailed as a legitimately great director. This a shame, especially when you consider that with Save the Tiger and Joe, he made two of the defining films of the early ‘70s. At the time, the culture was so divided that it was hard to make something truly subtle—you were either on the side of Midnight Cowboy or The Green Berets—but Avildsen explored a strata of American society that just wasn’t being talked about. He hasn’t done much later in his career (his last film was a Van Damme action flick), but in the early ‘70s he was bookending these hippie zeitgeist death-of-the-American-dream character studies with Troma films. Troma films! Now that’s what I call range.

"We Are All Guilty": Death in the Garden (1956)

2010-03-12T13:33:00.009-05:00

It’s always a thrill to go back and watch the early films of a director whose biggest successes came later in life. It’s this very pleasure that’s made it such a joy to catch up with some of Luis Bunuel’s films from the 1950s, many of which were only released on DVD for the first time last year. Most of the films come from the period when Bunuel was working in exile in Mexico, and they all display that very Bunuelian characteristic of being delightfully subversive and political at the same time that they often masquerade as straightforward adventure stories. 1956's Death in the Garden, which I just caught up with, is a perfect example. While it might not display the same feel for the surreal as the movies he made in France, it does show that, among his many other talents, Bunuel was a master at spinning a good ‘ol fashioned yarn. Beyond all else, it's proof that even when he was working as a hired hand within the constraints of a studio system, Bunuel was no less adept at making something incisive, thoughtful, and downright weird.

The film follows that classic setup where a group of people stranded in an extreme situation come to serve as microcosm for society at large. Bunuel being Bunuel, the extreme situation is a political uprising in a South American mining camp, and the stranded cast of characters includes a prostitute and (who else?) a Catholic priest. They’re both part of a group that’s taken hostage by a roguish French adventurer, who leads them into them into the jungle in order to escape from the local military.

It’s when the action gets moved to the unforgiving setting of the jungle that Death in the Garden really kicks into gear. Unlike a lot of directors, Bunuel doesn’t go out of his way to romanticize the beauty or purity of wild nature (just look at the film’s title). Instead, he portrays it as brutal and godless anarchy—a false paradise where any small misstep could mean death. This is all summed up rather succinctly in an early shot that depicts a snake being consumed by an army of fire ants, and it’s carried through as the weary runaways start to fall prey to the tests of the jungle one after another. Even more noticeable than the detail in which Bunuel documents the terrors of the wild is a high pitched squeal—insects? birds? a bad mic?—that accompanies a good many of the jungle scenes. It’s hard to say if it was intentional or not, but either way it definitely helps to give the viewer a sense of the intolerable conditions the characters are dealing with.

Bunuel’s camera and his blocking are pretty conventional—even stagy, at times—but the sophistication and audacity of his ideas makes up for what are otherwise some pretty forgetful stylistic choices. That being said, there are a few great little moments that remind you that this was the guy who had already made Un Chien Andalou, and who would later make The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. One of my favorites comes midway through the film when he abruptly cuts from a shot of the green labyrinth of the jungle to a soundless, stationary shot of cars driving by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at night. It’s a jarring transition that’s only made all the more affective when the shot cuts back to the jungle to show the character of Castin, an aging miner who dreams of opening a restaurant back in Europe, wistfully looking at a post card that depicts that very scene.

Thematically, Death in the Garden is certainly a rehash of several of Bunuel’s time-honored themes, but they are presented here with more restraint than they would be in his later films. First and foremost, as usual, is his antagonistic take on piety, which is personified here in the form of a naïve and well-meaning priest who seems oblivious to the fact that he’s being used to civilize the local Indians only so that they can be exploited for cheap labor. This is emblematic of the opinion that Bunuel—an avowed atheist whose iconoclastic position in the media often overshadowed the real subtlety of his theological ideas—seemed to hold on religion throughout his career. For him, it seems that the message of religion is not the problem. It’s that the figures in power—usually priests, politicians, and aristocrats—abuse it for their own gain at the expense of the masses, often without even knowing it. This, too, is expressed in a scene where the French adventurer called Chark is arrested and brutally beaten by soldiers who, in a darkly comic twist, stop off at the church for a quick prayer on the way to the jailhouse.

That’s the kind of subversive aside that all of these early Bunuel films manage to sneak in, and not just on religion, either. As a character says at one point in Death in the Garden, “we are all guilty,” and Bunuel made sure to be an equal opportunity social critic. Other movies (like The Young One, Simon of the Desert, and the early masterpiece The Exterminating Angel) target everything from racism and sexual abuse to the excesses of the upper class. That they’re always just as funny as they are incisive is only all the more proof of Bunuel’s untouchable position as the cinema’s greatest provocateur.

Tourism Ads by Lars Von Trier

2010-03-09T20:36:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure how long this has been around, but in light of my Antichrist discussion from a few days back it seems more than appropriate. The Onion never fails.

Antichrist (2009)

2010-03-04T18:12:00.005-05:00

Like Transformers 2, which might have single-handedly garnered print film criticism a stay of execution, last year’s Antichrist is one of those movies where the critical uproar surrounding it seemed to overshadow the picture itself. The film, which tells the story of a nameless couple (played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreating to their mountain cabin in order to get over the death of their son in some decidedly unhealthy ways, became notorious before it was even released. It’s Cannes premier alone, which was preceded by its director Lars Von Trier bestowing the mantle of “The Greatest Filmmaker in the World” on himself, was met with a substantial (for Cannes, anyway) amount of jeers and catcalls from the audience. Critics were polarized. Some called it a bold and challenging artistic statement, while others derided it as meaninglessly violent, misogynistic, and grotesque. Suffice to say, I had to see this thing. And thanks to Netflix watch instantly (these days you can get your Depravity On Demand), now I have.

I can’t really say what I expected going in. I’d avoided a lot of the conversation about the film, and besides some whispers about some particularly grisly activities that occur near the end, I knew very little about what Antichrist was actually about. So I was surprised to find that early on the film delivers some of the most strikingly beautiful (and yes, often gratuitous) imagery I’ve seen in some time. For a guy who once railed against the tricks of the cinematic trade when he formed the Dogme 95 movement, Von Trier certainly does possess a deft, sure-handed control of them. He mixes in just about every kind of stylistic tool at his disposal, from slow motion to jump cuts, handheld camera, and even subliminal images. But instead of coming off as muddled art house flash, all of this stylistic noise actually sort of works, and for a while the film is as gripping and atmospheric as the best of David Lynch’s work. The genre here is as much horror as anything else, and Von Trier manages to make the woods outside the couple’s cabin look deep and sumptuous like something out of a fairy tale at the same time that they’re creepy and unsettling. That they’re also filled with deformed deer, dead birds, and a mutilated fox that speaks aloud to Dafoe that “chaos reigns” only adds to the overwhelming feeling of dread and surreality that starts to form.

And then the last 20 minutes happen. Nearly all of the critical discourse on this movie has focused on the ending, so I’ll try to keep it as brief and mercifully vague as possible. But let's just say the movie, which to this point has been teetering on it quite skillfully, goes over the edge completely. The violence that happens is shocking—fucked up is probably a better way to describe it—but the real problem is that it’s also meaningless and uninteresting. Truth be told, half of what goes down is no more extreme than your average b-level horror film. But up to this point Von Trier’s made a movie that was so hauntingly vague, mysterious, and even beautiful that seeing such aggressive imagery manages to drain the film of any artistic credibility.

Suddenly, all of the preceding scenes, with their hyperactive camera and dreamlike editing, start to mutate into something hollow and almost laughably pretentious. And the story, which was pretty half-assed to begin with, suddenly seems the worst kind of art film trash. Von Trier’s smart enough—and big-headed enough—that it’s difficult to believe that it wasn’t all somehow intentional, but this doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t work. He’s giving his audience answers to questions they didn’t ask, and in doing so he sabotages his own movie. For a great deal of its running time, Antichrist has flirted with territory that’s vaguely reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky. Von Trier certainly thinks so, and he even includes a dedication to the great Russian filmmaker in the end credits. But after the legendary blow-up his movie has in its final act, even this seems all too reminiscent of something an affected film school student would do.

Disappointing as it is, Antichrist is an important film for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s proof that even in today’s culture (whatever that means) movies still have the ability to shock and provoke controversy—even if for pretty base reasons. More importantly, though, this film is as good of an argument for the auteur theory as any in recent memory. It’s impossible to talk about it—either textually or as a cultural artifact—without discussing Von Trier and his more than questionable intentions. He’s stated that he conceived the film in the wake of the worst depression of his life, and you can’t help but attempt to delve into the guy’s mind and psychoanalyze him when talking about his movie. Whatever he is—and angry film critics have called him a lot of things—there’s no denying he’s an important artist. I guess we can only hope that next time he’ll use his powers in the service of more substantial material.

Willful Suspension of Disbelief

2010-02-23T21:39:00.003-05:00

This is pretty good. An American physicist has become so annoyed by bad science in movies that he wants to limit Hollywood filmmakers to just one scientific "gimme" per film. Such a claim is patently ridiculous, but what's funny is that this very rule is supposed to be a part of screenwriting 101--you get your one chance to stretch, and from there you're supposed to stick to real-world logic. Of course, you can't expect your average Hollywood screenwriter to stick to classical story structure, let alone to what's scientifically plausible. To be honest, at this point I'd be happy if half the movies that came out managed to follow their own internal logic...

The House of the Devil (2009)

2010-02-18T15:23:00.007-05:00

Last year’s The House of the Devil plays like an unreleased Tobe Hooper flick from 1980—the kind of movie he might of made in that forgotten period between The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Poltergeist. I don’t just mean that it apes the style of those films. I mean that it tries to present itself as one of them, right down to its retro poster and opening titles. In a humorous nod to the later 80s, there’s even a Footloose-inspired dance scene (set to none other than The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another). While it’s good for a laugh, all this can easily be written off as Grindhouse-style homage, yet another chapter in the increasingly annoying modern obsession with 80s culture. What’s surprising, then, is how well The House of the Devil manages to match those late 70s/early 80s horror classics in tone and style. Those directors (Hooper, John Carpenter, Wes Craven) prized suspense and build-up above all else. They were always giving the viewers a chance to scare themselves before they allowed the movie to do it for them. The House of the Devil picks up where those old masters of the genre left off—when was the last time somebody actually made a “stuck in a scary house” movie?—and the result is a surprisingly creepy little artifact of a film.

In keeping with the old-school horror style, The House of the Devil is downright slow for its first third. We follow Sam (Jocelin Donahue), a college student who’s dealing with the very everyday problem of having an annoying roommate. She’s found her dream apartment, but she only has a matter of days to get money for the down payment. Her desperate situation leads her to seek out an “easy” gig as a babysitter along with her best friend Megan (mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig, whose feel for meandering, realistic conversation actually fits into this milieu quite perfectly). These first 30 minutes do move by pretty uneventfully, but when the two arrive at the house for the babysitting gig—a byzantine mansion that looks more like a life-sized dollhouse than a place anyone would actually live—only to find that the couple in question doesn’t even have a kid, we know things are about to get weird.

This slow-burning approach is a big part of what makes The House of the Devil work so well. Like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, this is a film that wrings a lot of creep out of characters finding themselves in situations that slowly move from just plain old socially awkward to quietly terrifying. This is most apparent during Sam’s meeting with the owner of the house, Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), an impossibly tall old man whose strangely passive demeanor only makes every pleasantry and overly polite remark he makes sound like a veiled threat. Noonan’s an old pro, and he’s perfectly subtle in the role, to the point that you don’t even blame Sam for eventually taking the job—especially after Mr. Ulman ups the pay to a few hundred bucks for an evening’s work.

Once Sam is left alone in the house—except for “Mother,” that is, who may or may not be sleeping in a bedroom upstairs—is when The House of the Devil really comes into its own. The film was produced by Larry Fessenden’s (The Last Winter, Wendigo) production outfit Glass Eye Pix, and like Fessenden, director Ti West has a real gift for pushing tension and mystery as far as it can possibly go. In this regard he owes as much to Hitchcock and Polanski as he does to guys like Carpenter and Romero, especially in the way he makes use of classical suspense (that is, the things the audience knows that the characters onscreen don’t) as way of building a sense of dread. He also manages to get an absurd amount of mileage out of some well-worn horror gags, from power outages and unsourced sounds to everyone’s favorite, the obscenely loud telephone that rings at just the right moment. Using every trick to its full potential, West manages to create one of the best 30 minutes of old-fashioned big screen horror I’ve seen in a long time. It's a movie that prizes atmosphere and suspense over gore, where every little bump in the night carries with it some real dramatic weight. Of course, when the violence does come, it’s quick and downright brutal, not unlike the first appearance of Leatherface in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Like most movies that work on suspense, The House of the Devil inevitably brings on a bit of a letdown when it finally lays its cards on the table. This is disappointing, but at the same time it’s a testament to how well West and company were able to build atmosphere: there was simply no way they could ever live up to the creepy bar they set for themselves. Still, none of this takes away from the kind of wonderfully low-budget horror this film achieves. It’s a classically made movie that deserves credit for not just stealing from the old school, but for taking ownership of the kind of style and approach that made those movies great. It harks back to the days when directors like Romero, Carpenter, and Hooper were king, and for horror fans there’s no way that can be a bad thing.

Tommy Guns, Fedoras, and...Digital Video: Public Enemies (2009)

2010-02-13T16:47:00.009-05:00

Just caught up with Johnny Depp and Michael Mann’s latest, Public Enemies, which very well might be one of the most cursory period piece/biopics I’ve ever seen. For a film based on such a revered and well-researched book (Bryan Burroughs’ Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34), Public Enemies chooses to gloss over nearly all of the details of what made its subjects tick, to the point that they might as well be cardboard cutouts wearing trench coats and fedoras. We get to know nothing about John Dillinger, who is supposed to be flamboyant and larger-than-life, but whom Johnny Depp can’t help but make just a touch too dark and brooding. This is all summed up in a scene early on where Dillinger meets Marion Cotillard’s character Billie Frechette (who, by the way, is the only actor in the film who succeeds in seeming like a real person), and immediately tries to get her to run away with him. When she protests that she knows nothing about him, he responds “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you... what more do you need to know?” It’s a good line, and would probably be enough to get any woman to drop everything and take off with Johnny Depp. But Mann seems to think that this is all we as an audience need to know, as well, and for the remainder of the film that throwaway line will stand in for character development.

This is even more egregious in the case of Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent on Dillinger’s trail, who’s played by everyone’s favorite stoic Christian Bale, who is so wooden here that you get the impression he was placed into each scene by stagehands along with all the other props. Depp has enough inherent charm and personality that he’s always able to inject a little life into an underwritten character, but Bale, who seems to have a congenital inability to emote (at least not at anyone other than his DP), is the last guy you want in that situation. We know his character is an FBI agent, and we know he wants to catch John Dillinger, but beyond that he’s a total enigma. God knows I’m not asking for the requisite domestic dispute scene where his wife, baby in hand, says something like “this case has made you a ghost in this house” (which, come to think of it, might be a line from Mann’s much better film Heat), but a little flair or personality somewhere would have been nice.

Mann’s not helping the cause stylistically, either. You would hope that he might add to the dramatic depth of the story visually, as he’s proven he can do in the past, but he insists on shooting Public Enemies (which takes place in the dust bowl!) in a jittery, handheld, and distractingly digital style. I’ve seen few movies where the lack of film texture and grain is so obvious--and so clearly missed. I'm in no way one of those people who thinks that digital video is the scourge of modern cinema. But even the high dollar HD cameras like the one Mann used are still not at the level they should be. There are still things that the traditional film format does better, and I cannot imagine a setting that is more anathema to being shot in digital video than 1930s Chicago. Everything looks too slick and hyper-real, especially considering that the settings could have looked downright sumptuous if the filmmakers has shot them in the right way.

This antiseptic style carries over into nearly every other aspect of the film, including the ways in which it tries to build dramatic momentum. The film is based on one of those sweeping non-fiction epics, and watching it, it seems like its origins are always far too apparent. It’s as though every scene is a reenactment of something that is described in a much greater and more perceptive way in Burroughs’ book. It plays like a documentary without the narration, to the point that even when the scenes are slick and well-executed, you keep waiting for Peter Coyote (is there a more ubiquitous V.O. actor out there right now?) to start talking over the action to fill in the historical details.

I’ll close by saying that, all other faults aside, Michael Mann’s feel for action is as good as it’s ever been. The bank robbery in Heat, and the ensuing gunfight in the streets, remains for me one of the most heart-pounding and tense action scenes ever committed to film, and though Mann never reaches that level here, he comes awfully close. At different points in the movie, especially in a scene that features George “Baby Face” Nelson literally going out in a blaze of glory, he delivers exactly the kind of weirdly poetic visual grammar that made Heat one of the most wonderfully operatic action films of the 90s. Public Enemies might be a misfire, but seriously, is there a film director out there more adept than Michael Mann at capturing the sheer mayhem of automatic weapons being fired off? I don’t think so.

Cold Souls (2009)

2010-02-07T15:37:00.003-05:00

Cold Souls finds Paul Giamatti joining the weird list of actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves. As such, he stars as Paul Giamatti, a melancholy actor who’s having a devil of a time pulling off the lead in a Chekhov play. The problem? His own existential fears, guilt, and neuroses are getting in the way of him delivering a true, unburdened performance. He gets the answer to his problems in the form of an absurd company that offers a most unusual service: soul storage. By some never-explained technology, they’ve found a way to literally extract the human soul (it sort of looks like a grey blob of putty), and then place it in stasis in a storage locker. Free from the weight of their mortal quandaries, a doctor played by the great David Stathairn explains, the soulless are finally able to get down to the business of really living. Although skeptical, Giamatti accepts a brief soul extraction in order to get through the stress of performing on Broadway. But as you might expect, things don’t go so smoothly.

Cold Souls is supposedly based on a particularly bizarre dream that director Sophie Bathes once had, and it would have been much better served to go down that kind of abstract path, especially considering its premise. Instead, the whole thing is played oddly straight, and this gets in the way of it ever really paying off on its promising setup. We’re left with way too many questions, and some of the more interesting aspects of the story, like what its like to be “soulless” or how the soul really shapes a person’s world view, are either glazed over or written out of the script with throwaway lines. For his part, Giamatti certainly rises to the challenge of having to carry such a tough sell of a story. He provides the movie with all of its most memorable moments, and it’s his strange mannerisms and comic timing that allows it to remain pleasant and watchable even though it’s never as interesting as it should be.

Still, despite the undeniable fun of Giamatti’s performance, Cold Souls is ultimately one of the most disappointing movies I’ve caught up with in a while, if only because the central idea of its premise was so fascinating. Discussions of the soul are a decidedly esoteric thing, and trying to tackle them in a movie that is so conventional in its presentation was bound to be problematic. It might have all been better served as a piece of literature or as a one-note short film, but as it is, Cold Souls seems like it’s always struggling to find something concrete and tangible to actually be about. That’s a problem that even some solid performances and a clever setup will never find their way around.

Favorites of 2009

2010-01-26T23:19:00.006-05:00

It’s a little late for this end of the year stuff at this point, but I didn’t get to catch up with a lot of the big ’09 films until the very last minute. So consider the following my belated take on the ten best releases of the year. Also, I might as well start a tradition by once again including the ten best films, both new and old, that I caught up with on video this year.

1. The Hurt Locker

Someone finally realized that the way to make a movie about the Iraq war is to not mention any of the details specific to it. To watch this movie is to understand why Jeremy Renner’s Sergeant James character is so addicted to war: it’s just plain exhilarating. That might be a bit appalling if this wasn’t also one of the first films to truly address the #1 problem of all war movies: that for all their horror, they will always be way too cinematically exciting to really be anti-conflict. That it does that while easily being the most gripping film of the year only adds to its greatness.

2. Inglourious Basterds

3. An Education

People who say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” apparently haven’t seen this film. It’s classically constructed, beautifully written, and features one of the very best acting performances of the year from Carey Mulligan.

4. Moon

5. Summer Hours

I’m ashamed to say that I haven’t seen even a single one of Olivier Assayas’ other films, but this was enough to make me want to go through his whole catalogue. A deeply moving and meaningful story that tackles subjects rarely covered in the movies. This also features my favorite ending of any movie this year.

6. Goodbye, Solo

7. Thirst

Korean priest-vampires having lots of kinky sex? Count me in! Seriously, though, beyond being one of the most gorgeous looking movies of the year, this one finds a way to take the now very tired concept of the vampire, strip it of all it pretensions, and make one of the most oddly moving morality tales I’ve seen in a good while.

8. Big Fan

Not only is it as creepy as it is funny, but it has the originality (that is, balls) to portray characters that most movies wouldn’t touch. Patton Oswalt also proves once and for all that he’s got the skills to be a truly great actor.

9. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

10. In the Loop

The year’s most scathing satire, this story of the political spin machine at work is full of delightfully obscene dialogue where nearly every other line is something so clever that you feel you should write it down.

Honorable Mentions:

Up in the Air, District 9, Zombieland, Sugar, Not Quite Hollywood, I Love You Man

Video Discoveries of 2009:

Le Corbeau (1943) D: Henri Georges Clouzot
Elevator to the Gallows (1958) D: Louis Malle
The Young One (1960) D: Louis Bunuel
Le Trou (1960) D: Jacques Becker
Downhill Racer (1969) D: Michael Ritchie
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) D: Peter Yates
Wings of Desire (1987) D: Wim Wenders
Withnail and I (1987) D: Bruce Robinson
The Hidden (1987) D: Jack Sholder
Joint Security Area (2000) D: Park Chan Wook

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

2010-01-23T13:47:00.004-05:00

Werner Herzog’s awkwardly titled new film The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans might stand as one of the most interestingly bold choices ever made by a legendary filmmaker. The film, which is full of Big Easy heavies and a ravaged post-Katrina landscape, could be described as a shameless b-movie, but that doesn’t really do it justice. Think of it more as one of those mid-eighties cop movies starring Gary Busey if it had been made by the world’s most prominent art house director…oh yeah, on drugs. (That little post-script might as well be tacked on to every description of this film.) Plenty of directors are willing to touch a toe into the tepid water that is exploitation, but Herzog, never one for doing anything half-assed, dives in headfirst, filling his movie with hookers, dead alligators, mobsters, hallucinatory iguanas, and, weirdest of all, Nicholas Cage. In the process, he finds a way to inject some new life into the “burnt-out cop” movie while simultaneously not forsaking one ounce of his trademark eccentricity. Whether you like the movie hinges almost entirely on whether you’re able to embrace its particular brand of insanity, but if you are, then The Bad Lieutenant proves to be one of the most rewarding and downright fun movies of ‘09.

Nic Cage stars as Terrance McDonagh, a New Orleans detective who, in the aftermath of Katrina, saves a convict from drowning in a flooded prison. His act of heroism earns him a promotion to Lieutenant, but it also leaves him with chronic back pain that leads to a mounting number of drug habits—both legal and otherwise. Just as he’s really starting to spin out of control, Terrance gets put in charge of investigating the execution-style homicide of a family of immigrants. In typical Herzogian fashion, McDonagh becomes absolutely fixated on solving the case—that is, of course, when he’s not too busy raiding the police evidence room for heroin or shaking down club kids for coke. While Terrance’s search for answers in the case leads him to a local drug dealer called “Big Fate,”(Xzibit) he also becomes entangled with a group of would-be mafiosos while trying to protect his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) from a particularly unpleasant brand of customer.

Herzog shoots this all in the same kind of straightforward, low-budget style as he did Rescue Dawn. Some critics have complained about this, as though in order to really appreciate the fact that Terrance is snorting enough drugs to topple an elephant we need a shakier camera and some quicker pans. This, of course, has never been Herzog’s M.O. Even his grander films like Fitzcarraldo are relatively unadventurous in their visual stylings. He’s a guy much more concerned with just documenting the spectacle going on in the scene than he is with trying to enhance it with elaborate camera moves. That being said, The Bad Lieutenant does have some tricks up its sleeve. On a few occasions where Terrance is really flying high, Herzog switches to what looks like 8mm film to get a real feeling of detachment, and there’s even a bizarre shot sequence where the camera seems to ride on the back of an alligator as it waddles into the swamp. This is only one of dozens of shots in the film that depict the local wildlife (someone should write a book about how animals and insects function in the work of directors like Herzog and Luis Bunuel), from snakes and fish to imaginary lizards, the last of which makes for the film’s most absurdly hilarious scene when Terrance offhandedly complains “what the fuck are these iguanas doing on my coffee table?” to some fellow cops, as though it’s the most normal thing in the world.

Beyond these little touches, Herzog’s style here is relatively minimalist considering the material. This is all for the better, as his laissez-faire approach lets us sit back and really soak up the glorious insanity of Cage’s lead performance, which Matty Robinson of the Filmspotting podcast more than appropriately referred to as “a big bag of crazy.” Cage is in his full-on manic mode here, devouring scenery in a way that would have made Klaus Kinski proud. The guy gets a lot of grief, and he probably deserves most of it, but even I can admit that there is not one other actor in the world of such a high standing that would have been willing to tackle this kind of a role. For what it’s worth, there also might not be a single actor in Hollywood better at playing intoxicated, or at somehow ingratiating himself to the audience in the process. When Cage isn’t slurring his way through a scene, he’s bouncing off the walls like a madman and speaking in a rat-a-tat fashion that sounds like a mix of a 1920s news reporter and someone with a broken jaw. He switches between the two in a way that borders on confusing, but this mercurial quality is only one more part of what makes his delivery so fascinating. Still, Cage’s real achievement here, beyond affecting some really hilarious mannerisms and facial tics, is in the way he manages to make us believe in Terrance and root for him no matter how many despicable things he does. This is a guy who’s willing to pull guns on senior citizens and blatantly break the law in just about every way possible, but we still believe that there is a method to his more than considerable madness. That alone is an award-worthy achievement.

In the final analysis, this movie belongs more to Cage, whose performance alone is enough to warrant repeat viewings, than it does to Herzog. But Herzog still makes some truly wise decisions in his approach here. Unlike so many directors, he always knows exactly what kind of movie he’s making. He lets the material speak for itself, and beyond throwing in a few little Herzogian touches here and there, he’s not going out of his way to put too much of an authorial stamp on the film. This is disappointing at first, but then a bit comforting: if Herzog had filled The Bad Lieutenant with dwarfs, extended takes of chickens, or other evidence of his classic preoccupations, it would have been sure proof that he’d started to become a parody of himself. But he doesn’t. He’s restrained enough to let the movie’s strengths, particularly its bizarre brand of humor—this is, at its heart, comedy—be its biggest statement.

I’ll close with this: descriptions and reviews of this movie have all stressed just how over the top and insane it is. With this in mind, I was convinced going in that I would inevitably be a bit disappointed with the crazy factor of it, if only because it had been pushed so hard by every critic in the country. Suffice to say, The Bad Lieutenant manages to live up to the hype to be every bit it as mind-blowingly gonzo as you would hope it to be. And that just might be one of the most oddly significant achievements in any film this year.

Observe and Report (2009)

2010-01-13T21:14:00.004-05:00

Jody Hill is a director who wholeheartedly doesn’t give a damn about whether his characters are likable. This stance was arguably the downfall of his first film, The Foot Fist Way, which heaped so much venom on its hero, a wannabe kung fu master, that it became downright tedious in its viciousness. Then came the excellent HBO TV series Eastbound and Down, on which Hill served as a writer and sometime director, which took a similar approach but added in equal amounts of pathos and a more experienced Danny McBride to help create one of the funniest egotists in recent TV memory. Observe and Report, which chronicles bipolar mall cop Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen) in his struggle to get his life together and hunt down a serial flasher, is an amusingly uneven hodgepodge of Hill’s two previous projects. Its highs are soaring (in more ways than one, considering the different controlled substances characters ingest in heroic doses), but like its main character, it’s also got some serious issues.

The film has a great cast, especially Celia Watson as Ronnie’s perpetually drunk mom, and some seriously good set pieces, but tonally it’s all over the place. In the early running Hill and company are deliberately testing the limits of the audience’s threshold for dark humor (even the most hardcore comedies usually steer clear of characters slamming heroin and engaging in borderline date rape), and for a while, it’s all a bit too messy to be as funny as it should. But this is exactly the territory that Hill likes to deal in, so it’s almost not surprising that around the ¾ mark things get so ridiculous that the tone of the movie seems to swing back around the dial again to reach a level of absurdity that Will Ferrell would be proud to call his own. This shift is abrupt enough that it definitely drains the film of a lot of the off the wall creepy momentum it had early on. Still, jarring as it is, you are almost relieved that you finally get to laugh a bit. I would have preferred for Hill to have either made a unapologetically dark character study or an Anchorman-style comedy, but I can’t deny that some of the film’s most memorable moments are a mix of the two, and by the time Barnhardt faces off in hand-to-hand combat against a legion of angry cops led by Ray Liotta (!) while armed only with a flashlight, you sort of have to admit that Observe and Report has found a way to be both funny and completely amoral all at the same time. This might not be enough to keep every viewer engaged, as the critical uproar over the film showed, but even the movie’s detractors would probably admit that the players here are working with a fairly high degree of difficulty considering their intended audience. That, along with the fact that Hill has proven that he’s still not the least bit afraid of alienating half his viewers in any given scene, makes this a film that I have to admit I have an odd amount of respect for.

Crank as the Ultimate Video Game Movie

2009-12-21T15:34:00.004-05:00

I’ve finally ended my reign as the last American male who hasn’t seen the movie Crank. I don’t remember the original or its even zanier sequel getting all that much attention when it first came out, but it seems that both have attained minor cult status on video, and it’s easy to see why: like all the best genre movies, both Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage relish their B-movie status, throwing all verisimilitude, logic, and dramatic pretensions out the window in favor of pure, anarchic fun. It’s the kind of attitude that made this year’s Zombieland work so well, and it’s the formula that many of the most beloved action and horror films, from the Evil Dead series to the cream of the Hong Kong action crop, do so well. It’s such a simple plan that it’s surprising it’s not employed more often: start your movie off with a bang, and then don’t let up ‘til the credits roll.

I’m a little late to the party on this one, so I’m not going attempt to review or discuss either of these films in the more traditional sense. I do want to try and tackle their style, though, because while watching them it occurred to me that these two films seem to encapsulate the so-called “video game aesthetic” as well as anything I’ve seen. In the past, a “video game” movie was something like 1995’s Mortal Kombat, or 1994’s utterly forgettable Street Fighter (which has the depressing honor of being Raul Julia's last movie); that is, movies adapted from video games. In recent years, though, some directors have started employing the feel and construct of games as a recognizable filmmaking style. Crank appears to be the exemplar. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are using this aesthetic at every turn throughout both movies, and while the effects are probably jarring or even confusing to people that didn’t grow up with Nintendo, for those that did, it’s too obvious to ignore.

Right from the beginning, Neveldine and Taylor cue their audience in to the kind of style they’re using. The opening credits are done in a blatant arcade game mode, complete with old school 32-bit graphics and Donkey Kong-style sound effects. When they finally do cut to the first scene of the movie, it’s a point-of-view shot of hit man Chev Chelios (Jason Statham, proving why he deserves two action movie franchises) waking up in his apartment to find that he’s been injected with the “Beijing Cocktail,” a mixture of decidedly un-groovy drugs that is slowly stopping his heart.

This opening scene works like a video game in two ways: the first is that it’s the classic “cut scene” that seems to open every action video game. That is--introduce the hero, let us know what his problem is, and then on to the ass-kicking. Some movies have used this method--Commando comes to mind--but traditionally they require a lot more throat-clearing in the form of character introductions and exposition before they really get down to business. Video games have always eschewed that kind of backstory out of necessity, since anything the person playing the game can’t control is really just filler, and needs to be dispensed with as fast as possible. The fact that Crank does the same is a definite clue as to what kind of movie you’re about to experience.

The second key aspect of the opening scene is that it sets the stage for a particular style of framing--establishing Statham as a video game hero who is essentially being “played” by the movie--that the filmmakers are to use throughout both films. For the rest of Crank, and in Crank 2, he’ll often be shot in a very deliberate and almost intentionally stilted style that is designed to recreate the look of a character within a game. Here, the idea is point-of-view, the kind of style used in so-called “first-person shooter” video games. But Neveldine and Taylor often employ a third-person style, as well, in the form of tracking shots that follow just behind Chelios as he walks down the street. Of course, the whole of both movies is not shot in this fashion, but even when they’re not using a particular type of video game framing, both Crank films take a cue from the particular set-design and set up of action video games.

The most notable example occurs at the beginning of Crank 2, when Chelios, still alive but now sporting an artificial heart with the battery on empty, escapes from the Chinese gangsters who were holding him hostage. He makes his way out into a kind of industrial park, where a collection of shipping containers have been stacked and arranged in such a way as to create a makeshift maze. Naturally, there are roving groups of armed guards, who Chelios both avoids and guns down at will. This kind of situation--where equal amounts of stealth and fighting are required--is found time and again in video games, and the style of filming, which again employs a healthy dose of centered third-person framing, is one of the franchise’s most obvious nods of the head to the arcade aesthetic. The shipping containers are also a nice touch. I’m not sure what it is, but in my experience every action video game--and quite a few movies, as well--have at least one sequence in a compound filled with shipping containers.

There are plenty of other video game elements to Crank worth studying, from the Godzilla-inspired fight sequence in the second film to the movie’s use of a map--courtesy, apparently, of Google Earth--to zip from one location to another throughout Chelios’ frenetic dash to get revenge, but I’ll let them be for now. The overall point is that these movies, juvenile though they may be, do seem to represent a small step forward for filmmakers interested in trying to mix media, whether it’s with music videos, computer animation, or video games. In the past, a “video game movie” was a movie that just borrowed hackneyed characters, plot lines, and elements from titles out of the Sega Genesis catalogue. But now it might refer more to a particular style, feel, and tone that’s more referential--oddly postmodern, even--than it is anything else. The purist in me wants to say that anything that contaminates the precious style of movies as they are is a definite step in the wrong direction, but as long as this kind of stuff is here to stay, it might as well be done right. And Crank, for whatever else you might say about it, gets the genre of the absurd, R-rated action movie oh so very right.

The New Great American Director?

2009-12-10T22:39:00.007-05:00

Recently, I finally got a chance to see Goodbye Solo, the third movie from director Ramin Bahrani. Like both of his previous films, Chop Shop and Man Push Cart, it’s gotten rave reviews from all the major critics, including Roger Ebert, who proclaimed Bahrani “the new great American director” in the intro to this excellent interview from March of this year.

Whether or not Bahrani is going to go down as a pioneering filmmaker is too early to say, but Goodbye Solo certainly isn’t going to hurt his chances. Like Chop Shop, it’s a marvelously realized movie that attaches the heaviest of implications to what might seem like a small, simple story. It’s all buoyed by a mesmerizing performance from Souleymane Sy Savane as the title character, an immigrant cab driver who forms an unlikely friendship with an embittered old man, played by (no kidding) former Elvis bodyguard Red West.

There’s certainly no denying Bahrani has only gotten more accomplished with each movie he’s made, and after only three films he’s already established a recognizable style and set of preoccupations. Watching Goodbye Solo I kept thinking of the final scene in Dirty Pretty Things, another movie that followed the plight of immigrants, in which Chiwetel Ejiofor’s character describes himself and others like him as “the people you don’t see.” That seems as concise a definition as any of the kinds of films Bahrani makes. He follows food cart operators, poor families, and cab drivers, and finds in their stories the kind of poetry that usually only shows up in the work of other so-called “great” directors like Herzog and Bresson.

The most interesting thing about Bahrani is that he’s built his reputation solely on his brilliance as a storyteller. Usually, the young directors with the most heat on them are those with the flashiest style or the most audacious plot structures. Bahrani’s plots are audacious, but only in their elegance of execution. Whether you like his movies or not, those are the kinds of films that tend to stand the test of time. And while I still wouldn't proclaim him the next great thing in American movies, he’s certainly making the case with each film he puts out.

In The Company of Men (1997)

2009-12-08T22:09:00.007-05:00

Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men follows two mid-nineties corporate types--complete with wacky ties--who’ve just been dumped by their longtime girlfriends. To collectively get back at the opposite sex, they come up with a particularly devilish plan: while on a six-week business trip in fly-over country, they will simultaneously begin dating the same woman, gain her affection, and then unexpectedly blow her off and skip town (it may be juvenile, but I couldn’t help being reminded of The Dennis System). It’s the kind of thing that inadvertently happens in countless relationships, but the kicker here, of course, is that the two bastards are doing it on purpose.

The duo involved in this nefarious scheme couldn’t be more different. Chad, played with a really despicable gusto by Aaron Eckhart, is an unapologetic misogynist who sees people as pawns and dupes to be played for all they’re worth. He puts off the impression of being just a fast-talking, opportunistic jock--the kind of guy whose handshake is always a bit too strong--but by the end of the movie your not likely to think of him as anything other than an out-and-out sociopath. Howard (Matt Malloy), meanwhile, is an unassuming, bookish-looking middle manager, but LaBute establishes early on that he likes to think he’s every bit the smooth operator that Chad is. Together, they decide to take on the task of breaking the heart of Christine (Stacey Edwards, who is terrific), a shy, good-hearted typist who works in their building and--oh yeah--also happens to be deaf. No one could accuse LaBute of pulling any punches when it comes to taking his comedy extra black.

This may all sound too dark to take, and at times it is, but on the whole LaBute manages to balance the woman-hating style of his lead characters with a healthy dose of satire, not only of masculinity and the vampiric nature of some modern relationships, but of corporate culture in general (Chad, for one, seems like he would fit right in with Patrick Bateman and company from American Psycho--which would make a fitting, if not uncomfortable, double feature with this film). It all amounts to an unusually good exploration of why bad people do the things they do, which is a much tougher trick to pull off than it sounds. I remember once hearing a critic say that this movie encapsulates the whole notion of “the banality of evil” as good as anything outside of the Coen Bros. canon, and I think they have a point. LaBute seems fascinated by the duplicitous behavior that outwardly upstanding people are capable of, and it's something he’s explored throughout his career. In fact, his recent effort The Shape of Things seems nothing if not an expansion of the ideas he’s playing with here. (That film, interestingly, is told not from the point of view of the victimizer but of the victim, who, even more interestingly, happens to be a man.)

My only problem with In the Company of Men, outside of the grating-but-sparse jazz score, is LaBute’s visual style. It’s become sort of a joke at this point that no director who comes to film by way of theatre (as LaBute did) can ever display even the most minimal deftness of visual style, and he’s no different. The film is all static shots and takes so over-long that the actors occasionally stumble over their lines. I wish I could say that this insular style allows us to focus in on the gleefully mean-spirited nature of LaBute’s dialogue, but really it's just off-putting and sometimes a bit tedious. Still, In the Company of Men provides more than enough substance to get over its lack of style. This includes a real killer of an ending--the kind of scene that’s bound to stay with you, probably for a few days longer than you’d like it to.

Whatever Works (2009)

2009-11-28T16:32:00.009-05:00

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works is based on a script he wrote in the seventies and never filmed, and he supposedly made it on the quick right before the SAG strike (which, of course, never actually happened). Critics were hard on the movie, and in many ways it’s easy to see why: it’s got that haphazard quality that so many of Woody’s movies (Anything Else, Hollywood Ending, Melinda and Melinda) have had in recent years, and what interesting points it does make have arguably already been covered in better movies of his like Manhattan and Annie Hall. Yet for all these criticisms (most of which are entirely valid), Whatever Works still manages to, well, work, thanks in part to its lovely tone and feel. There’s no denying that it’s a resoundingly imperfect effort, but it still only serves as further proof of the argument that, for all his faults, Allen still makes the most watchable, breezy films of any modern director.

In classic Allen fashion, the film traces the story of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), a misanthropic New Yorker who abandoned his old life as a near-Nobel laureate physicist to live in a shabby apartment and teach chess to children, who, like everyone else, he refers to as “morons” and “inchworms.” Boris’s insular life takes a strange turn when he decides to let Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a young runaway from Mississippi, crash at his place while she searches for a job. Even though he insults her constantly, the impressionable young Melody takes a strange liking to Boris, and soon the two strike up a very unlikely romance.

Like all Allen movies, Whatever Works is much more about character than plot, but what is strange about it is which characters end up being the most compelling. The film suffered from a pretty terrible trailer that served up the particularly egregious Southern accents of Wood, Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley, Jr. (as her fundamentalist parents) front and center. To watch it, you would’ve thought that David’s classic Allenian cynic would be the film’s only saving grace, but the reality turns out to be quite the opposite. It is Wood and Clarkson who turn out to be the funniest characters as the naive Southern belles transformed by the culture of New York City, and David, for all his obvious talent, seems left rushing to catch up. He looks the part of the elitist genius just fine, but his performance here seems the final proof that his particular brand of comedy is best absorbed in thirty minute installments on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Like his famous collaborator Jerry Seinfeld, it’s pretty clear he’s no actor, but he works around this fault whenever he’s in the looser construct of his own show. The same cannot be said for his work in this film. He’s funny. He reads his lines well. But that’s just it--for a guy who’s true skill is improv, everything he does here ends up feeling just a little too rehearsed.

David doesn’t get much help from Allen, who affects one of the most flat directorial styles of his career to tell his story. This was a problem of his in the nineties, but you would have been forgiven for thinking he’d turned a corner with recent work like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Unfortunately, his go-to method here is to shoot everything like a stage play. It’s a style he no doubt does better than most, but all it does is highlight David’s shortcomings and add a dangerous air of shallowness to every philosophical statement--and there are many--that his script tries to make.

All these faults are much more apparent than they should be, but the film miraculously manages to stay afloat thanks to the twisted positivity of Allen’s world view. It seems odd to say it, but Whatever Works, for all its talk of the hopelessness of humanity and suicide (which Boris attempts twice--to comic effect), is one of the most feel-good movies I’ve seen in a long time. Allen has always positioned himself as one of film culture’s most staunch neurotics, but if this film proves anything about him, it’s that he’s also a hopelessly positive person, well aware of what he sees as the gentle indifference of the world, but also aware that this means the impetus for happiness is always in the hands of the individual. As the title suggests, for Allen the key to happiness is for each person to find and hold on to whatever small bit of goodness works for them. This idea is reflected throughout the movie, which only manages to get away with having such mean-spirited (Boris) and dim-witted (Melody) characters because it refuses to judge them. That it does it all with Allen’s trademark clever dialogue and razor sharp wit is what really makes it special. There is certainly a danger that goes hand-in-hand with this approach, as it’s easy to worry that Allen could be starting to skate away from the kind of material that made something like Crimes and Misdemeanors so good and toward a style that is just...pleasant. For the time being, though, it’s enough to keep me coming back for more.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

2009-11-09T00:17:00.005-05:00

The Men Who Stare at Goats opens with a title card that reads: “More of this is true than you would believe.” I’ll admit that this kind of playful hedge is a great way to start a movie whose centerpiece is a military unit that trains its soldiers to read minds and walk through walls. It works because at the same time that the story told here strains all possible levels of credibility, anyone who knows anything about our government’s history of whacked out secret research and black ops knows that when it comes to wasting tax payer dollars, those in charge are forever outdoing themselves.

With such a solid, satire-ready backdrop (courtesy of a book by the English writer Jon Ronson) and a cast of old pros, it would seem that the makers of The Men Who Stare at Goats were halfway to an interesting movie before they even shot any film. But director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan disappointingly decide just to let the momentum of their larger-than-life premise--that in the early 80s, the U.S. Army attempted to build a unit of super-soldiers with psychic powers--carry their film. Time after time, they go for the easy hooks and the obvious jokes, seemingly so enamored with the oddness of their pitch that they forget to ever construct a story worthy of living up to it. This is an approach that was destined to produce a good trailer--which The Men Who Stare at Goats most certainly has-- but the end result can only be described as one of the most conventional movies about an unconventional subject ever made.

The story starts by introducing Bob Wilton, a small town reporter played by Ewan McGregor, who still hasn’t quite mastered that American accent he keeps getting forced to use. After Wilton’s wife leaves him for his one-armed editor-- a plot point that this film finds to be absolutely hilarious-- he takes off for Iraq with vague aspirations of becoming an embedded journalist. While languishing in a Kuwaiti hotel, he encounters Lyn Cassady (Clooney), an eccentric soldier who claims to have formerly been a part of the “First Earth Battalion,” a top-secret Army project to turn everyday grunts into what he calls “Jedi warriors.” Thinking this could be just the story he’s looking for, Wilton takes up with Cassady, who explains that he’s there on a mission, and the two head off into the desert toward Iraq.

Right from the beginning, The Men Who Stare at Goats sets up more than a few roadblocks for itself. The first is that it relies extensively on narration from McGregor’s character, who begins the film in cringe-inducing fashion by introducing himself and his story (“my name is Bob Wilton...), and then goes on to relate Cassady’s tale of government experimentation and new age military tactics. Rather than helping to create context or giving the film a chance to crack a few wry jokes, as I’m sure it does in Ronson’s book, all the narration ultimately does here is muddle up the plot and keep things at an arm’s length from having any real impact or meaning. It necessitates using a great deal of flashbacks, linear shuffling, and cut scenes, and these only succeed in making the film superficial and cursory, as though every scene has been severely cut down to size. For example, the story of how the First Earth Battalion’s stoned-out, hippie leader Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) conceived of the idea for the unit after being shot in a rice paddy in Vietnam could have been one of the funniest, most interesting parts of the film, but all we’re given is a clichéd montage showing him tuning in, turning on, and dropping out by frolicking through a field in a sari and doing yoga. I suppose it’s worth saying that Bridges is still great, as he always is. He gets all the best lines here and succeeds in building an interesting character, but the film’s superficial handling of his part of the story forces him to the periphery, and what could have been a legitimately funny character ends up feeling like a half baked version of The Dude.

If the flashbacks of the First Earthers and their training never gets going, the film’s present day story is even worse. Subplots are introduced left and right--Cassady and Wilton are captured by Iraqi’s, Robert Patrick shows up as the head of a mercenary company--but all it amounts to is the cinematic equivalent of running in place. We don’t get any meaningful insights into Clooney’s character’s story from these scenes, and all each additional minute spent with McGregor does is prove how shoddily carved a character Bob Wilton really is. McGregor is doing his best to keep up, injecting a little fire into the role whenever he can, but his character is an audience proxy if there ever was one. The characters eventually get back on track with their quest, and all this somehow culminates in a clash with Kevin Spacey, who is introduced as a late substitute for an antagonist and given very little to do. A rushed attempt at a plot is forged, but it’s definitely a case of too little too late.

What’s strange about The Men Who Stare at Goats is that no part of it is that offensively bad, poorly acted, or even boring-- it’s just that there’s nothing to it. I could have written off the paper-thin story and the boggy narrative if the film had been funny--satire is often about small moments and individual scenes-- but that just wasn’t the case. Heslov and company’s default mode is to go with the obvious and inoffensive, which ultimately amounts to ninety minutes of them pointing at their characters and saying “Hey! Aren’t these guys weird!?” They’re happy to take a swing at anything that comes right down the middle of the plate, from cold war hysteria and hippie idealism to modern day government contractors, but they never try to move beyond the soft and the slapstick. What the film needed was an edge or a stylistic audacity that matched the wackiness of its story, but the filmmakers are too satisfied with their killer premise to be bothered with things like character or narrative inventiveness. It is a good premise, to be sure--good enough that it deserved a better movie.

Revolutionary Road (2009)

2009-10-13T21:32:00.010-04:00

Last year’s Revolutionary Road, which garnered several Oscar nods despite getting a somewhat mixed reception, is based on a 1961 novel by the writer Richard Yates. It’s a book I’ve read and enjoyed, insomuch as anyone can enjoy a book about the “hopeless emptiness” of 1950s suburbia, but I read it so long ago that I was hoping to be able to take the film on its own terms. Unfortunately, like many movies based on beloved works of literature, Revolutionary Road is a film that exists very much in the shadow of its source material. On the outside, it’s a gorgeous looking, expertly acted piece of work, but unlike Yates, director Sam Mendes lacks the kind of incisive, incendiary storytelling skills to truly exploit the material for all its worth.

The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple on the verge of their thirties. The two have always considered themselves exceptional-- immune to the soul-crushing monotony of meaningless jobs and a safe life in the suburbs. Yet as the film opens, Frank has found himself pushing paper at the same machine company his father once worked for, and the couple now have two kids and a simple, pleasant house on the street that gives the story its name. The disappointment of this existence has started to weigh on their marriage, and in a momentary flash of inspiration, the two hatch a wild plan to uproot their family and move to Paris, as they had dreamed of doing in their youth. This plan, which seems doomed from the start, briefly reinvigorates their relationship, but it brings along with it wholesale problems that force the two to question themselves and their ambitions.

As the content might suggest, Yates’ book is narratively audacious, heartbreaking, and distinctly American, and yet it’s these strengths that only help to highlight the problems with the film, which is rigorously classical and so stylistically unambitious that the only reaction it gets from the viewer is one of overwhelming ambivalence. Normally, this points to a number of problems, but in this case the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the director. Mendes’ style here is relentlessly cold and detached, and for a story that is rooted in the American experience, oddly British. Many of the sequences are reminiscent of some kind of English chamber piece from the 40s or 50s--the scenes are well-composed and gloriously acted (especially by Winslet), but the style is stagey, stuffy, and too reliant on dialogue over action.

The thing is, you almost can’t blame Mendes for taking this approach. The book he's working from is full of small, wonderful moments, and he has a stellar cast and the hottest cinematographer in the business (Roger Deakins of No Country For Old Men fame) at his disposal, so it’s easy to see why he’d want to make the movie he did. The problem is that Yates' book has always fallen under the same “unfilmable” umbrella as novels like Catcher in the Rye or The Moviegoer for a reason. It’s a cerebral novel, almost experimental in the way it mines the contents of different characters’ psyches in order to build a story out of a scattered collection of events. Mendes has the unenviable task of trying to construct a film out of a book that is largely made up of characters’ thoughts and internal monologues, and outside of using constant narration (which, thankfully, he doesn’t) there’s not a lot to work with. You’ve got to give him points for trying, but the results don’t work, because when it all comes down, all the great moments in the novel of Revolutionary Road spring from the pseudo-omniscient asides by Yates, the embittered, eternal cynic, and not from the dialogue of his characters, whom he goes out of his way to portray as petty, feeble, and misguided. Mendes has to rely entirely on the outward actions of Frank and April to tell his story, and the results are naturally much more sympathetic to their foibles.

This would almost be excusable, but the real sin Mendes commits here is in not using his camera to create some--any-- kind of stylistic dissonance between what is being said by the characters and the real dramatic truth of the story. He’s much too content to film the couple’s domestic squabbles and heartbreaks from a safely removed distance, and this somehow becomes as exhausting as it is dull. Mendes has a background in the theatre, and he clearly loves actors (especially in this case since he’s married to Winslet), but he focuses on performance over action, movement, and meaning to a fault, and ends up turning what was a sad, ironic kind of satire into something more closely resembling Greek tragedy. Maybe it was the only choice he had when working from such an “unfilmable” novel, or maybe he’s just incompetent. Either way, as much as I hate to use the cliche, the results pale in comparison to the source material.

Zombieland (2009)

2009-10-11T19:11:00.007-04:00

Right from the opening credits, Zombieland lets it be known that it doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a fun, uncomplicated ride. Instead of a quick montage establishing how the world came to be overrun with zombies, or menacing shots of the undead walking the streets, the film starts with a series of ultra-slow motion shots of people frantically running from hordes of flesh-eating cannibals. One guy desperately tries to carry a kid while being chased by an army of the things. Another is only steps ahead of a naked zombie stripper. In my personal favorite, a guy wearing a tuxedo straight out of Fantasy Island shoots an AK-47 right at the camera as a group of the walking dead converge on him from all angles. Oh yeah, and this all set to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica.

If that doesn’t make it obvious enough, this is a film that desperately doesn’t want to be taken seriously, and I’m happy to say that it succeeds admirably in this regard (just take a look at the several cut scenes featuring the “zombie kill of the week”). Lots of movies have advertised themselves as being exactly what Zombieland is, only to weigh down the fun of their premise with absurd melodrama, halfhearted social commentary, and insulting attempts to “push the genre further” (see the Dawn of the Dead remake). Thankfully, the filmmakers behind Zombieland, specifically director Ruben Fleischer, know that’s not why anyone goes to see a zombie film when it’s not directed by George A. Romero. With this in mind, they never sell out on the built-in hook of their premise--in short, that zombies are as scary as they are inherently goofy, and that it's damn good fun to watch Woody Harrelson (who's having the time of his life here) take to them wielding a banjo as a weapon. Fill that out with some sharp one-liners, some interesting stylistic choices, a killer soundtrack, the always hot Emma Stone, and one of the most wonderfully ridiculous cameos in recent memory, and you’ve got what everyone wants from this genre-- a solid, unabashed B-movie.

Naturally, this is not to say that there aren’t faults here. Some aspects of the aesthetic Fleischer employs don’t quite work, like the rules for staying alive that the main character Columbus (played by Jesse Eisenberg with that endearing awkwardness that seems to be the trademark of his generation of actors) follows unerringly throughout the film, and which are flashed on screen each time they come into play. It’s a fun idea, but the rules aren’t half as creative as they should be, and by the fifth time the one about always shooting a zombie twice makes an appearance, it’s a bit more than stale. It’s these aspects of the film that get most frustrating, and this is only because Zombieland’s premise is so wide-open (thankfully, the cause behind the zombie apocalypse is left unexplained) that there are infinite avenues the story could have gone down at any particular turn, and not every one of them is guaranteed to satisfy every viewer.

But in saying this, I’ve already started overthinking this movie, which is as much a carnival ride as it is a film (it’s no surprise the main characters are on their way to a theme park). This film is certainly not making any headway in raising the genre back to the artful level of something like Night of the Living Dead, but that’s clearly not something Zombieland even pretends to be interested in. This is a movie that happily eschews all logic and faux-complexity in favor of showing Woody skid a car around a corner while gunning down zombies with an Uzi, and it’s all the better for it.

Gangsters, Murderers, and Detectives

2009-09-27T21:31:00.007-04:00

I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog arguing about how the French films of the 1940s and 50s are more consistently excellent than those of the New Wave. Well, here’s more proof. I’ve just recently caught up with three films by some of the major French directors of the era, some of which are minor classics, some nearly forgotten. They all deal with crime and intrigue in some form or another, and all of them exhibit the kind of expert control of pacing, style, and content that I think is the trademark of that era of cinema.

Quai des Orfevres (1947)

Literally translated as Quay of the Goldsmiths, this was the first film Henri Georges Clouzot made after a brief period of blacklisting in the wake of the controversy surrounding Le Corbeau. The film is a character-driven murder mystery/police procedural that follows sultry singer Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair) and her pianist husband Maurice (Bernard Blier). As the story opens, the drab and mild-mannered Maurice is becoming increasingly jealous of Jenny, whose burgeoning stardom is starting to attract the attention of wealthy and powerful characters like Brignon, a debauched elderly businessman whose hobby is wooing young women with his ability to help their careers. The story really kicks into gear when, following a secret rendezvous with Jenny in which they plan to “discuss her future,” Brignon ends up dead inside his mansion with a head wound. In what amounts to some sensational plotting, both Jenny and a distraught and vengeful Maurice, who was planning to murder the old man, think themselves responsible, and the couple soon start to unravel as they feel the police closing in on them.

This might sound like enough plot for a whole film, but Clouzot fits this all in to the first thirty or so minutes by using his trademark razor-sharp attention to detail to establish it all with a remarkable economy of scenes. From here, the tone of the story shifts rather dramatically with the introduction of Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet), a world-weary police detective who is assigned to Brignon’s murder and soon begins investigating Jenny and Maurice. Even though he’s not introduced until well into the story, and even then only in a supporting role, Louis Jouvet flat out walks away with this film. His Antoine is not your typical movie detective, tenacious and driven to solve the case by any means necessary. Instead, he is a slow-moving, avuncular kind of guy who would much rather spend time with his adopted son than catch criminals. In one of the film’s best moments, Antoine is given a chance to make the classic determined detective speech to one of the other characters, but shrugs it off with a simple “I don’t give a damn.” That’s the kind of great character moments that a director like Clouzot brings to this kind of material. Throughout the story, he constantly subverts the easy, plot-driven style of the suspense genre in favor of these little touches, always striving to avoid the cliched and superficial. This style, along with the cool, restrained presence of Antoine, proves to be the perfect antidote to the hyperbolic (and admittedly sort of annoying) performances of Delair and Blier, and helps drive the film home to a rather clever conclusion.

Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (1954)

If Jouvet’s Inspector Antoine was a clever reversal on the typical police detective, then Jean Gabin’s performance in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (Don’t Touch the Loot) does the same thing for the stereotypical criminal character. Gabin’s Max, the cool-as-ice thief at the center of the film, is an aging gang leader in search of the proverbial “last big score.” Unlike a lot of movie criminals, though, Max isn’t just trying to strike it rich, he’s really just sick of the game. In every scene, Becker goes out of his way to make it painfully clear just how tired of the criminal lifestyle Max is, whether showing him listlessly walking into his sparsely-furnished apartment, or just brushing his teeth. He has the perfect vessel for this world-weariness in Gabin, who looked quite a bit older than his 50 years when this film was made in 1954. He, along with Rene Dary as his right hand man Riton, make for two of the cinema’s most unlikely gangsters with their gray, slightly thinning hair and expanded waistlines. But this all just helps sell the the idea that these are thieves whose glory days are well behind them, and who now seem more at home eating crackers at the dinner table (as they do in one of the film’s more memorable scenes) than they do taking down scores. This idea is reflected in Becker’s style and plotting as well, as the director avoids showing us a number of the requisite crime movie scenes (most notably the unexplained heist that drives the whole story) in favor of the kind of small moments that help put the story in perspective. When it does come in the film’s final few scenes, the action is indeed well choreographed and exciting, but the fact that it's perpetrated by characters whom Becker has so lovingly established as past their prime makes the situation (and, for that matter, the film genre in which it takes place) all the more shocking and absurd.

Elevator to the Gallows (1957)

Louis Malle is a director I usually associate with slightly rambling character-driven dramas like the brilliant Atlantic City, so I was surprised to find that Elevator to the Gallows, his first film, is a tense, irony-filled crime movie. The story follows businessman Julien (Maurice Ronet), a former legionnaire and hero of the Indochina war, who is having an affair with his boss’s wife, Florence (Jeanne Moreau). The couple resolve to kill the husband, a crime that is ingeniously depicted in the film’s opening sequence when the athletic Julien scales the outside of his building with a rope, guns down the man, and scales back down, all the while maintaining his alibi that he was quietly working in his office. He executes the crime with stunning precision, save for one crucial piece of evidence, and when he goes back to retrieve it, he inadvertently becomes trapped in the building’s elevator. While Julien spends a desperate night trying to escape, Florence, convinced she’s been ditched, wanders the city streets frantically looking for him. At the same time, a rebellious young couple played by Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin steal Julien’s car and take it for a joyride, eventually stopping at a hotel and committing an inexplicable crime of their own.

If that complex plot description doesn’t make it clear enough, this is a film that values multiple (often absurdly flawed) perspectives of the same event, and it is the way these character’s fates and paths become intertwined that helps drive the story forward. In many ways, the film seems to exhibit several of the tendencies of the existentialist movement that was still prominent in France at the time of its release, as whole plot points are brought on by random and cruel bits of chance. Similarly, every character at some point or another is forced to act on the flawed or incomplete knowledge brought on by their skewed perspectives, and the result is a hilariously ironic series of exchanges where all the principles eventually incriminate themselves and each other. Moreau’s Florence is one of the major players in this regard, as her desperate search for her lover ends up being his undoing, but she is just one part of a tangled web of misunderstanding and coincidence that eventually becomes almost tragic in its implications. Like all the other actors in the film, she isn’t really given much juicy dialogue-- this is a film that prizes action above all else-- but Moreau’s screen presence here is formidable, and provides us ample evidence of why she would eventually become a major star. Likewise, her lonely walk through the Paris streets at night gives Malle a real chance to flex his directorial muscles, and he provides some of the best looking location shooting you’re likely to see this side of the New Wave, all of it accompanied by a now-famous improvised jazz score by Miles Davis. This great style, coupled with the film’s rich themes of chance, fate, and consequence, amounts to a truly superior film. This is the kind of movie that directors like Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino have strived to make throughout their careers, and you could make an argument that neither has ever pulled it off with this kind of simplicity and elegance.

Rogue Film School

2009-09-14T19:18:00.006-04:00

In a book of interviews with him, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said that he'd like to open a film school that ignored all the traditional rules and styles of teaching and focused on the kind of real world experience that would help make students "good soldiers of cinema." Herzog being Herzog, he says these skills would include learning languages, lock picking, document forgery, and hand-to-hand combat. I'm still not sure if this website is legit or not, but if it is, then it seems Herzog has made this bizarre academy a reality. The famed director and professional eccentric is set to host a series of seminars on filmmaking under the title "Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School." The seminars will teach a lucky group of students Herzog's personal philosophy of self reliance and the pursuit of "the ecstasy of truth." According to the website, for $1450 you too can learn such life changing lessons as the virtue of traveling on foot and "the exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully." Applicants need no professional or scholastic credentials, just a ten-line statement of intent and a short film sample.

A lot of people have in the past accused Herzog of veering dangerously close to becoming a parody of himself, and it's a safe bet that this will do little to calm the criticism. I am a hopeless fan of the guy (he could start a cult and I'd want to join), but I still think this is a pretty fun idea. I have the feeling he's probably a natural (if not hopelessly cryptic) teacher. The $1450 entry fee is a bit disturbing, but I still doubt he'll have trouble finding enough applicants. Either way, if you ask me it's been too long since he's done something off the wall crazy.

Check out the website for more great one-liners like this one, my personal favorite: "Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth."

Literary Soundtracks

2009-09-12T17:16:00.013-04:00

Lately I’ve been addicted to listening to a short album I bought called The Last Pale Light In the West. It’s a solo album by Ben Nichols, the lead singer of the excellent rock/country band Lucero. Stylistically, it’s not so different from the kind of songs Nichols makes with his usual band-- it’s full of tough, twangy southern music with a built in edge courtesy of Nichols’ trademark scratchy vocals-- but it is a bit more subdued than usual. The interesting thing about the album, though, is that it’s completely inspired by famed writer Cormac McCarthy’s devastatingly violent Western novel Blood Meridian. Every song is named after one of the characters, from “the Kid,” the novel’s young protagonist, to “the Judge,” the murderous figure at the book’s center, who is frequently described as “the devil himself.”

I’m sure it’s been done tons of times before (though I can’t think of any other examples off the top of my head), but this idea of writing a kind of unsanctioned soundtrack for a book strikes me as a boldly unique, if not inherently problematic, idea. At first blush, it seems that unlike writing music for a film or a play, there’s no way Nichols’ album will ever have more than a tenuous thematic relationship to McCarthy’s novel. The mediums are too at odds with one another. Books, as the philosopher Plato used to always say, are “dead.” The words on the page require a person to come to life, and even then they exist only in the nebulous reaches of the reader’s own head. Music is the same way to an extent, but it is temporal and fluid in a way that writing can never be, which allows it to be much a more free form and evocative medium. But if you’ve read McCarthy’s book, and then listen to Nichols’ album, an interesting thing happens. The lyrics and music start to call up images from the novel, and pretty soon it’s as though you can see the whole thing unfolding as if it were a movie. This is something that always happens when one reads a book, of course, but rarely does music evoke the same kind of mental imagery. What Nichols has essentially done is write the soundtrack for a movie based on a book that hasn’t been filmed. Or, rather, has yet to be filmed.

Movies have always struck me as a perfect meld of the so-called “temporal” (music) and “spatial” (painting, sculpture) arts, and this is nothing if not a perfect example of this idea at work. The music, along with any knowledge of the story it’s based around, conspire to create this imaginary play in the listener’s head, and the language of film seems to provide a bridge to make that experience possible. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it is an interesting idea, especially when you consider that Nichols’ album is no less than the second work of music to owe a debt to McCarthy. The band Calexico’s 1998 album The Black Light actually thanks the writer in the liner notes, and it doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to picture their Western-themed instrumentals as the soundtrack to a film version of one of McCarthy’s books. I’m not really sure what all this adds up to, but it is an intriguing thread to follow. If anything, I wholeheartedly recommend checking out The Last Pale Light in the West. And if you haven’t read Blood Meridian, then by all means do so as soon as possible.

The Real Film Realism

2009-09-05T16:41:00.006-04:00

The relationship of movies to "real life," and how well they portray that reality on screen is a constant source of debate. It began as soon as people started talking about movies and continued with critics like Bazin, Kracauer, and Arnheim up through the 50s--what is now remembered as the golden age of "neorealism" abroad--and into the 60s. Since then, it's been less of a dominant issue, but it still resurfaces every few years in a different form (see this year's debate over neo-neorealism), and some critics have argued that American independent film is currently experiencing a blessed reconnection with photorealism.

In the midst of such preoccupations, it seems strange that the questions asked and challenges made against the proponents of realism have always been so incomplete and poorly framed. Whether or not recreating the drama of everyday life should be the ultimate aspiration of movies is a philosophical question that is way too unwieldy for me to address in a few paragraphs. But what is worth discussing is how flawed and problematic the definition of what movie "realism" is has been, and whether or not it's time to retool our idea of just what it is that filmmakers should be aiming for.

During the heyday of Italian neorealism, films like Open City and The Bicycle Thief were hailed as the exemplars of a new kind of cinema that sought to document the struggles and tragedies of everyday life by way of using a static, unadorned shooting style. This, thanks to critics like Andre Bazin, essentially became the definition of what film realism was. They praised the use of nonprofessional actors, location shooting, long takes, and small stories about working class people, the idea being that presenting reality for its own sake was an end unto itself. Any other approach, for these critics, drew too much attention to the filmmaker as a creative force and was bound to taint the "truth" of the film with ideology and politics.

These ideas, which were all the vogue in the 1950s, have managed to be one of the longest running and most returned-to arguments in all of film theory. Watch any modern independent film by Kelly Reichardt or Ramin Bahrani that has been described as "well-observed" or "gritty" and you're likely to get a lot of long takes, unadorned editing, and location shooting. This in itself is perfectly fine--if those directors see that as the best way of achieving realism, then good for them. But the notion that this is the only way to achieve it is dangerously off base. Realism does not come from a particular shooting style or subject matter, it comes from a rare kind of consistency and harmony among all the aspects of a film, chiefly from the writing and the performances, but also from camerawork, editing, set design, the presence or lack of music, and a hundred other variables. If all of these aspects follow the same internal logic and are working toward a similar goal, then the result-- along with, more often than not, a decent product-- is a certain level of verisimilitude and, ultimately, realism.

Some classical theories of film realism would have you believe that anything other than the style of movies like the Bicycle Thief or Umberto D (which, don't get me wrong, are great and important films) results in failure, but their arguments have always been full of holes. First of all, a "style-less" approach of long takes and invisible editing is itself a style, no matter how simple it might be. And no matter how unobtrusive a filmmaker tries to be, their presence will always be felt. What angles they choose, the order of scenes, the length of individual shots-- all of these things still point to a director at work. On a similar note, location shooting is great, and stories of the common man are an admirable subject matter, but to brand them as resulting in a finished product that is more "real" is a mistake. Sparseness of style or subject matter will never equal realness, and in the context of a motion picture it will always be as much of a stylistic choice as anything else, especially when it's obvious that the director has gone out of their way to achieve it. As a rough example, take Technicolor film, the advent of which was met with much skepticism from audiences that had come to accept black and white as the only way to watch a movie. On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive. Life, after all, takes place in color. But you have to consider how, at the time, most color film was cartoonishly oversaturated, like looking at a photograph that had been painted over as an afterthought. It was still unequivocally a closer representation of everyday experience, but black and white was sharper, cleaner, simpler, more subdued, and therefore more real.

Filmmakers like Vittorio De Sica, who made many of the most famous works of Italian Neorealism, undoubtedly achieved something important and, yes, realistic, but to say they did it because of a few small stylistic choices is to shortchange them. Every choice in those films helped create the feeling of realism that made them so great. If anything, critics who push neorealism as a theory are mistaking the work of uniquely talented filmmakers as a patented style that could be easily recreated. The same can be said of Bahrani or Reichardt, both of whom are undoubtedly among the more interesting directors currently working, and it also applies to any director who is able to find that perfect balance of story, theme, and style that makes their audience feel like they've witnessed something that reflects everyday life. In the end, perhaps all the style proposed by the neorealist critics does is make that balance a little easier to find, and only then because they've stylistically stripped the film down to its barest parts. But realism comes in many forms, and there will always be way more than one path to take in getting to it.

Inglourious Allusions

2009-08-29T17:52:00.003-04:00

One of the things that most fascinated me about Inglourious Basterds was how seamlessly integrated and evocative the allusions to other movies were, which is not something I've ever before accused Tarantino of pulling off. There are now a number of lists floating around the web that try and catalogue all these references, and this one seems to be the most ambitious. A lot of them are a bit of a stretch (just because it resembles a movie in theme doesn't imply an intentional reference), but if you've seen the film it is a pretty interesting read.

(Re)Writing History With Lightning: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

2009-08-23T14:55:00.010-04:00

Quentin Tarantino is undoubtedly a polarizing filmmaker, but I can’t say I’ve ever been that consistently strong of an apologist for him or critic against him. Simply put, some of his movies are really good (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), and some are outright terrible (Death Proof, Jackie Brown). I will say that, not unlike a lot of guys my age, I was completely enamored with his work when I was 15, but since then he’s become more of a curiosity than anything. Which is part of why I was so pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds, his wickedly funny, expertly shot, and oddly philosophical new film. Watching this movie was like (to use an aspect of its plot) being bashed over the head by Tarantino’s love for cinema with a baseball bat. And I somehow mean that in a good way. When it was over, I found myself remembering why I used to think this guy was a genius.

One of the big criticisms of Tarantino, which I myself have been wont to employ, is that he’s more concerned with winking at his audience about the cleverness of his dialogue and dropping references to 70s trash cinema than he is with telling a decent story. His movies always reflect a unique and refined taste, but never in a way that adds up to anything truly worthwhile for the purposes of the script. But with this film, I think he’s finally made a movie that reverberates--hell, radiates-- with his love for cinema in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to the larger point of his story. Whereas movies like Death Proof and Kill Bill ventured into the realms of lazy pastiche and outright thievery, with Inglourious Basterds it seems like Tarantino has finally made something truly original out of his influences, a movie not just informed by other movies but about them in the grandest sense possible.

This isn’t to say that he doesn’t still have an inveterate penchant for name-dropping. In addition to meeting Churchill and the whole Nazi high command, we get mentions of Chaplin, Max Linder, G.W. Pabst, Henri Georges Clouzot, King Kong (in one of the film’s best scenes), Marlene Dietrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and even a cameo from Emil Jannings. But these pop culture references are imbued with a meaning that wasn’t present in the idle chatter of even something like Pulp Fiction. Take the Clouzot reference, which we get when we see the French auteur’s name on the marquee of a movie theatre showing Le Corbeau. As I mentioned in my discussion of it a few days past, Le Corbeau is a movie with a huge amount of social significance to Vichy France, as Clouzot was later accused of being a traitor simply for making it. The fact that it makes an appearance in Inglourious Basterds just before a scene in which a French woman is drawn into an involuntary collaboration with the Nazis is certainly no coincidence. It’s a rare instance of one of Tarantino’s references being added in the service of his movie rather than at its expense, and throughout the film we get countless delightfully obscure moments like this. They add an invaluable amount to the story as a whole, which, as Glen Kenny recently mentioned on his blog, is told with a remarkable economy in no more than sixteen(!) extended scenes.

I’m convinced that the reason this style works so well is because Inglourious Basterds is a period piece, which forces Tarantino to ground his references in a certain time and place. Getting out of his trademark So-Cal milieu was probably the best thing he could have done for his work, and he seems to embrace the shadowy cellars and wide open fields of the French countryside with real relish. His visual style here is impeccable, making effective and often hilarious use of cut-scenes, fantasy sequences, camera moves, and cross-cutting to make a movie that is made up of small moments that add up to way more than the sum of their parts. Say what you will about the guy, but there’s no denying Tarantino has improved as a visual storyteller with every film he's made. Here we get several scenes of wickedly drawn-out suspense (most notably the scene in the tavern) that display a masterful control of pacing and language. As for the dialogue, it’s as sharp and idiosyncratic as ever, especially when it’s being delivered by Brad Pitt (whose shamelessly terrible Tennessee accent provides all of the movie’s funniest moments) or Christoph Waltz (who deserves the Oscar nod he’ll undoubtedly get for playing the gentlemanly sociopath Col. Hans Landa). I could have done without the somewhat annoying Eli Roth as the baseball bat-wielding “Bear Jew,” or the often intentionally anachronistic music, but these are small complaints, and outside of a few unusual moments (a montage set to David Bowie?!), the score is actually a real pleasure to listen to.

The big debate among critics on this film seems to be whether or not it’s disrespectful toward the struggles and atrocities of WWII, and many reviewers have dismissed it as outright offensive. Whether or not the idea of creating a revisionist revenge fantasy about the Nazis is in bad taste is another argument for another day. I’m not sure it’s an issue that Tarantino is even that concerned with, as there are much more interesting, less polarizing ideas in play. To my mind, the real statement here is self-referential and self-reflexive. This is a film not just built from other films, but literally about the cinema and its role as a social and historical tool. As has already been said by many others, Tarantino seems to be using film as a means of exorcising the demons of history in order to rewrite it with a perversely violent and oddly triumphant vigilante ending. But there’s even more going on than that. All of Tarantino’s movies play like love-letters to the cinema, but Inglourious Basterds takes it to a new level and tells us not just what movies the director is into but why he loves movies in general. Consider a scene near the end of the film where a woman guns down a man in a projectionist’s booth, only to look at the movie screen and see his face still flickering there in some kind of momentary immortality. And then for him to seemingly rise from the dead directly afterward, almost as though the magic of cinema is enough to be able to bring him back to life. It’s perhaps the film’s best moment, and it’s a huge statement about the power of movies not only to re-write history, but to have a hand in creating it (it’s no surprise that a propaganda film is at the center of the story). Whole articles and Masters theses could be (and probably will be) undertaken about the meaning of such a scene, and it takes a true love of cinema to even recognize it, let alone to have written it. For what it’s worth, I have trouble thinking of any other modern American director who could or would create a moment like that.

Alive In Joberg

2009-08-15T18:14:00.006-04:00

District 9 was finally released yesterday, and so far it's been getting some pretty stellar reviews. The movie is based on an excellent short film called Alive In Joberg that director Neill Blomkamp made a few years back. Everyone's probably seen it by now, but if you're like me and are always behind the times on this stuff, then check it out. If District 9 is half as interesting as this film, it's sure to be worth seeing.

Kids These Days...

2009-08-14T15:11:00.004-04:00

There's a great post called "young and dumb versus old and in the way" currently up on film critic Glenn Kenny's consistently interesting blog Some Came Running. It dovetails nicely with my ramblings about the culture industry from a few days ago and this whole idea that, as Kenny implies, culture isn't necessarily any more in jeopardy now than it's ever been. I'm not sure if I truly buy that argument, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.

Sleep Dealer (2009)

2009-08-12T17:21:00.007-04:00

Sam Peckinpah once remarked that he made Westerns because they were the best medium through which to comment on the state of the modern world. Watching his movies, it’s easy to see his point, but I would argue that science fiction is an even more effective genre for delivering social commentary. I think that Alex Rivera, whose excellent film Sleep Dealer follows a collection of marginalized Mexican workers who literally “jack in” to the world economy to remotely do the jobs Americans won’t, would probably agree with me. The film uses the speculative nature of its eerily familiar backdrop to make an expansive statement on the future of technology and the world economy. Working on a shoestring budget, Rivera has managed to create one of the most cutting, hypnotic, and worryingly plausible science fiction films I’ve seen in some time, and along with the recent Moon, Sleep Dealer bodes well for the future of the genre.

One of the first SF films that truly fits the bill of being “cyberpunk,” Sleep Dealer takes place in a dystopic near future that resembles something William Gibson might have dreamed up. In Rivera’s future world, first world nations like the U.S. have been completely walled off from Mexico, where the story takes place, and multinational corporations have taken a controlling interest in natural resources. The story follows Memo, a young man who lives with his family in a small Mexican village where the water supply is managed by one of these nameless companies. When his father is killed by fighter plane drones that protect the company’s interests, Memo is forced to become a new kind of itinerant worker. Distraught and vaguely desiring revenge, he heads for the border town of Tijuana, a technological dust heap where migrant workers get their bodies implanted with “nodes” that allow them to jack in to a worldwide network and perform blue collar jobs across the border. Soon, Memo is regularly working at a “sleep dealer”-- the slang term for the companies that set up the jobs-- and remotely building skyscrapers hundreds of miles away in San Diego.

The social implications of the story are patent, but Rivera is good about letting his character’s struggle speak for itself. The film never becomes too didactic, and what little reference it makes to the modern day is exceedingly clever. For example, when Memo’s sort-of girlfriend, Luz (a futuristic writer who makes her living selling virtual reality recreations of her memories on the internet), takes him to get some illegally implanted nodes, the guy who puts them in is called a “coyotech,” a shrewd allusion to the modern coyotes who lead immigrants across the border. Rivera uses small details like this one to help immerse the viewer in his future world. The film uses extensive narration from Memo, which does allow it to cut some corners, but overall Rivera is quite adept at using small bits of set design, editing, and clips from fake TV shows (Memo finds out about his father’s death by catching it on a reality TV show that follows the exploits of drone fighter pilots) to quickly establish the world he’s trying to create.

Sleep Dealer’s special effects certainly aren’t going to win it any awards, but they are completely serviceable. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that they so quickly draw the viewer into this world that you aren’t likely to notice the effects aren’t ILM-worthy. In many ways, the budgetary constraints here have shaped the movie in a positive way. Rivera’s future world is gritty, organic, and oddly familiar (Blade Runner comes to mid), which gives everything a touch of immediacy and surreality. Too many science fiction films give us an antiseptic and metallic world completely different from our own, but the world of Sleep Dealer is just different enough to sell the future premise, and just familiar enough to let the ideas really hit home. Rivera’s world is one augmented by technology but not completely transformed by it. Characters in Mexico still drive cars, farm vegetables, and work outside, but they do so amid the constant glow of flat screen TVs and holographic computer screens.

Sleep Dealer has been criticized for being a small story about ordinary people in the service of a wider critique of political, social, and technological issues instead of vice versa. It's true that the story is relatively A-to-B, but never in a way that becomes boring or trite. Like the world it presents, this is a film that prizes experience and atmosphere above all else, and Rivera does such a great job of building his environment that it helps to carry the story along in its wake. As for the commentary, this is not a film that overtly preaches to its audience or falls into the realm of polemic. Quite the opposite, in fact. Like the best science fiction, Sleep Dealer is more concerned with asking questions than it is with providing answers or making statements. Thankfully the questions it asks--about the moral implications of immigration policy, the possible effects of mass globalization, and the price a society pays for prizing technological “connectivity” at the expense of personal relationships-- are endlessly fascinating.

The Culture Industry

2009-08-07T13:22:00.004-04:00

Going back and re-reading some of the film criticism from the 1920s and 30s is always an interesting experiment. If anything, it’s fascinating to see how prescient guys like Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin were with regard to the possible directions film could take. From the very beginning, cultural critics (many of them Marxists) were arguing about the problematic nature of film as a cultural tool. Especially troubling to some of these critics was the cinema’s propensity to be used as some kind of mass marketing device that would homogenize culture and encourage complacency and conformism. If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’re still having this debate today, perhaps more with regards to television than film, but these critics were writing before the television was even invented. The similarities are still there, though. Ask anyone who doesn’t own a television why and they’re likely to cite a very similar argument.

It is pretty compelling, though, to see that from the very start of sound film people were worried about its cultural placement as a product. Because of financing and other monetary constraints involved in getting a movie made, critics were concerned that film would never be able to be as “difficult” a medium as literature. Here, they weren’t able to anticipate that digital technology eventually would make it easy for anyone with a credit card to start making art films in their garage, but this is another issue that’s still alive and well in contemporary film culture. Every film snob in the world (myself included) has at some point lamented the way movies have become so mass-produced and easy to swallow, and they often point back to the golden age of cinema as a better, simpler time. If reading the criticism of the early 30s (or taking one look at the old studio system) proves anything, it’s that this belief is completely misguided, because before narrative film had even come into its own, people were already complaining about the lack of real artistry and the tendency to avoid taking risks. These critics, in particular a group known as “The Frankfurt School,” even had a name for it: The Culture Industry. This applied to all pop culture in general, but it seems to fit film and television the best. In short, it means a constructed culture full of mass-produced and palatable copies of the real, spontaneous art that springs from “average” people (again, most of these guys were Marxists). Take what you will from it, but to imagine that people were making these kinds of claims in a world before Transformers 2 and “Must-See TV” is pretty amazing, and you can only wonder what they’d be saying if they were still around today.

Le Trou (1960)

2009-08-05T13:55:00.006-04:00

French films from the fifties have always held much more of a fascination for me than those of the New Wave. Filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais undoubtedly made huge contributions to cinema, but they often did so at the expense of telling a good story. Don’t get me wrong, I love many of their films, and had I been around in 1960 I would have championed them as much as anyone else. But from a modern perspective, it seems they reach a point of experimentation that now seems a bit tedious, and many of their films, unclassifiable as they are, seem oddly dated. This has never been the case with the class of filmmakers that directly preceded them. Directors like Jean Pierre Melville, Henri Georges Clouzot, Robert Bresson, and Jacques Becker were taking equally bold stylistic risks in the 1950s, but they always did so in the service of their narrative. Whereas Truffaut and Godard eventually just made films about film, movies like A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Les Diaboliques, Bob Le Flambeur, and The Wages of Fear were all about process and experience. They detailed the ways people would go to extremes in order to survive, and they were always just as entertaining as they were inventive and political.

Case in point: Jacques Becker’s Le Trou (The Hole). One of the all-time great prison break movies, this film revels in the details of the ways five Parisian convicts plot and scheme to escape from their jail cell. Le Trou is based on a true story, and in a bold move, Becker even cast one of the actual participants in the real-life jailbreak to play a character in the film. The rest of the cast were all nonprofessionals as well (some of whom would go on to have respectable acting careers), but you wouldn’t know it to watch the film. If anything, the lack of dramatic training is what makes these characters, who are cool and professional to the core, seem so believable.

Becker’s fascination with the minutiae of prison life and the small details of the prisoners’ plan pervades the whole film. It’s all a part of the preoccupation with the process of performing complex and dangerous tasks that seems to be a running theme of filmmakers like he and Clouzot. Here we get to bear witness to every small part of the convicts' scheme, from the way they build a periscope from a tooth brush and a shattered piece of glass so they can spy back on the guards, to how they construct an hour glass with sand smuggled from one of the guards’ ashtrays in order to keep track of time. Beyond these tasks, their days are filled with the monotony of prison life, which sees them assembling boxes, sleeping, and eating food sent to them by their relatives (there’s a great early scene of the prison’s inspector expertly and shamelessly cutting apart one prisoner’s items to check them for contraband), but at night they band together to institute an ingenious and very audacious escape plan.

In the early running, Becker maintains an airtight control of space and pacing, to the point that it seems many of the scenes play out in real time. This is one of the most-discussed aspects of Le Trou and Becker’s filmmaking in general, what has been called his seamless “control of temporality.” Here, he uses it to immerse the viewer in the gargantuan task these men create for themselves, and from the very beginning of the breakout there is a palpable sense of tension. Take, for example, the first step of the plan, which requires the men to hammer through the stone floor of their cell in order to reach a tunnel directly beneath it. As the men take turns chiseling the floor of their cell with a crudely fashioned hammer, Becker simply lets his camera roll, eventually creating a four-minute take of the floor being broken apart. The effect is that we become completely immersed in their struggle as though we are the sixth member of the team, and Becker’s refusal to cut away to show the guards just outside the cell only heightens the suspense. This stress-inducing scene is only the beginning of a massive undertaking that will see the men tunnel through rock, file metal bars, pick locks, and chisel through cement, and all while avoiding roving guard patrols.

Le Trou culminates in a stunning sequence of two of the men finally making their way to the city’s surface and getting a glimpse of the Paris street and the outside of the prison walls. It’s an amazing and evocative sequence, considering how hermetically sealed the film’s environment has been up to this point, and it speaks volumes about the film’s themes of freedom, responsibility, and loyalty, especially since the two then return to the prison in order to collect the rest of the group. What follows is a painfully nerve-wracking ending that hits about as hard as any you’re likely to see.

Le Trou was the last film made by Becker, who died shortly after filming, and its release in 1960 coincided with that of Godard’s Breathless and the start of the New Wave. Directors like Melville would continue the tradition of hard-boiled, realistic film that was started in the 40s and 50s, but it seems that Le Trou stands as a kind of turning point in French cinema. The bold style and medium-shattering experiments that followed were certainly a necessary step in film history, but it does seem a shame that the tradition of taut, athletic films like Le Trou was briefly lost along the way.

Inner Space By Way of Outer Space: Moon (2009)

2009-07-16T14:41:00.007-04:00

As science fiction continues to become less and less distinguishable from action and adventure movies, it’s getting harder to find anything resembling the heady, speculative style of classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris and Silent Running. Even the better efforts from the last few years, like Pitch Black and 28 Days Later, rely more on action and horror than they do hard science, and you only need to look at the recent remake of Star Trek-- which, don’t get me wrong, was a lot of fun-- to see that this trend isn’t going away. But all this only helps to highlight the intelligence of a film like Moon, the superb debut from director Duncan Jones. It’s very much a throwback to the slower, more contemplative science fiction of the 1970s, and like those films it uses its far-out, technological backdrop to explore very grounded and very human themes.

The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an astronaut coming to the end of a three year contract for Lunar Industries, a company that mines the surface of the moon for an energy resource used back on Earth. Bell has been working alone on the company’s small base for too long, his only companion a helper robot called GERTY, and when we first meet him it’s clear that the isolation is starting to get to him. Although he’s anxious to be reunited with his wife and daughter back home, he’s become jittery and accident-prone, and worse yet, he’s starting to see things.

If that sketchy synopsis didn’t already make it clear enough, Moon is a difficult movie to review without giving too much away, because so much of its plot hinges on a number of big reveals that happen relatively early on in the story. This is one of the film’s major strengths, and it lets the audience know straight away what kind of movie Jones intends to make. Any other director would’ve saved these twists for the final ten minutes and used them as the big “aha!” moment of the film, but Jones is smart enough to know that to do so would only be telling half the story, and he’s less interested in getting his audience to ask “what just happened?” than he is in giving them the time to think and speculate about the very complex and, yes, very philosophical ideas he’s presenting to them.

This conceit is reflected in the technical style the filmmakers employ, as well. Jones uses a matter-of-fact shooting style that employs a lot wide shots and longer takes, but he has a gift for giving away just the right amount of information in every one of his shots, always keeping the audience in uncertainties when he needs to. Meanwhile, a number of scenes end with slow fades to black, and in others, the sound from one scene is allowed to bleed into the one that precedes it, creating an odd sense of interconnectedness and inevitability. In each case, (and thanks also to writer Nathan Parker’s script) the story is allowed to breathe and unfold deliberately. The filmmakers want us to constantly be second-guessing our assumptions about what is going on, but they let the complexity of the ideas take care of that for them rather than planting unnecessary red herrings throughout the story. Jones supposedly has a Master’s degree in philosophy, and no doubt understands the power of a good paradox.

Moon will almost certainly be both criticized and praised for its uncanny kinship with films like 2001 and Blade Runner, and it does employ many of the stylistic and thematic elements of those films. Let’s be honest-- this film is certainly not blazing any new intellectual territory, but at the same time it does engage with its ideas in a much more direct and astute manner than most films of this kind. Jones doesn’t go out of his way to skirt around the specter of his influences, but he doesn’t let the movie ever reach the level of homage, either. In many ways, it seems as though he and Parker are making use of the expectations the audience brings to the movie. Take GERTY, Bell’s friendly helper robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey in one of his coolest performances in some time). With his monotone voice and vaguely human personality, GERTY immediately conjures up memories of HAL in 2001, so from the start we ascribe sinister motives to him. This ready-made belief helps play a big part in the great deal of suspense that builds throughout the story, and all without any real effort on the filmmakers’ part, as GERTY, in what comes as a delightful plot twist, seems to have been designed with Asimov’s three laws of robotics clearly in mind.

I haven’t mentioned Rockwell yet, but it should be said that he gives a career performance here, the kind that should be earning him huge accolades. He’s always been hit or miss for me, and I’ve criticized him for being a bit over the top in the past, but here he won me over once and for all. He’s truly carrying the film, and the poignancy and warmth he brings to Sam Bell helps to ground the personal, human aspects of the story. The fantastic, haunting music by Clint Mansell, who scores all of Aronofsky’s movies, is also worth mentioning. His music really helps to set the mood here in a subtle, non-intrusive way, often adding even more levels of suspense to what is already a pretty eerie atmosphere.

Moon is not a movie that will win the hearts and minds of the fanboy sci-fi crowd, but it’s very hard to see how anyone who appreciates the old-school, cerebral brand of hard science fiction would not find a lot to like here. Even though it gives away its plot secrets relatively early, it plays its intellectual cards decidedly close to the vest, and this only helps to make its themes and its story all the more rewarding. Few movies have the audacity to really explore ideas like what it means to be human, or how much we can truly trust the validity our emotions and our memories. And beyond the unanswerable, there are scenes, ideas, and motives I’m still reviewing and questioning-- what, for example, is going on in those video messages from Sam’s wife?-- that have me eager to see Moon again. Refreshingly, this is not because I’m still trying to piece its narrative together, but because I want more time to consider its ideas. That, if anything, will always be a sign of good science fiction.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

2009-06-25T16:13:00.009-04:00

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Ron Howard is the most innocuous director in Hollywood. The guy doesn’t make bad movies, on the whole, but outside of Apollo 13 he hasn’t made anything truly great, either. Frost/Nixon is yet another workmanlike effort from him, and it might as well be a metaphor for his entire career: It’s well-acted and competently shot, but it’s also frustratingly arbitrary and uninteresting (I can remember few Best Picture nominees that were any less discussed or controversial). Probably the only question raised by Frost/Nixon is why this movie--or, for that matter, the play it's based on--exists at all. Did we really need a dramatization of the famous interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, especially when everyone who’s interested in the subject has either already seen the real thing or can easily seek it out? Sure, it’s fun to watch Frank Langella do a Nixon impression, and he does it well, but all the movie as a whole amounts to is a slightly clumsy reenactment of something that most people already know about.

Howard’s way of getting around this issue is to shoot the movie in faux-documentary style, with characters frequently addressing the camera in confessional interviews and recounting their experiences as a part of the two research teams. In addition to just being a tired technique, these interviews also come off feeling like a cheat-- an all too easy way for the film to tell and not show--which ironically breaks the first rule of the kind of “good journalism” that Frost/Nixon is trying to champion. And this is too bad, because the backroom preparation, dealing, and politics that helped make the interviews happen are the only story really worth telling here, and these scenes should have been where the movie really shined. Instead, we get one cliche rolled out after another, where the characters sit around tables littered with papers and coffee cups and name-check all of Nixon’s greatest hits, from the “Checkers speech” to his unfortunate debate with JFK. Outside of this, the movie is also notable for featuring what might be the most half-assed romantic subplot in recent memory, in the form of Frost’s relationship with his girlfriend Caroline, herself a journalist. Why a talented actress like Rebecca Hall would lower herself to playing what amounts to little more than set dressing is completely baffling.

Not surprisingly, the movie only really gains steam when it gets to the unscripted bits: the actual interviews between Frost and Nixon. In what amounts to a real intellectual fencing match, Frost is initially outdone by Nixon, who controls the tone and speed of the interview like the slippery customer that he is, and it’s only when they reach the subject of Watergate that the tables begin to turn. Still, these few exhilarating moments only succeed in highlighting the question that’s hovering over this entire movie: Why watch the recreation of an interview when the real thing is readily available, and now on YouTube, no less? Regrettably, this is a question that Frost/Nixon and its director are never quite able to answer.

Le Corbeau (1943)

2009-06-11T15:52:00.008-04:00

On its surface, Henri Georges Clouzot’s noir Le Corbeau (The Raven) is simply an expertly crafted suspense film. Made in 1943, the film follows the controversy that erupts in a provincial French town after an anonymous author starts sending caustic letters revealing the citizens’ darkest secrets. Near-riots ensue, innocents are imprisoned, and at least one person turns up dead. There is a laconic leading man with a dark past (Pierre Fresnay), a lascivious young woman after his affections (Ginette Leclerc), a colorful cast of supporting players, and a cracking mystery at the center of them all. And while all this might not seem that extraordinary, the circumstances under which the film was made, along with its rich subtext and the consequences it had for its creators, certainly were.

Le Corbeau was made during the reign of the Vichy government, when France was still very much under the control of Nazi Germany. The film’s script had been around since the early thirties, but some of its incendiary content-- that Fresnay’s character, Dr. Germaine, performs abortions for desperate women is not only alluded to but stated outright-- had prevented it from being produced. Clouzot, who only had one other major work to his credit, was only able to get the film made by collaborating with the Continental Film Company, a production outfit that had been started by the Nazis as a means of making popular entertainment for occupied France, as all American movies had been banned. Ironically, at the time, filmmakers working for Continental were allowed to work with little censorship and larger budgets than those working for the French companies, and this freedom helped Le Corbeau become a wide success.

It was only after the war and the occupation ended that the controversy started. The film’s actors and crew were accused of collaborating with the Nazis, and Clouzot was initially banned for life from making films in France. This ban was eventually lifted after much debate about the content of the film, but it would be four years before he worked again.

Seen today, the most puzzling thing about the firestorm created by Le Corbeau is how both the censors at Continental and those who decried the film as an act of treason so clearly misread its message. If anything, the film’s story of an anonymous writer of inflammatory letters now seems a bold statement about the culture of informing and back-stabbing that was going on in France during the occupation, when the Vichy regime and many citizens even went so far as to help the Germans organize raids to capture Jews and other undesirables to the Nazi Party. Le Corbeau, both through its characters and the way it deals with questions of morality, repeatedly condemns this behavior, showing the ways that it can tear a community (or a country) apart. The war is never once mentioned during the film, but it hovers over everything like a fog, and the message is there. Still, it would take some time before a number of prominent writers and filmmakers recognized Le Corbeau for the parable of life under occupation that it is.

That this message was so subtly delivered means that Le Corbeau works on many levels, and it can also be enjoyed as the pure entertainment that Continental meant it to be. On a stylistic level, it’s hard to believe that this was only Clouzot’s second film as a director, because he employs such a confident visual style. His compositions are as impeccable as they are economical-- every shadow, every object in the frame is there for a reason. He relies on his camera to express his themes as much as he does dialogue, most notably in a scene where the avuncular Dr. Vorzet, a psychiatrist in Germaine’s hospital, discusses the nature of good and evil, all while a light bulb swings overhead, casting alternating patterns of shadow and light over the two characters. It’s a powerful scene, and this motif of moral ambiguity is one that Clouzot would return to throughout his career, especially in his two masterpieces, Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear. It has been said that Alfred Hitchcock would eventually consider Clouzot to be one of his chief rivals for the title of “master of suspense,” and after watching his work here it’s easy to see why.

Black Robe (1991)

2009-05-28T18:36:00.006-04:00

One of the most gritty and downright bleak historical films I’ve seen, Black Robe follows a Jesuit priest called Father Laforgue as he travels into uncharted territory in 1600s Canada. Escorted by a party of Algonquin Indians, Laforgue and his adventurous companion Daniel are led by canoe into what is now Quebec, where they hope to find and convert a local Huron Indian tribe to Christianity. Along the way, Laforgue attempts to endear himself to his escorts, but his austere manner and strange form of dress (the black robe of the title) are seen as malevolent by the Algonquins, and as the party moves deeper into the wild, a dangerous divide forms between the two groups.

Black Robe was released the year after Dances With Wolves, and it’s tempting to argue that its grim, naturalistic style is some kind of counterpoint to that film’s romantic idealism. Director Bruce Beredsford goes out of his way here to document the manifold complications of the relationship between Indians and colonial settlers, and his depiction of the hardships and the violence of the era is uncompromisingly realistic. So too is his depiction of the Indians (the book this film is based on is said to be one of the most well-researched depictions of Native American life ever written), who are played by a wonderful collection of actors, most notably August Schellenberg as the group’s leader, Chomina. Most movies about Native Americans paint them either as wise and noble sages or as warlike savages, but Black Robe manages to show both they and the settlers in all their complexity. This doesn’t mean that the film doesn’t include the requisite scenes of the two groups learning from one another, or that Daniel doesn’t begin a romance with Chomina’s daughter, but all of this is handled with a subtlety that is truly rare in these kinds of films.

This is partly thanks to the way that, despite the sweeping landscapes in which it takes place, the film’s story remains elegantly simple and centered around its principle characters. I couldn’t help but think of Aguirre, The Wrath of God at many points in the story, as Black Robe has the same kind of emotional and physical rawness that made that film so memorable. The two also share a certain subtle absurdity, manifested here in the form of a dwarf sorcerer called Mestigoit who counsels the Indians that Laforgue might be a demon, inciting a debate among the Algonquins about whether or not they should kill the priest or leave him stranded in the wilderness. This is only one of many small indictments of religious figures that fill the story. Beresford seems to repeatedly draw a comparison between Laforgue and Indian shamans, and between Indian religions and Catholicism in general, and always with a slight skepticism. But Black Robe is certainly not any kind of polemic, and Beresford complicates his themes as much as he does his characters, always adding new angles and perspectives, some of which are truly unexpected.

Still, all this murkiness just might be what keeps the film from achieving any real sublimity with its ending, which is as haunting as it is puzzling and unsatisfying. There’s a certain kind of fatalism and inevitability that comes with the territory in historical fiction (we do know how this all ends, of course), and even if we can appreciate the necessity of the film ending the way it does, it still leaves us wanting more. That being said, Black Robe is still notable as a strange kind of historical artifact. Few films have ever tried to capture the mood and the struggles of this particular time and place so carefully or unflinchingly, and even fewer have done it this well.

Bad Lieutenant Trailer

2009-05-28T16:12:00.002-04:00

The trailer for Werner Herzog's pseudo-remake of Bad Lieutenant is finally available, and it definitely looks like it's going to be one hell of a weird trip. It is nice to see Val Kilmer back in action, and I suppose it has been too long since Nic Cage got to do that crazy over-the-top kind of performance that he loves so much...

Wendy and Lucy (2008)

2009-05-15T15:31:00.008-04:00

I finally caught up with Wendy And Lucy following the surprise attention it got from critics last year, which saw it receive a deluge of praise, find its way onto several “best of” lists, and spark at least one debate on the state of modern film. At first glance, I can say without hesitation that Wendy and Lucy is a much better effort than director Kelly Reichardt’s previous film, Old Joy, which was so slight that it eventually became downright dull, but I have the feeling that I’ll never need to see a single frame of it ever again. In a way this is to the movie’s credit: Wendy and Lucy’s subject matter is so seemingly small, and the style so mathematically precise, that after you’ve seen the movie once you feel as though you’ve truly experienced it, and chances are you won’t need to revisit it any time soon.

The film stars Michelle Williams as Wendy, a young drifter who’s driving around the country with her dog, Lucy, in tow. When her car breaks down somewhere in Oregon, a chain reaction of bad luck and bad decisions ends with Lucy going missing, and with no help and little money, Wendy is stuck trying to find her companion in a city where she knows no one.

You wouldn’t think that a movie about a girl looking for her lost dog could be all that compelling, but Reichardt’s meditative style and a great, subtle performance from Williams really draw you in. It’s become a huge cliche at this point, but the real achievement here (yes, as in The Bicycle Thief) is that this small, seemingly insignificant struggle eventually takes on tragic implications, and by the last few minutes of the movie we truly are hoping against hope that everything will work out for this character. This may just be because of the hopelessly sentimental girl-and-her-pet-dog dynamic that’s at work here, and there’s no doubt that stories about animals are one of the easiest ways to tug at the heartstrings of an audience, but it's a real achievement that this film is able to take this easy, readily available device and makes it stand for so much more at the same time that it strips it down to its barest parts. Beyond all else, we are involved.

And this is strange, because we know almost nothing about Williams’ character or where she’s coming from, and other than her vague aspirations of going to Alaska to work in a cannery, we don’t know where she’s going. What is clear is that she’s a person who’s hell-bent on living in the present, and it seems that as a director Reichardt is equally set on building this conceit with her camera. Her style of placid, stationary landscapes and slow, fluid tracking shots can definitely get a little tedious, but it does succeed in grounding the viewer in the here and now of her story, and helps us to identify with Wendy even though she seems so anonymous. As the story builds and the stakes get higher, it becomes obvious that this movie is not just about a girl searching for a lost pet, it’s about someone searching for a way to survive in a world that seems cold and indifferent their existence.

For all its economy of style and content (this movie clocks in at barely over 80 minutes), Wendy and Lucy is chock full of subtext, but unfortunately not all of hits home the way it probably should. I could have done without the supermarket clerk who catches Wendy shoplifting having to prominently sport a cross necklace and spout off conservative ideology--a none too subtle attempt to create a counterpoint to Wendy’s free-spirited lifestyle--or a short scene featuring independent filmmaker Larry Fessenden (who pulls off creepy very well) as a menacing homeless man, which seems oddly out of place. Still, there are also some real standouts here, especially Wally Dalton, who is a real delight to watch as a Walgreen’s security guard who is seemingly the only kind soul that Wendy encounters in the whole film.

Ultimately, it seems that Wendy and Lucy is a movie that probably got praised more for being a novelty in American cinema than it did for accomplishing anything groundbreaking. It doesn’t necessarily stake out any new territory, cinematically speaking, and the struggle at the heart of its story is nothing new either. Foreign filmmakers have been hitting both fronts for at least fifty years. It's too early to tell whether or not it marks the beginning of a sea change in American independent cinema, but all hype and theorizing aside, this is a well-made and superbly acted little film that builds to a truly elegant ending. At the very least, you have to respect Reichardt and Williams for being willing to take on such a slight, muted story. Sometimes it takes a lot more courage to a make a movie that is stripped down and meditative than it does to make something sweeping, and even if Reichardt's films aren't necessarily as transcendent as some have claimed, I'm still glad she's making them.

Doubt (2008)

2009-05-07T14:41:00.008-04:00

Certain movies are bad because they try too hard to be unpredictable and end up sacrificing the logic of their story in the process. Other movies are bad because they become so utterly predictable that the act of watching them comes to feel less like an experience and more like reading a laundry list of plot points and reversals that are supposed to be affecting. Writer-Director John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, which is an otherwise well acted and tightly constructed little story, suffers from a problem that I can’t say I’ve encountered that often: it is predictably unpredictable. From frame one-- hell, from the title alone--we know that this movie is going to be an exercise in how little can be revealed and how little can be explained. While this willingness to embrace mystery and uncertainty is something that I have championed time and again, here it ends up draining the story of its energy and meaning, to the point that all we’re left with is a number of not unimpressive shouting matches between great actors. We’re never really able to have an opinion on who is right, because we’re never allowed enough information to truly know what the stakes are. When the film ends, the only thing worth considering is not the substance of what this story is supposed mean or the complexities of its characters, but simply whether or not we believe a plot point actually happened.

The story is set at a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the new priest, Father Flynn, a liberal, worldly man who believes that the church should try to be “friendlier.” His ideas put him at odds with the austere Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the school’s principal, who feels it’s her job to be feared by the children. Caught between the two is the sweetly shy Sister James (Amy Adams), the only young teacher at the school, who is torn between her respect for Sister Aloysius and her admiration for Father Flynn’s new ideas. When Father Flynn’s relationship with a young boy is called into question, it sets the stage for an epic clash between he and Sister Aloysius, who is set on proving Flynn’s misconduct and having him removed from the church.

The film’s best feature is the delicious irony that Shanley constructs around his characters. We take an instant dislike to the strict Sister Aloysius, described by Flynn as a “hungry dragon,” but we know she means well. Similarly, although Father Flynn strikes us as the kindest of men, we know that his affability may conceal a dark secret. For the first thirty minutes or so, Doubt works thanks to this neat trick, where the perceived protagonist could be the antagonist, and vice versa, but it quickly becomes obvious that Shanley has no intention of ever resolving this dissonance. While this is certainly in keeping with the film’s literary style (Doubt originated as a stage play) and all-too-obvious themes, it prevents the story from carrying any real moral weight, and leaves the audience with no point of reference.

The film’s literary origins mean that the metaphors, of which there are many, are going to be placed front and center. Shanley’s script is chock full of reversals and visual cues and clever foreshadowing, but the film wears these devices on its sleeve to the point that they carry little meaning. It’s as though Shanley wrote this story with the intention of it being easily deconstructed. (This is exactly the kind of film that high school English teachers should show their classes, because the metaphors are plentiful and easy to point out.) So if Sister Aloysius has a peculiar hatred for ball point pens and sugar, you can bet Father Flynn writes with one and takes his tea extra sweet. This is not to mention that the weather outside is particularly windy and ominous for the whole of the film, or that-- no kidding-- a light bulb literally blows out in the middle of one of the more heated arguments. This heavy-handiness translates to Shanley’s visual style as well, which makes use of several comically miscued dutch angles at different key points in the narrative.

What saves the film from being a complete miss are a number of excellent performances. Hoffman’s turn as Father Flynn just might be my favorite performance of his career, if only because it was so refreshing to see him play a character that is upbeat and confident instead of the melancholy sad sack that he seems to have become typecast as. For her part, Adams probably has the easiest role as the demure Sister James, but she brings a certain intellectual depth to her character, who could have easily come off as annoyingly wide-eyed and naive. Surprisingly, and though she’s undoubtedly the class of the group, Streep just might be the weak link here as Sister Aloysius. She’s certainly enjoying herself, and really sinks her teeth into the role, but she does take it dangerously over the top in a lot of her scenes. A big part of the problem is the strong Noo Yawk accent that she insists on doing (but only some of the time), which brings a weirdly comic quality to a lot of her lines. I have a theory that great actors often get themselves into trouble with accents. They seem to latch onto them a little overzealously, probably because they see them as a challenge, but the results aren’t always as convincing as one might hope. Streep seems to be one of the repeat offenders in this regard, and here she is outdone on more than one occasion, most notably in a towering ten-minute scene with the great character actress Viola Davis, who completely deserved the Oscar nod she got for her role.

Unfortunately, it seems that every time these great actors manage to build something here it gets undone by the fatal flaw of Shanley’s script. Not ever following through on any plot point means that he robs his story (and his audience) of ever having a chance to explore any ideas of real depth. Because of the route the film takes, all the well thought out ideas about the role of women in the church, or how uncertainty is a part of faith, or how convictions operate, are ultimately trumped by a simple question: “Did he do it?” In a way, this movie is criticism-proof, because any objection to the writing or lack of clarity only further reinforces the theme of uncertainty. The problem is that this uncertainty was such a certainty all along that it lacks any kind of punch. Without getting too pretentious here, let’s just say that mystery only works when there is some mystery about whether or not there’ll be a mystery, and knowing all along that Shanley intends to leave us in the dark prevents the story from gaining any momentum. Maybe it all works a lot more elegantly on the stage, where themes, performances, and metaphors can be employed with a lot less subtlety. But as a film? I have my doubts.

The Goofy Movie...As Directed By David Lynch

2009-05-05T14:00:00.002-04:00

Apparently there's a new internet meme where people re-edit classic, happy movies and make them look like they were made by the master of all things weird and unsettling. My personal favorite is this re-cut of The Goofy Movie, which is truly some kind of small masterpiece. Watch and be amazed:

While it doesn't quite reach the same level of strangeness as Goofy, this re-imagining of Dirty Dancing is also worth a look:

Moon Trailer

2009-05-03T02:43:00.004-04:00

Moon is a science fiction movie about an astronaut (Sam Rockwell) who starts cracking up after 3 years spent alone on the lunar surface, his only companion a talking robot, oddly voiced by Kevin Spacey. It played at Sundance and the Tribeca film festival, where it got a lot of attention for being a throwback to classic science fiction films like Solaris and Silent Running, and many have already predicted that it will find a cult following. Sam Rockwell is definitely hit or miss as an actor, but this one does look pretty interesting, and it's already been picked up and is set to release in June. The big draw for me? The film's director, Duncan Jones, is the son of none other than famed musician David Bowie. Apparently he shares his father's fascination with outer space.

“What a Piece of Work is a Man”: Withnail and I (1987)

2009-04-17T13:54:00.012-04:00

The cult comedy Withnail and I finds Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann as two debauched and unemployed actors in 1969 England who head out to the countryside to recuperate from their latest binge and get started on the next one. Broke and with few prospects as thespians, the duo manages to dupe Withnail’s (Grant) gay uncle Monty in letting them use his cottage for the week, and take off with the intention of “getting out of it” for a while. What follows is a comedy of errors and epic bad behavior, as the two insult the local townsfolk, get attacked by bulls, and go fishing with shotguns, all while consuming heroic amounts of “the finest wines available to humanity.”

Withnail and I is certainly one of the all time great films about drinking and excess, but where it works where movies like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas fail is in the relationship between the two lead characters. There is not a false moment in the film, thanks to an eminently quotable script from writer/director Bruce Robinson (How To Get Ahead In Advertising), and brilliant performances from McGann and Grant as the two leads. Grant is as good as he’s ever been as the mercurial, cowardly, and somehow entirely likable Withnail, a ferocious ball of energy and insults that seems to have stumbled into the film straight out of a Shakespeare play. Described as a man “incapable of indulging in anything but pleasure,” Withnail is selfish, manipulative, and bombastic, and also one of the all time funniest screen characters. Scene by scene, Grant never delivers a line that isn’t pitch perfect, and he’s matched by McGann as Marwood, the “I” to his Withnail, who is the more level headed of the two, but is really only marginally less insane than his friend.

Robinson’s shooting style, as he has said himself in interviews, is pretty mediocre, but his writing is so good that you’re not likely to care. The real pleasure here (as in last year’s In Bruges, which probably owes a debt to this film) comes from watching great actors deliver great lines, and for such a small story, this works just fine. There is very little plot to be found here, just excellent characters, including Ralph Brown as the duo’s drug dealer, Danny. Brown is probably best known as the roadie Del Preston from Wayne’s World 2, and it seems that his character in that film was nothing if not a personal homage to his character here, a long-haired, philosophy-spouting hippie who makes bizarre claims like “all hairdressers are in the employment of the government” and constantly argues with Withnail over who can handle the most drugs. Richard Griffiths is also excellent as Uncle Monty, a wealthy aesthete with a penchant for food and fine wines, who shows up unexpectedly at the cottage with a single-minded obsession to seduce the hapless Marwood.

Along with the performances and great dialogue, what really makes Withnail and I so enjoyable is the theme of friendship that runs throughout. Everyone has known a person like Withnail at some point or other, and we can all identify with the neurotic Marwood. So it's easy to see how much their two personalities compliment and play off one another, and we come recognize how much each man, especially Withnail, needs the other. It’s no surprise that the film is set in 1969, at the very end of what Danny calls “the greatest decade in history,” because Withnail and I is in many ways a film about transition from one period of life to another, and the ways that certain habits and people have to be left behind in the process. The two characters spend most of the film in stasis, perpetually drunk and starving, and as that begins to change, so too does their friendship. This adds a small element of tragedy to what is otherwise a comic tale, and only helps make the film’s uncertain, bittersweet ending all the more perfect.

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

2009-04-14T23:32:00.008-04:00

Synecdoche, New York is the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter behind films like Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Over the course of six scripts, Kaufman has developed a trademark style of exploring familiar themes (the creative process, romantic love) while at the same time playing with structure and introducing bizarre plot points like a portal that leads to the head of another person, or a machine that can erase painful memories. So it’s no surprise that Synecdoche, New York is a serpentine head trip of a movie. In fact, there’s no doubt that this is his most ambitious project to date. It’s a behemoth of a film, charting a character through most of his existence and tackling some of the big questions about life and death. What is surprising is how little pathos or liveliness it has, and for a film with such gigantic ambition and scope, how empty it ends up feeling. Kaufman’s gift for exploring the limits of narrative and structure is certainly alive and well, but his script never delivers on enough substance to make it a trip worth going on.

The film ostensibly follows Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director known for audacious projects like a version of Death of a Salesman performed with all young actors. His life begins to literally fall apart when his artist wife (Catherine Keener) leaves him and takes his daughter to Berlin, and his health problems start multiplying at an alarming rate. Convinced he’s on the verge of death, Cotard unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “Genius Grant,” and resolves to use his new financial freedom to put on a play that will be “big and true and tough,” a project to sum up his life experience. Renting out a gargantuan warehouse and employing thousands of actors, he begins to build (over the course of years) a giant set replica of the outside world, reenacting events from his life and transforming them into a magnum opus of love, loss, and death.

Kaufman’s script is chock full of references to famous authors and theorists like Baudrillard (Cotard considers, not surprisingly, calling his play “Simulacrum”), Rilke, and Kafka, so it's little wonder that the mood here is one of pervasive dread and morbidity. This is echoed by Kaufman’s shooting style, which is all dark and seedy urban landscapes and dreary apartment buildings (in a nod to Luis Bunuel’s surreal style, one character’s house is perpetually on fire), a decay that seems to mirror Cotard’s forever-ailing body. But Kaufman seems to have little of an eye for interesting composition, and it becomes obvious that whatever spark his previous films had was courtesy of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. Similarly, his pacing is unbelievably awkward and mistimed. Every time the story begins to gain any momentum, another twist occurs, or a new level of narrative is introduced (I’m still trying to figure out the relevance of the sequences in Berlin), a tactic that does little for the meta style he’s trying to cultivate, and only succeeds in repeatedly taking the viewer out of the story.

As Cotard, Hoffman exudes a certain kind of exhausted melancholy in every scene (one could argue that he does this in almost every film he’s in, actually), and he does it well, but his character ultimately becomes a caricature of all the worst parts of the creative personality to the point that we stop caring about his latest loss or health problem. Meanwhile the periphery characters, among them Michelle Williams and Emily Watson as two of Cotard’s love interests, seem less like real people and more like stage props for Hoffman’s character to manipulate and arrange in his project. This may or may not be intentional, but there’s no doubt that it alienates the audience to the point that the movie becomes relentlessly tiresome.

This is too bad, because on a scene by scene basis, there is actually a lot to like here. The introduction of Tom Noonan as an actor playing Cotard in the play makes for some of the film’s best moments, and the details of how the play is put together inside the warehouse are fascinating, with Hoffman walking through a maze of different sets and giving his legions of actors direction. Structurally, these parts of the film (probably Kaufman’s career, in truth) owe a debt to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose famous short story “On Exactitude In Science” describes an attempt to make a map with the scale of a mile to a mile. Similarly, Cotard becomes so busy recreating his actual life in his labyrinthine back lot that he forgets to live it, to the point that the two become hopelessly intertwined. This idea is interesting enough, but Kaufman fails to set his focus on any one subject enough to fully explore it, and as his ideas pile up one another, the whole construct eventually collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.

There’s no doubt Synecdoche, New York is full of enough legitimately good ideas for ten feature films, it’s just that Kaufman fails to meld them into anything truly compelling. There’s no argument that he’s an interesting man and an inventive writer, but it seems like beneath all the wordplay, self-reflexivity, and narratology, he’s just not a very effective or natural storyteller. His movies, which tackle some of the big questions of life and what it means to be human, are always paradoxically drab and lifeless, like an academic whose ideas are beautiful but whose own personality is relentlessly bland. Taken as individual snippets, many of the scenes in Synedoche, New York work beautifully. For example, the few sequences featuring the always excellent Hope Davis as Cotard’s therapist hit just the right note of absurdity, and provide the film with some of its few moments of levity, and a late scene that finds an actor (playing a priest) expounding on the nature of despair is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve seen. But none of this ever gels into anything that feels complete or whole, and while I’m willing to concede that even this conceit might fit into the fractured framework of Kaufman’s script (his style is so meta that it gets hard to legitimately criticize anything), it never succeeds in making Synecdoche, New York anything more than an oddly alluring mess of a movie.

The Debate Over Neo-Neo Realism

2009-04-03T19:16:00.008-04:00

Soon after posting my review of Frozen River I came across this article from IndieWire about an argument going on between film critics A.O. Scott (NY Times) and Richard Brody (New Yorker) over an article Scott wrote about the “Neo-Neo Realism” that he claims is at work in a lot of American independent films like Chop Shop, Wendy And Lucy and the new film Goodbye Solo. Scott’s basic argument is that these movies, which generally use non-professional actors and tell simple stories about working class people, are the kinds of films that America is currently starved for, and that these filmmakers are carrying on in the tradition of Italian Neo-Realist directors like DeSica, Visconti, and early Federico Fellini. Hence the redundant name of his theory.

Brody’s lengthy response argues that Scott is “making too much” of these films and that the examples he chooses to illustrate his theory are too disorganized to add up to anything concrete. “I think it rests on questionable premises and reaches dubious conclusions,” he says. In the pedantic world of film websites and movie critics, it seems that this little argument has already grabbed a lot of attention, with different critics falling on one side or the other of the debate and wasting a whole lot of time talking about how we’re supposed to talk about movies.

Since I brought up my own little theory in the review about how movies like Chop Shop and Frozen River are operating within a wider framework, I thought I should chime in on this and give my opinion on who’s right in this debate. But after reading both of their essays, I can’t say that either one of them has much of a solid argument to back up their claims, and anyone with the least bit of film knowledge should be able to poke all kinds of holes in their theories.

For example, Brody’s objection to Scott seems to be all semantics, based around whether or not films like Killer Of Sheep are actually Neo-realist, and whether there are better examples of current films to make an argument around. As Scott said in his eventual response, “this is Mr. Brody’s way of saying that he and I like different movies.” Arguing over what movies best fit a concept that you don’t even accept as true doesn’t get you very far. This is not to mention the number of bizarre claims Brody makes near the end of his article, like when he says that the films mentioned are no more realistic than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a claim that is patently absurd. No matter who you are or what you think about the films in question, I think you’d have to agree that a film about a woman who loses her dog, like Wendy and Lucy, is far more rooted in reality than one about a man who is born old and ages in reverse. There’s just no argument there.

This is not to say that I agree with Scott either. His argument about these films is a little too loosely defined for my tastes, since he never seems to make a distinction about whether he’s talking about how these movies are made (handheld camera, location shooting, non-professional actors), or the stories they tell (working class struggles, social issues), or both. In any case, any two of the films he mentions have only a couple of these aspects in common. In this regard, I would agree with Brody that Scott is a bit too hasty to give a name to a movement that hasn’t really developed any recognizable characteristics.

And this is all without getting into the whole philosophical argument about what it means to be “realistic” on screen and whether or not it’s even a goal to aspire to. As Brody mentions, all the early practitioners of Neo-Realism eventually abandoned it in favor of more conventional styles that would allow them to tell bigger, deeper stories by using all the technological tools at their disposal. This was certainly true of Fellini, who abandoned the neorealist style in order to more deeply explore the psychological aspects of his characters. Movies are about telling stories, plain and simple. If a director thinks one style is best suited to telling a specific tale, or if it allows them to shoot it more quickly or cheaply, then they should use it. They shouldn’t worry about whether they’re going to be classified one way or another, or limited by what label they are given. That’s the kind of territory you venture into when you start trying to name a style before it’s even really developed.

Which brings me back to Frozen River, Chop Shop, and Shotgun Stories. The only thing I can really see linking these films together is a desire to document parts of American culture that are otherwise ignored. Films from Hollywood don’t exist in any American culture. They exist in a streamlined, homogenized movie culture that they all feed on and build up to the point that it can stand in for the real thing. America is a big country, and just because everyone shops at Target and Wal-Mart it does not mean we all live in the same culture. If there is any kind of a movement going on in film right now, it just might be the desire to break away from the construct and start documenting the culture beyond New York and Los Angeles. But beyond this impulse, which seems to be presenting itself in countless forms, I have to agree with Brody that there isn’t anything closely enough resembling a new style to be worth classifying, especially not with a name as pretentious and loosely defined as “Neo-Neo Realism”.

Frozen River (2008)

2009-04-03T14:21:00.007-04:00

Along with last year’s Chop Shop and Shotgun Stories, writer/director Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River is part of what seems to be an emerging trend in American film to document life as it plays out in specific regions of the country that remain untouched by the prevailing culture. These films seek to show the vast differences in life and experience in the U.S. by documenting parts of the country that might seem utterly foreign to the typical viewer. In Chop Shop it was New York City’s Iron Triangle, an industrial neighborhood in Queens filled with scrap yards and auto repair shops, and in Shotgun Stories it was decaying small-town Arkansas. Here, it is New York’s North Country, just near the Canadian border and a Mohawk Indian reservation, a frozen, gritty backdrop where everything seems dilapidated and on the verge of falling apart.

Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo), a cashier at a dollar store, is struggling to raise two sons and preserve a marriage with her perpetually absent husband, a drug and gambling addict who at the film’s start has disappeared with the money set aside for the family’s new double-wide trailer. While searching for him around town, Ray meets Lila Littlewolf (Misty Upham), a Mohawk woman with a history of smuggling. Since both have fallen on hard times, the two soon begin transporting illegal immigrants into the U.S. by driving them across the frozen St. Lawrence river between two Indian reservations. It is dangerous and illegal, but it pays very well, and Ray sees it as the only way that she’ll be able to give her children a new home.

Like Chop Shop or Shotgun Stories, Frozen River avoids sermonizing about social issues in favor of focusing on the plight of its characters. Hunt could have used her film as a soapbox to decry American immigration policy or the treatment of Indians in the U.S., but she wisely lets the characters and their story speak for themselves. At its heart, this is a very simple film about the lengths a mother will go to to protect her children. Both Ray and Lila, who is estranged from her baby boy because of her criminal history, are only trying to make enough money to take care of their own. In Ray’s case it is only the simple, sensible dream of trying to get a new trailer that leads her to take bigger and more extreme risks as the story progresses.

As Ray, Melissa Leo gives what is undoubtedly one of the most engaging and unsentimental performances of last year. She’s a consistently strong actress who has appeared in countless projects over the years, but she seems born to play this role, and deserved the Oscar nomination she got for it. Her Ray is a tough, world-weary woman has been beaten down by life but refuses to give up, and is willing to go to the most extreme lengths to preserve her dignity and that of her family. Leo’s performance works so well because she never once asks for the audience’s pity-- she is simply a person doing what she has to do to survive. Misty Upham is similarly strong as Lila, who couldn’t be more different from Ray, but who bonds with her over the need to care for and protect her own child.

Hunt shoots all this in a blue tinted hue that lends itself to the cold and unforgivable landscape of the North Country. The film was shot on location, and the environment, as in the other films, is as much a character as the people who inhabit it. Here it is all trailers and deteriorating buildings, bitter cold and mud, an environment as inhospitable as the economic situations the characters find themselves in. The smuggling scenes are incredibly taut and well-realized, with the characters crossing the river’s thin layer of ice under cover of darkness and transporting illegals back across in the trunk of their car. It’s a deceivingly simple process that Hunt manages to keep adding new depths and higher stakes to, to the point that one of the final crossings manages to be one of the most nerve-wracking scenes of last year.

Despite all this, Frozen River never comes to close to being a thriller, just as it avoids being a message movie. Everything is too grounded and focused on Leo’s performance and the struggle of these characters. Because her goals are so modest and the stakes to reach them so high, Ray’s struggle ultimately has tragic implications. This, too, is a through line that seems to run through these new films. In Chop Shop, it’s the young boy’s dream of opening a food cart, in Shotgun Stories it’s the broader need to provide for family and come to terms with one’s own past. In each case the stories tell about a person’s struggle to improve their station in life, only to be be thwarted by outside forces that are forever conspiring against them. (I'm still waiting to see Ballast and Wendy and Lucy, both of which seem to be of this same ilk). It’s a story we've seen time and again, (The Bicycle Thief comes to mind), but these new films, especially Frozen River, have breathed new life into it by linking it to parts of American culture that previously have not been documented.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

2009-03-17T17:14:00.006-04:00

2008’s Rachel Getting Married is a drama about a group of upper-class New Englanders coming to terms with their past during the wedding of the family’s eldest daughter. It’s a movie where the cliches are rolled out one after another. Parental divorce, addiction, sibling rivalry, a death that’s never been properly confronted-- it’s all here, and very little of it is even presented in any way that complicates what we’ve already come to expect from this type of film. The only unexpected thing about Rachel Getting Married, then, is how unusually well director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sydney) make these old standards operate within the framework of their story. For its first half, the movie almost works well enough to restore faith in the power of the dysfunctional family melodrama, but it quickly loses steam an ends up more like an updated version of Ordinary People with music. Lots and lots of music.

The story, as expected, is pretty simple. Kym (Anne Hathaway), a young woman with a history of drug abuse, is let out of her latest rehab institution for the weekend to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding. Conflict ensues, of course, and over the course of a very long few days a number of familial issues are brought to light and confronted. Where the movie works where so many of its kind fail, at least in the early running, is in the way that the conflict manifests itself. When Kym shows up at the house, we expect her to barge in like a force of nature and immediately start shaking things up. But the filmmakers don’t go for these kinds of easy setups. Things start out normal, and Kym, though she clearly has problems, is actually rather pleasant and likable, and even her relationship with Rachel seems pretty stable. Her issues are much more insidious, though, and it quickly becomes obvious that Kym resents the attention being showered on her sister. This tension finally comes out during a toast at the rehearsal dinner that, though a bit over the top, is notable for being at the same time relatively innocuous and unbelievably hard to watch.

Scenes like this one and the epic argument that follow it back at the family’s house are where Rachel Getting Married is at its best. Rarely does the conflict in these types of films arise so naturally and organically out of the situations. Usually it devolves into actors competing to see who can deliver their lines with the most venom, but here the arguments feel all too real. A lot of credit should go to Hathaway, who wisely holds back enough that Kym never feels too much like a caricature, but I was also very impressed with Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel and Bill Irwin as the sisters’ mild-mannered father Paul, who has the unenviable role of playing referee in most of the conflicts. The scenes between the family are unbelievably tight in their execution, but never in a way that seems over-rehearsed, and most of all, the script lets the story come out of these characters and the ways they clash rather than vice versa.

Demme films all this in that jittery handheld video style that I have time and again railed against, but here I have to admit that it adds an element of immediacy that might not have been there otherwise. He just might have hit on the perfect use of the handheld style (something that John Cassavettes realized 30 years ago), and it helps to add a fluidity to scenes that could have come off all too much like theater.

The problem is that beyond this opening conflict the film has very little to offer beyond reverting to a number of Lifetime-channel cliches and confrontations that, if not delivered by such superior actors, would seem laughably juvenile. Near the end of the film, things get rather repetitive, and it eventually becomes frustratingly obvious that what we have here is the content of an excellent short film stretched and padded to feature length. Demme tries to combat this by including several documentary-style scenes of the wedding activities. There are toasts, speeches, and dinners, but outside of a few cut-ins of Kym looking troubled, they add absolutely nothing to the actual story. When it came time for the actual wedding ceremony I was truly hoping that he would cut around it. No such luck.

And then there’s the music. Scene after scene of it, throughout the movie. It’s all played by wonderfully able musicians in a number of genres, but beyond making me wonder where I could get a hold of some of these songs it has no effect whatsoever on the experience of the film’s story. Demme made Stop Making Sense. We know he can shoot the hell out of a musical performance, but in the context of the film these otherwise cool scenes are nothing more than filler.

Maybe ditching these scenes and extending the actual story of Rachel Getting Married would have made it one of the more hard-hitting films of last year, and maybe it would have watered everything down to the point of unwatchabilty. It’s hard to say, but the point is that Demme and Lumet seemingly didn’t try, they just got in contact with some good musicians and let them go crazy. Watched alone, I’d wager that the few good scenes of familial conflict rank among the best of last year. They are heartbreakingly incisive, and hit all the right notes that you look for and so rarely get in a movie like this. But in the film’s second half everything just sort of devolves into a half-baked concert film/wedding documentary. All these scenes pile on one another to the point that by the end of Rachel Getting Married, you feel as though you’ve actually attended the wedding, and the supposed family drama seems less like the actual story and more like an embarrassing scene you stumbled upon while you were waiting to get another drink.

Let The Right One In (2008)

2009-03-13T17:08:00.008-04:00

The expertly constructed Swedish vampire film Let The Right One In is one of those rare movies that is more notable for what it suggests to its audience than what it actually shows them. Director Tomas Alfredson’s film just may be the best shot movie of last year, and the style he employs is at times so slight and subtle that the smallest look or gesture is able to speak volumes about its characters and their bizarre relationship. This is certainly a horror movie, faithful to the mythology of the vampire and with several striking scenes of violence, but at its heart it is one of the more keenly observed films about human relationships to come along in some time.

The story follows 12-year-old Oskar, a young boy living in a suburb of Stockholm in 1982. Oskar is an outsider at his school, where a group of bullies is constantly terrorizing him, and even more alienated from his parents, who are separated and seem to have very little to do with him. He is seemingly alone in the world, until he meets Eli, a girl his age who has just moved in next door. Eli is certainly strange-- she doesn’t go to school and only seems to come around at night, and her arrival coincides with a series of grisly murders in around the town-- but Oskar is happy to have a friend, and eventually asks if she’ll be his girlfriend. She hesitantly agrees, as long as he realizes that she’s “not really a girl.” Soon the two are spending as much time together as they can, and Eli is coaching Oskar on how to fight back against his tormentors.

Oskar’s reaction to learning that Eli is a vampire is certainly unexpected, and moves the story toward its more surreal final third, but it works because of how well-constructed the dynamic between the two is, and how natural their interactions have been to that point. The majority of the credit should go to the wonderful young actors playing the duo, Kare Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson, but the film’s script, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his novel, is also spot on, and features some of the most beautifully simple dialogue I’ve heard in a while. Take the oddly funny scene where Oskar, upon learning that Eli is indeed a blood-drinking vampire, asks her how old she really is. “I’m twelve,” she insists, “but I’ve been twelve for a very long time.”

Director Tomas Alfredson’s style is impeccable, and is a big part of what makes the film’s meaning so rich and multilayered. He makes use of a largely static camera to capture the unusually foreboding backdrop of the town, often using long shots to let the atmosphere swallow up the characters. After watching the film, one can’t imagine the Swedish landscape, with its snow covered streets and pitch-black night skies, being shot any differently. The comparison to fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman is probably too easy, but Alfredson’s camera seems to capture the film’s landscape and the faces of its characters with the same kind of emotional intensity that makes films like Winter Light so memorable, and like Bergman he delivers several beautifully composed shots that will stay with the viewer long after the film is over. His deliberate pacing is also Bergman-esque, but it is punctuated by some staggeringly brutal scenes of violence that rival some of the horror genre’s masters in their originality and intensity. Alfredson handles these scenes with a matter-of-fact kind of style that lends an elusive quality to the violence. Avoiding the quick cuts and shaky camera that plague so many American horror films, he uses long shots in these scenes to place the viewer at a distance and give the odd feeling of being a witness to the killings, which unfold with the speed and ferocity of an animal attack.

Outside of these scenes, the pacing and style of the film is quite subdued. Alfredson feeds the audience very little through dialogue, and his directing style might as well be a master course on how to tell a story visually. Every scene is altered and the surface meaning complicated by a simple shot or a cut scene, and as the film progresses we begin to see that the seemingly innocent relationship between Oskar and Eli is becoming more and more clouded.

Still, in the end it is this relationship, in all its complexities and terrifying implications, that makes Let The Right One In work so well. Eventually, we begin to see that the title doesn’t just refer to the old lore that a vampire must be invited into someone’s home before they can enter it, but also to the interaction between the two main characters, who are slowly letting another person truly know them after a life of feeling alone. Oddly, and despite all the gothic trappings that come along with being a vampire story, Let The Right One In is at its heart an elegantly simple film about two outsiders finally finding a person they can relate to, and it’s this emotional core, twisted though it may be, that grounds the film and makes the fantastical elements seem all the more natural.

TRAILER:

Choke (2008)

2009-03-02T22:08:00.004-05:00

Choke is the latest adaptation of a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. Palahniuk is known for his mind-bending stories and his black humor, so it’s no surprise that the plot of Choke is appropriately bizarre, following sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), who when he isn’t looking for his next hook-up is trying to work his way through the twelve steps (he’s been stuck on number 4 for a while), though it seems that every time he attends a meeting he ends up slipping away to a closet or a bathroom with the girl he’s supposedly sponsoring. Victor works as a “historical interpreter” at a colonial theme park by day and as a sort-of con man by night, intentionally choking in restaurants and hoping to be saved by rich people who, in order to “relive their savior experience,” will keep in touch and sometimes even send money. He does all this to help pay for his long-suffering mother (Anjelica Huston) to stay in a care facility for the mentally ill.

If that schizophrenic plot summary doesn’t make it clear enough, Choke is a movie where the plot is constantly moving in frustratingly nonsensical, thematically divergent directions (and that’s leaving out the subplots). Maybe in the book Palahniuk makes it all work (he’s always been on my “life is too short to read...” list), but on screen the story practically screams with dissonance. This movie, written and directed by character actor and first-time filmmaker Clark Gregg, is simultaneously a comedy, an addiction movie, a “head trip” movie a la Fight Club, and a drama-- which would be fine, if any of those elements cohered into anything remotely resembling a watchable story. There are a few clever scenes, most of which take place at the colonial theme park and concern Victor’s boss Charlie (played by Gregg), who is a stickler for 1700s accuracy, but after a funny start the movie becomes more droll than anything, and like all Palahniuk stories, seems to try too hard to be disturbing and unusual. By late in the film, even a scene where a woman asks Victor to “pretend” to rape her seems like nothing more than a pitiful attempt to get nervous laughter.

The film falls even flatter as a drama, suffering from that same inertia-destroying compulsion to revert to childhood flashbacks to explain every little adult problem that has plagued and destroyed so many an otherwise adequate film. And as for the plot-twists, they seem very forced and very obvious, as though the movie is trying to be like Fight Club in that “nothing is what it seems" sort of way despite lacking any of that film’s energy or inventiveness.

Rockwell is growing on me as an actor, and he’s perfectly fine as Victor, bringing just the right kind of sarcastic detachment and absurdity to a character that would otherwise be very hard to sympathize with. The real disappointment is Kelly MacDonald, who has been almost universally good throughout her career, especially in 2007’s No Country For Old Men, but who here seems to be so obviously acting that it becomes almost painful to watch as she recites line after line as though it’s written on a cue-card off screen. A late plot twist slightly exonerates her, but even this (which anyone should be able to spot a mile away) would have worked better if she had been even the least bit convincing in her role. Angelica Huston, as always, displays more acting skill in a few scenes than most do in their whole career, but after suffering through The Darjeeling Limited, I’m starting to get sick of seeing her show up as the eccentric mother in movies that try painfully hard to be offbeat. She could do much better.

In many ways, I’ve started to see Palahniuk’s Fight Club as a good movie that was bad for movies in general. Ever since Tyler Durden was introduced to the world, every other film that comes out has some last-minute rewrite of the story, where everything in the previous 90 minutes is rendered moot and useless by the sudden revelation that “it was all a dream” or “he was dead all along.” Choke doesn’t pull the rug completely out from under its audience to that degree, but it’s still ultimately a cheat, the same kind of hustle that Victor pulls on unsuspecting restaurant patrons. If Fight Club was the high point of Palahniuk’s trademark style brought to life on screen, then let’s hope that Choke is as low as it gets.

Blindness (2008)

2009-02-19T18:20:00.008-05:00

One of the easiest criticisms of movies based on novels is that they pale in comparison to their source material. The book is always better than the movie, and the most common reason is that filmmakers take liberties with the author’s vision, adding scenes, dropping characters, and playing fast and loose with story to the point that the finished product sometimes resembles its predecessor only in name (see I Am Legend). City of God director Fernando Mereilles' film Blindness, an adaption of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s novel of the same name, bucks this trend by staying rigidly faithful to the novel. The film’s script, by Canadian cult figure Don McKellar, works exclusively within the framework of Saramago’s story, only dropping the smallest of scenes in the interest of time. Blindness is one of the most faithful adaptations of a novel I’ve seen, and oddly, it’s all the worse for it.

Both the film and Saramago’s novel, which was considered by many (I would now say correctly) to be unfilmable, depict a sudden and unexplainable epidemic of “white blindness” that befalls an unnamed country. We follow a select group of characters, among them an ophthalmologist and his wife (Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore), a prostitute (Alice Braga), and an Old Man (Danny Glover), who catch the disease, which manifests itself as a milky whiteness rather than the blackout traditionally associated with blindness. They and others with the sickness (the rapid spread of which is conveyed in a chilling montage in one of the film’s better moments) are soon quarantined by the government and confined to a dilapidated mental institution with the warning that anyone who tries to leave will be shot.

Saramago’s story is shamelessly allegorical (which explains the purposely nebulous setting and the refusal to give the characters names), and this unfortunately means that the narrative unfolds with very few surprises. The government’s fear of its people and subsequent reaction, the lack of any kindness toward the sick--these are all pointed and calculated attempts at creating a moral fable. These are all too common in literature, and all too easily botched onscreen because of how rote they can be. So it’s not unexpected that what has started out as a kind of science fiction tale soon becomes a modern attempt at Lord of the Flies. The blind, crammed into tight quarters and forced to live in filth and squalor with little food, quickly become degraded to extreme levels. Soon, a former bartender (played with a wicked energy by Gael Garcia Bernal) has formed a gang and proclaimed himself “King” of the ward, hoarding the supplies and demanding payment-- money, jewelry, and eventually women-- in exchange for food.

The small group of characters at the center of the film are alone, their only help the doctor’s wife (Moore), who has miraculously retained her sight but went to the ward anyway to avoid abandoning her husband. She is the center of the film, alone in witnessing the wretchedness and the degradation of her fellow detainees. As could be expected, Moore is excellent in the role, and along with Garcia Bernal she is the most effective at creating a believable character out of a two-dimensional symbol. She is one of our very best actresses, and it’s no surprise that she takes the challenge of being the eyes of the audience in stride, even as her character is repeatedly put through hell. In fact, the cast here is universally fine, especially Danny Glover, who, though underused, makes the most of his role as a lonely man who finds solace in the makeshift family that is formed as the characters move through the post-apocalyptic conditions of the film's final third.

The problem is that beyond these extremes of human suffering and the tired and obvious parable of the frailty of human civilization, there just isn’t all that much on display in Blindness to make it worth enduring. The great accomplishment of Saramago’s novel is the rhythm he finds in his prose of telling a story without much visual description, of starkly recreating the feeling of being adrift in a sea of sounds and voices with no spatial or visual referents. This is obviously something a film director, especially one as in love the beauty of images as Ferandno Meirelles, will never be able to recreate onscreen, and so it’s no surprise that the film becomes relentlessly tethered to the doctor’s wife at the expense of everything else. Meirelles’ camera is precise and fluid, and outside of a few too many intentionally blurry shots (are these people blind, or just nearsighted?) the cinematography is impeccable. But beyond being slick and well composed, his shots reveal little emotional truth about his characters or their plight. The film’s handling of sound, on the other hand, is appropriately acute, especially the excellent music by Marco Antônio Guimarães. One scene in particular finds the detainees, exhausted and hungry, listening to some music on the Old Man’s radio. The simple beauty of the scene, which comes at one of the most trying moments of the film, lies in their newfound appreciation of the sounds, which seem to echo on some primordial level.

But this kind of profundity is scarcely found elsewhere in the film, which falters in its pathological loyalty to a story that was already too literary for its own good. Saramago’s book was told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator with a particularly cynical view of the world who would comment and even make light of the human failings and the folly that the characters displayed, often going off on lengthy tangents to make a philosophical point. Without the use of constant narration, this is something that a film simply can’t recreate (this is certainly not a new criticism-- fear of similar disconnect is why I'm still avoiding seeing Revolutionary Road.) We learn so little about the characters in Blindness, not even their names, and as an auteur Meirelles seems to have little to say about the world he creates. This leaves only the depravity, which is certainly disgusting and deplorable, but not even in a shocking enough way to be memorable or haunting. And all of this because the filmmakers, to their credit, tried to honor the material they were working from. I say it with hesitation, but it seems the best thing for Blindness would have been to play as fast and loose with the content of the book as was legally possible.

Herzog and Lynch's Horror Film

2009-02-10T21:06:00.007-05:00

If you're like me, that title alone was enough to get you excited for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, a new film to be directed by Werner Herzog and produced by David Lynch that's set to start shooting in March. Not only does this project find three of my favorite aspects of movies (Herzog, Lynch, and Horror) colliding into one epic storm of weirdness, but according to this article, the cast is slated to include Willem Dafoe, Michael Shannon, and-- believe it-- Udo Kier. Herzog has definitely made some weird choices of late, not least of which is his upcoming "reimagining" of Bad Lieutenant with Nicholas Cage and Val Kilmer, but for me, this is definitely the most exciting. Check out this interview with Herzog for more details about this, his hatred of film professors, and his upcoming book.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

2009-01-27T14:46:00.005-05:00

Errol Morris’ recent film Standard Operating Procedure, which studies the now famous pictures of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, is one of the most stone-faced, impenetrable documentaries that I’ve seen in a long time. You can’t fault Morris for trying to maintain an austere tone in the face of such troubling material, but the coldness of the film, his oblique approach, and the intellectual distance that he maintains from his subject are what ultimately make his argument so inaccessible.

I get his basic premise: that photographs never tell a whole story, that they are half-truths frozen in time. The conditions in which a picture are taken-- what lies outside the frame-- are just as important as what we can see. We get some of this from interviews with the accused soldiers, who range from pleading and insightful to downright naive, but Morris undermines any argument he might have by refusing to prove or refute anything. In taking what the soldiers say at face value-- from the convincing and chilling revelation that the soldiers were ordered by the CIA to be hard on detainees to “soften them up” for interrogation, to the now-infamous Lyndie England’s lame excuse that it was all her ex-boyfriend's fault-- he ends up leaving us even more baffled and confused than we were before we saw his film.

And maybe that’s exactly the point. Morris’ only goal here is to make people at least hesitant to judge the veracity of a charge or an event based on photographs that only tell a small piece of the story. Ultimately, his interest in Abu Ghraib is academic. He’s not trying to tell a story here-- he’s just trying to illuminate an abstract idea.

This revelation aside-- which, let’s face it, should already be obvious to anyone who knows the least bit about film or photography, or has ever used Photoshop-- Standard Operating Procedure is still hurt by its relentless meandering. See it for its interview with a wise, seasoned interrogator who puts the whole Middle East situation in perspective, as well as for the gorgeous slow motion photography and Danny Elfman’s haunting score. Just know that it’s not half as enlightening as The Fog Of War, as touching as Gates Of Heaven, as clever as Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, or as absorbing and important as The Thin Blue Line.

Armond White's Better Than List 2008

2009-01-21T12:52:00.007-05:00

I'm not really quite sure what's happened to New York Press film critic Armond White over the last year or so. Even though I've been on board with a lot of his contrarian opinions (hating The Dark Knight) and agree with him about many of the films he supports (Shotgun Stories), the man really seems to have gone off the deep end lately, to the point that the majority of his reviews test the limits of readability. Still, even though there is a lot of Armond-hate out there, I still have an odd respect for the guy, which brings us to his 2008 Better Than List. This is a piece he's been putting together for the past few years, where he gives you ten movies that mainstream critics have been praising and then explains why his choices are better. As usual, he borders on incoherency, but a few of his choices are interesting, like his recommending Steven Chow's CJ7 over Wall-E. I can't get behind his shameless Spielberg-promoting (Indiana Jones 4 is a terrible, terrible movie), but his praise for RocknRolla and Transporter 3 does make me a bit more excited to check those films out. Check out the list for yourself. The indignation of the commenters alone is worth the price of admission. As an added bonus, take a look at Jim Emerson's response to White's list, which is a pretty funny examination of Armond's often impenetrable prose.

I Love Sarah Jane

2009-01-14T17:07:00.004-05:00

I Love Sarah Jane is a zombie film from Australia. It was featured at Sundance last year, and it's one of the better shorts I've seen in a while. Think Night of the Living Dead meets Lord of the Flies, with a twisted love story thrown in for good measure. The You Tube Screening Room has a lot of great films available to watch, and I'll try and start posting the good ones as I come across them.

Favorites of 2008

2009-01-11T17:35:00.017-05:00

It’s hard for me to make a “best of” list for 2008, because I’ve seen so few of the big movies this year. It seems that film has become seasonal, with all the awards contenders and critical favorites crammed into late December, and many of them only released in the big cities. So I still haven’t seen some of the movies that are getting lots of attention, like the Swedish vampire movie Let The Right One In or the documentary Waltz With Bashir, both of which are collecting awards left and right. As for the Oscar bait-- like Milk, Doubt, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon-- I’m willing to wait for the video releases.

That being said, I’ve managed to come up with ten films from 2008 that are legitimately good and well worth checking out. Some of them have already been mentioned on this blog, but a few are totally new. To mix things up a bit, I’ve also included a list of the best movies, some recent, some very old, that I caught up with on video this year. Most of the movies I see in any given year are on video, and these are the ones that I can most enthusiastically recommend.

Best of 08 (in no particular order)

MAN ON WIRE
The most exhilarating and engrossing movie that I saw this year. It's already on video. Rent it now.

IN BRUGES
You probably won’t find it listed as a comedy, but this is the funniest movie of the year. I could watch it endlessly.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Some directors have already won me over to such a degree that I can’t even begin to review their films, and Herzog is at the top of that list. I am convert to the church of Werner, but even if I weren’t I would still be saying that this weird, fascinating documentary was one of the best of the year.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
The same could be said of Danny Boyle. This is the kind of crowd pleasing, feel good movie that should be at the top of the box office charts.

SHOTGUN STORIES
It’s always bothered me that Hollywood films seem to exist not in the true culture of America, but in a fairy tale culture of their own devising. It’s such a problem that a great movie like Shotgun Stories, so steeped in the culture that it’s documenting (in this case the South), seems oddly like a foreign film. It's as though we need subtitles to understand it. But this faithfulness to regional filmmaking is what makes movies like this one, and Chop Shop, to a lesser extent, so rewarding.

YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH
Not technically an ‘08 release, but I had no chance of seeing it until then, so I’m including it on the list anyway. A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about this movie, but I see it as one of the best of Coppola’s career. Watch it to remember why you ever thought he was great to begin with.

BOY A
Peter Mullan is great as always, and Andrew Garfield’s performance is nearly the best of the year.

THE WRESTLER
I say “nearly” because the best of the year, not surprisingly, is Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. It’s an all around well constructed film, but the whole thing is propped up by his presence. I can’t imagine anyone else playing his role, which I’ve always considered to be high praise for any performance. This film also has my favorite ending of the year.

REDBELT
Like any Mamet movie, it has its flaws, but it also has Chiwetel Ejiofor. Enough said. And I’m a sucker for any modern day Samurai in Los Angeles story.

STEPBROTHERS/ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO/FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL
This is my summer comedy trifecta, and even though it’s probably unfair to lump them all together, I don’t feel like choosing one. After all, American comedy these days is pretty much all Will Farrell, Judd Apatow and Co., and Kevin Smith, so I figure I’ve got all the bases covered.

OTHERS WORTH SEEING:
Surfwise, The Visitor, Diary of the Dead, Chop Shop

2008 VIDEO FAVORITES
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
Ace In The Hole (1951)
Pickpocket (1959)
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
Belle De Jour (1967)
My Night at Maud's (1969)
Atlantic City (1980)
Deep Water (2006)
REC (2007)
The Man From Earth (2007)

Boy A (2008)

2009-01-06T17:18:00.015-05:00

The sensitive and skillfully acted Boy A follows the story of Eric Wilson, who as a troubled child was involved in the violent murder of a young girl. Dubbed “Boy A” during the trial, he is released after 14 years of rehabilitation and given a second chance at a life. Eric, now 24, chooses the name Jack Burridge, moves into an apartment in Manchester, and begins to build a new identity under the guiding hand of his rehabilitation counselor, Terry ( Peter Mullan). Soon, he’s gotten a job, made some friends, and even begins dating a coworker (the excellent Katie Lyons). But Jack’s release has not gone unnoticed by the press, who have latched onto him as an example of pure evil and are on a constant quest to discover his new identity.

The early scenes surrounding the release are some of the film’s best, thanks to a superb lead performance from the relatively unknown Andrew Garfield as Jack. Garfield has the trickiest role in the film. He is, after all, not only portraying a man with a very checkered past, but one that’s learning to live again, and he does it all with the deftness of a much older actor. O’Rowe’s script doesn’t give him much to work with in the early running, and it would have been easy for him to come off as a non-entity, or, much worse, as outright dumb, but Garfield imbues the character with a kind of quirky earnestness that makes him easily likable. His Jack is quiet, skittish, almost pathologically shy, but it’s this vulnerability that almost instantly earns him the audience’s trust. Early scenes that feature him going out with his coworkers for his first ever night on the town (they think he was in prison for stealing cars) are some of the best I’ve seen in any movie this year (watch the sad, spectacular dance he does in the nightclub), and Garfield convincingly shows how the modest Jack could so easily win the favor of his new friends.

Along with Garfield, Mullan and Lyons deserve attention for their outstanding supporting work. Peter Mullan is one of the very best actors that no one’s ever heard of, and his funny, endearing performance here is one of the most skillful of the year. His relationship with Jack is more paternal than it is professional, (setting up an interesting juxtaposition with Terry’s biological son, with whom he is trying to reconnect) a feeling that rises out of the warmth and quiet wisdom that Mullan brings to the role. Katie Lyons is equally good as Jack’s girlfriend, Michelle, and the chemistry between she and Garfield is a big part of what makes their relationship feel so easy and unforced. Her role as the offbeat, understanding young woman that can see past the shyness of the male lead is perhaps a bit of a cliche at this point (I’m starting to think it’s a case of wish fulfillment on the part of male writers), but she rises above any weaknesses in the writing with a great deal of charm and vivacity, and the love story between she and Jack is one of the most natural and honest that I’ve seen in some time.

Crowley’s direction is appropriately minimalist, using a number of static wide shots and a cool color palette to show the industrial backdrop of Manchester, and he does a good job of preparing the audience for the inevitability of the film’s conclusion. But where he and O’Rowe do a disservice to their story is in the portrayal of Jack’s character. They clearly have their minds made up about how the audience is supposed to view their character, and seem to make an obvious attempt to stamp out even the smallest doubt that Jack may not be truly rehabilitated. Throughout the film, Crowley uses flashbacks to Jack’s childhood to slowly reveal what lead up to his crime. Yet when we come to the actual murder, he declines to show us what Jack’s role in the killing was, as though he wishes to hide any grisly details that might make us think less of our main character. I certainly can’t fault Crowley for wanting to spare his audience a horrific murder, but building a little skepticism about Jack’s character here and there would have done wonders to highlight and complicate the big questions about crime, punishment, and the possibility of redemption that Boy A is trying to play with. Making Jack a martyr, as Crowley comes dangerously close to doing, adds very little to the conversation.

That being said, it’s probably unfair to criticize Crowley too much for choosing to make a small character study over a social treatise, especially when the characters being studied are so well realized and elegantly portrayed. Even though it doesn’t tackle its subject as head on or as cuttingly as it could, Boy A is still a well-rendered, provocative, and heartbreaking story. It’s certainly a shame that it hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves, especially for Garfield, whose breakout performance is reason enough to seek it out. The acting on display here is universally superb, and the fact that Boy A is still one of the best films of the year despite its faults can be credited to nothing other than the significant skill of its cast.

Dots and Cuckoo Clocks

2008-12-20T18:51:00.004-05:00

The famous Prater Wheel sequence from Carol Reed's The Third Man. As the story goes, the cuckoo clock line wasn't even in the script. It was added on set by Welles because he thought it helped the timing. Fifty years later, it's still one of the most memorable parts of the film.

Man On Wire (2008)

2008-12-19T15:30:00.016-05:00

It’s no surprise that the end credits of Man On Wire list the main musical theme as the “WTC Heist Music.” After all, director James Marsh’s fantastic documentary about high-wire walker Philippe Petit is very much a heist movie, chronicling the planning, scheming, and intrigue involved in Petit’s 1974 attempt to walk a tightrope between the newly constructed World Trade Towers. Using disguises, fake names, falsified documents and months of meticulous planning, Petit and his accomplices managed to smuggle hundreds of pounds of equipment to the rooftops of the towers to engineer what the film's tagline calls “the artistic crime of the century.” It was an art heist in the grandest sense of the term, but rather than stealing a painting or a sculpture, Petit and his friends--identified in the film with espionage-inspired monikers like “the Australian” and “the Inside Man”--were stealing the opportunity to create their own absurd, sublime performance piece.

Marsh uses a number of excellently constructed reenactments to help portray the tension of the “heist,” which required the men to avoid roving security guards, at one point hiding under a sheet for hours while a guard made his rounds only feet away. Marsh never ignores the danger inherent in such a bizarre stunt, and he effectively uses the camera in his reenactments to give the viewer the feeling of being, as Philippe describes it, “on the top of the world.” (Lots of films have tried to recreate the danger of teetering on the edge of great heights, but Man On Wire is probably one of the few that will give its audience a true feeling of vertigo). Like Errol Morris, who’s made a career out of using reenactments in his docs, Marsh adds new levels of depth and artistry to the story with his cut scenes, which are often shot in grainy black and white, to the point that it's sometimes hard to tell what’s reenactment and what’s Petit’s own home movies, which are also used to great effect. There is no video of Petit’s stunning final walk between the towers, but Marsh’s deftness and the film’s pitch-perfect editing are such that you’re not likely to notice.

The story’s frenetic pace and the gripping subject matter are only enhanced by the interviews with Petit, an ebullient Frenchman and born raconteur whose poetic retelling of his own story is the most engrossing aspect of the film. As one of his accomplices says, “he draws you into his world” with his charm and creativity, which played a significant role in the successful completion of the heist. Consider how the men solved the problem of getting the wire from one tower to another: Petit examined a number of possibilities, from hitting a baseball tied to a rope to using remote control airplanes, but in the end they took the simple route and used a bow and arrow to fire a rope from one tower to another. It’s the kind of idea that anyone could come up with, but only a man crazy enough to walk a tightrope 1350 feet in the air would actually try. It’s the same attitude summed up by Philippe when he describes the formulation of his dream: “It’s impossible, sure. So let’s start working.”

While Marsh’s style and Petit’s personality succeed brilliantly in making Man On Wire compelling, an even bigger accomplishment is how quickly and completely they convince the viewer of the validity--the necessity even-- of what is essentially an absurd and pointless act. We see the beauty, the sublimity, and the artfulness that was inherent not only in the wire act but in the planning process, along with the overflowing love Philippe has for his craft, and we leave with a special gratitude for having received a gift we never even knew we wanted.

"There Has To Be Something Else Out There": Paranoid Park (2007)

2008-12-09T14:50:00.007-05:00

Save for his forays into mainstream mediocrity with movies like Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, and his shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, Gus Van Sant is regarded as one of the more interesting and provocative directors in American film. His career of late, which has included the so-called “death trilogy” of Gerry, Last Days, and Elephant, has established him as a director with something to say-- an artist interested in exploring “big” subjects like school shootings or the enigmatic life of a legendary musician. Beyond anything else, Van Sant is known as a director who gets his audience involved in tough subjects. With this in mind, it’s strange that Paranoid Park, perhaps the best-reviewed film of his career, evokes such a non-reaction, has so little on its mind, and eventually elicits nothing more than an indifferent shrug when its over. While watching the movie I felt like I could identify with Alex, the disaffected, ever-boy teen protagonist at the center of the story, if only because I felt as alienated from and disinterested in his life as he does.

Oddly enough, this does not mean that Paranoid Park is a boring movie to watch, a criticism that is easily (and not altogether unfairly) leveled at Van Sant’s recent work. His fluidity and sensitivity as a director is on display in every frame of the film, and from the start he draws you into the world of Alex, a Portland high school student and skateboarder. Alex is dealing with problems that a lot of kids his age face-- parental divorce, a girlfriend who wants to get serious, the need for acceptance from his peers-- and he walks around with the same vapid, bored expression that can be spotted on the faces of teens in shopping malls and skate parks across the country. But Alex, as he explains himself in an elliptical, inarticulate narration, is troubled by a bigger problem-- one that involves the grisly murder of a security officer in a train yard, and has the police showing up at his high school to question he and his fellow skateboarders.

I’ve frequently heard Van Sant’s style of late compared to Italian Neorealism, the school of cinema in the 50s that sought to portray ordinary life in an unaltered, unadorned fashion (think De Sica's The Bicycle Thief). Some critics have called Paranoid Park, with it’s unprofessional actors (Van Sant found lead actor Gabe Nevins and others on MySpace) and long takes, the heir to this style, but they’re off the mark. After all, people in normal life don’t get involved in murders that often, and a director who wants to shoot in an unadorned style doesn’t hire Christopher Doyle, longtime collaborator of Wong Kar Wai, as his cinematographer. In actuality, Van Sant seems to have hit on a newer, more original approach here, one that attempts to approximate as closely as possible the feeling of being inside a character’s head. Van Sant and Doyle, along with Rain Li, who provides a number of excellent skate scenes, fill the film with an abundance of stylistic “noise”-- from cutaways to super-8 footage of skaters in sewer pipes, to inexplicable soundtrack shifts from Billy Swan to Beethoven, and bizarre sound effects and synchronicities in the audio track-- that helps to show the rambling and panicked dialogue going on in Alex’s troubled mind.

It’s a stylistic achievement, and because it works so well the filmmakers are able to string the viewer along on a thin story and character for longer than they have any right to. But after the first half of the film I started wanting more from Alex than his inarticulate stuttering and blank expression. Van Sant undoubtedly directed Nevins to act this way in order to add a level of universality to the character, to turn Alex into a blank slate for the audience to project onto, but at a certain point a little expression, a little spark of personality here and there, would’ve done wonders for the film.

If this alienation were confined to the character I might have been able to get by it, but Van Sant insists on including the same level of nebulousness and universality to his theme and story as well. What we end up getting by the end of Paranoid Park feels like half a story: kid accidentally kills cop, is troubled by it, and... the end. We never get a real conflict, a real theme, or a resolution. What we get is a rigid character study of the most uninteresting character imaginable. Look, I’m no cinematic puritan. By no means do I demand to be presented with a 3-act structure and a theme at every movie I see. But I do demand that I be involved, if not in the character than at least in the things that happen to them. So I could have enjoyed Paranoid Park as some kind of modern-day Crime and Punishment (which many critics have compared it to), or as a Camus-esque study of randomness and chance a la The Stranger-- but we never get enough evidence from the story to make either such leap. The best explanation I can give is that Alex-- whose father is absent from the home-- is desperate for male attention to the point that he’ll blow off his girlfriend or commit a crime in an attempt to be accepted as one of the guys, and that kind of pseudo-psychology is about the least interesting path the film could’ve taken. At one point in the story Alex tells his friend Macy, an intelligent young girl who is the most interesting character in the film, that he feels like there’s another world beyond everyday life, that “there has to be something else out there.” That’s the way I felt, too, and I wish Van Sant had something more to show me beyond banal surfaces and his own technical skill.

Still, as problematic as Paranoid Park’s story and character are, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t intriguing to watch. Van Sant’s technical skill is considerable, and if you’re into that kind of thing it might get you through the movie-- it’s only when you think about it afterward that everything falls apart. The style on display here is exquisite, and leaves you wondering where a guy with such considerable talent will go next (the first step seems to be a move back toward the mainstream with Sean Penn in the Oscar frontrunner Milk). Still, I can’t imagine it is much more than Van Sant’s skill at weaving together image and sound that has made Paranoid Park so well-received. It is strange to see how he has evolved as a filmmaker over the last several years. Once, I would’ve considered him a director who made thematically interesting but ultimately dull films. Paranoid Park is not dull by any means, but when it ends it leaves you with woefully little to think about.

A New Take On Darko

2008-11-29T17:49:00.002-05:00

Everyone who's seen Donnie Darko has their own ideas about what the movie is really trying to say, with director Richard Kelly's take being about the least interesting of all. This essay by film critic Jim Emerson (whose Scanners blog is a lot of fun and worth checking out) poses one of the most wild and oddly convincing theories I've come across. Was Gretchen Ross just a figment of Donnie's imagination? Does Donnie have something of an unhealthy preoccupation with his sister's love life? I'm not sure I agree completely with Emerson's take, but this is certainly one of the more intelligent discussions of the movie that I've read.

Happy Anniversary

2008-11-20T18:12:00.002-05:00

The blog turns one year old today. I'm the first to admit that 60 posts over the course of twelve months is a pretty weak output, but I'm going to try and start paying more attention to this thing. Regardless, thanks for reading, and rest easy with the knowledge that I'll be around for another year to tell you why your favorite movie sucks.

Parker and Stone's Mormon Musical

2008-11-17T19:58:00.003-05:00

The internets are saying that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are putting together a Broadway show about Mormonism simply titled "Mormon Musical." If it's half as good as the "All About Mormons" episode of South Park, then it will be a work of pure genius.

"One Shot. One Kill.": Charting the Trajectory of the Marksman in Shooter(2007) and Sniper (1993)

2008-11-17T17:46:00.010-05:00

(consider this notes for something much more interesting that I'll never get around to writing)

The only pleasure to be derived from 2007’s Shooter is how often and satisfyingly it delivers on exactly what the viewer expects to happen. There are no surprises here. When a soldier in the opening scene shows Mark Wahlberg a picture of his wife, we expect he’ll be dead within five minutes, and he is. When Ned Beatty shows up as a folksy career Senator, we immediately expect him to be corrupt, and so he is. When a rookie FBI agent (played by the excellent Michael Pena) starts researching the assassination attempt at the center of the plot, we expect he’ll uncover a vast conspiracy within the bureau, and he does. Even the details of the conspiracy itself are half-assed and tired (not surprisingly, it involves oil). What keeps the viewer from writing the film off as yet another generic action film is how skillfully and viscerally director Antoine Fuqua handles all the cliches, and how much fun the actors (especially Beatty and Danny Glover) seem to be having going through the motions.

Wahlberg stars as the absurdly named Bob Lee Swagger, an expert sniper who, if the opening scene is to be believed, has never missed. Called out of his idyllic retirement in Wyoming by the military, Swagger is asked to use his extensive knowledge of ballistics to help prevent a possible assassination attempt on the president (we know where this is going, too). After a foreign dignitary is killed in the botched attempt, Swagger finds himself the unwitting patsy in the previously mentioned conspiracy, and has to go on the run to try and clear his name-- think The Bourne Identity meets The Fugitive.

Wahlberg, who as far as I’m concerned has still yet to prove himself as an actor, is more or less a non-entity here. His idea of playing tough is saying all his lines in a low whisper and never once showing any emotion. This fits his character perfectly, though, because as the film progresses, we learn that Swagger will never once find himself in a position of even remote vulnerability. This is one of those movies like Ocean’s Eleven where the main character is always one step ahead of everyone else, and the only involvement the audience has in the story is wondering what new trick he has up his sleeve. On the other hand, the villains in the film are almost cartoonishly evil, from Elias Koteas’ scenery-chewing performance as a psychopathic agent whose name is (literally) Pain, to Danny Glover in an unusual turn as a corrupt official. All their roles seem to be designed to have no gray areas-- that would make their characters too interesting and killing them less fun-- a sentiment proven by a late scene that finds the bad guys sitting in a swank mountain cabin drinking scotch, smoking cigars, and literally laughing about how good they are at swindling the American people.

This works to Fuqua’s benefit, because it gives him a whole ninety minutes to put on a clinic on how to shoot an action movie, which he does rather admirably. Fuqua, probably best known for Training Day, is undoubtedly a skilled director, and he does a top-notch job here of building tension and giving the audience a good understanding of the geography of every scene. That he does it all without using a shaky, “documentary-style” camera is even more to his credit. After suffering through the last two entries in the Bourne series, it was nice to know that there are still action movie directors that care about whether their audience knows what’s going on in a scene.

The film’s geeky take on trajectories and ballistics is also notable, as Fuqua and company seem to take an almost fetishistic delight in describing the physics and mechanics of long-range shooting, from the effects of wind and temperature on a bullet to the pull of gravity and even the spin of the globe. What they don’t ever venture into is the psychological ramifications of taking a life from 1000 yards, or what it means to hold a position where your sole purpose it to kill. Such depths might tell us something about the characters that we can’t see on the surface, but after all, Shooter is not a film interested in telling its audience things they don’t already know.

Whereas Shooter could be considered a film interested only the science of what it means to be a marksman, 1993’s Sniper could be considered a film about the art of taking a life, and the psychic price paid in the process. Directed by Louis Llosa (who would later cement his place in cinematic history with Anaconda) the film stars the underrated Tom Berenger and Billy Zane as marine sharpshooters during the United States’ secret war in Panama. While Shooter sports a faux-complex conspiracy plot, the story of Sniper could not be more stripped down: Berenger and Zane are snipers, and they have been sent into the jungle to find and “take out” two higher-ups in the international cocaine trade.

While it’s billed as an action movie, Sniper might be better described as a psychological drama. Not much happens for the first hour, as we see how the men make their entry into the jungle and begin to stalk their target. What we do learn about is the mindset and mental strength it requires to take on the role of the silent assassin. This is conveyed in the back-and-forth between Thomas Beckett (Berenger), a veteran with 63 confirmed kills and a collection of dog tags belonging to his dead comrades, and Richard Miller (Zane), the green rookie who’s been sent into the bush to keep an eye on him. Beckett frequently talks about the “rush” that a man can get from pulling the trigger, but it’s clear that he’s become cornered into a career that no one does for long, and that the jungle has become his only home. “When the rush is over,” Miller asks him at one point, “it hurts, doesn’t it?” “The worst thing,” Beckett responds, “is not feeling the hurt anymore.”

While Sniper’s moody atmosphere and preoccupation with the psychology of the battlefield separate it from Shooter’s frenetic plot and shiny surfaces, so too do the shooting styles employed by the respective directors. Fuqua rarely shoots from the point of view of the sniper. At most he’ll show the trigger being pulled or a close up of Wahlberg’s face before cutting to the thing being shot, person or otherwise. Meanwhile, Llosa always shows us the target from the POV of the shooter, and almost always with the crosshairs of the scope visible onscreen (it seems as though a third of the movie takes place from the POV of a rifle scope). When the shot is taken, he even switches to the bullet’s point of view as it whizzes through the air toward its target. While the photography in Shooter is more concerned with the results of the act, Llosa’s photography in Sniper focuses only on the act itself, forcing the viewer to identify with the man pulling the trigger and the horrific mental consequences that follow it. That both directors seem to go out of their way to maintain their respective styles is telling, and speaks volumes about the particular mood they’re trying to cultivate.

This connection between the sniper scope and film viewing is rather convincing, and it’s an idea that Sniper plays with much more interestingly than does Shooter. A film viewer-- the passive, far-off observer that is emotionally involved in what happens onscreen at the same time that he is divorced from it, is not unlike the sniper, who watches the action unfold from a safe distance through his own screen, and yet is still forever tied emotionally to the outcome. Whether it’s the “rush” that he feels, or guilt (as in Sniper), or nothing at all (as is apparently the case in Shooter, with its inordinately high body count and protagonist that literally never misses) is ultimately up to the man pulling the trigger, the cameraman shooting the scene, and the viewer watching the screen.

Netflix Watch Instantly Finally Available For Mac

2008-11-13T16:41:00.002-05:00

Finally! I've been a loyal Netflix subscriber for more than four years now, but their PC-only watch instantly feature was really starting to get on my nerves. Now mac users can start checking out all the great stuff they have to offer online. Just yet another excuse for me to never leave the house.

Spielberg and Smith's Oldboy Remake

2008-11-07T21:20:00.007-05:00

Let's hope it's not true, but several websites are reporting that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are set to remake Chan-wook Park's Oldboy sometime next year, no doubt continuing a trend of sub-par American remakes of good foreign films.

Sam Fuller Tells Us What The Cinema Is

2008-10-23T21:33:00.014-04:00

The clip below is Sam Fuller's cameo from Godard's Pierrot Le Fou. Fuller was not only a great director (if you haven't seen Shock Corridor, The Steel Helmet, Pickup On South Street, or The Big Red One, check them out), but he also led one of the most interesting lives of the 20th century. He grew up in New York City and became a crime reporter in his mid-teens, and in his 20s he traveled around the country as a tramp and wrote novels. When World War II started, he enlisted in the army, and his unit would eventually storm the beach at Normandy and liberate concentration camps. When he returned to the states, he shifted to filmmaking, and at the time of his death in 1997 he had made more than twenty features, all without ever having to sell out to Hollywood. His autobiography, A Third Face, is one hell of an American story, and should be required reading for any film fan. As Martin Scorsese says in the intro: if you don't like Sammy Fuller, then you just don't like movies.

Small Town Misery: Snow Angels (2006)

2008-10-21T15:20:00.014-04:00

David Gordon Green occupies a unique place in American film as one of the preeminent documentarians of the frustrations and triumphs of small town life. 2006’s Snow Angels, made before his commercial turn as the director of Pineapple Express, has been described by many as the perfect synthesis of the kind of low-key, somber filmmaking style that Green has been cultivating since his feature film debut George Washington in 2000. The film’s biggest asset is the unbelievable depth of its cast, which features Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell, along with an unparalleled group of supporting players that includes Griffin Dunne, Nicky Katt, Olivia Thirlby, Tom Noonan, Amy Sedaris (in a serious role!) and the relatively unknown Michael Angarano in what should be a star-making performance. Coupled with the dependable fluidness of Green’s direction (he garners a lot of comparisons to Terrence Malick), and the film’s source material, a celebrated novel by Stewart O’Nan, you might expect something exceptional, but Snow Angels, though occasionally engaging and often heartbreaking, never manages to be more than just the sum of its parts. There is a lot worth liking here, but by the time it was over, I had the nagging feeling that this was one of the most needlessly manipulative, frustratingly uneven films I’d seen in some time.

Which is not to say it doesn’t have its share of good scenes. Green’s unconventional approach in the early running is to tell his story using a collection of short but often memorable vignettes (few scenes last longer than a minute or two), and these help to set things up rather nicely. We meet Annie Marchand (Beckinsale), a waitress in a small, unnamed northern town, and her estranged husband Glenn (Rockwell), an unstable alcoholic and born-again Christian who’s futilely trying to mend their marriage and reconnect with their baby daughter. Their story is mirrored with that of Arthur Parkinson (Angarano), a retiring high school student whose parents’ (Dunne and Jeanetta Arnette) marriage is on the rocks. Arthur works with Annie at a Chinese restaurant, and we learn early on that she used to babysit him as a child. Green works in these small connections between characters throughout the story, helping to establish how people’s fates are tied together in a small town, and in its first half the film works as a clever character piece. We see the contrasts in Annie and Glenn’s young and struggling marriage with that of Arthur’s parents, and when Arthur begins dating a new student at his school (Olivia Thirlby, doing a lot with a little as she did in The Wackness) the film’s narrative becomes effectively triangulated, following these three relationships of people all at different stages in their lives.

The problem is that this triangulation is about as complex as things get. After all the major characters are set up, Green has nowhere to take them but straight down, and in its second half the plot of Snow Angels devolves into presenting one devastating tragedy after another. This is a common problem with indie films in general, which often seem to substitute unrelenting misery and pain for seriousness and substance, as though only a downbeat story can have meaning. Green seems as intent on manufacturing sadness as your average Hollywood film is with happiness, and beyond learning that they're dejected we never get much illumination on who any character is or why they do what they do. (Rockwell’s Glenn is the only exception, and that’s just because he’s constantly getting drunk and listing out his problems to anyone who will listen). I’ve always been less a fan of Green’s own films than of those he’s produced (Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories) or seemingly influenced (Ray McKinnon’s severely underrated Chrystal), and I’m starting to think that his biggest problem is that he’s too cerebral for his own good, to the point that his movies always seem as though they would have been better served as novels. He does the best he can to hint at depth through camerawork and mood, but his audience can only be expected to fill in the gaps for so long, and the end result is that everything he does ends up being disquieting but never meaningful. Snow Angles is actually based on a book, which I haven’t read, but I get the impression that if we could get inside the character’s heads a little more then everything would pack the punch that Green thinks it does. As it stands, we just get a number of shots of people giving really pained, pensive looks, trying their damndest to look interesting.

Still, to the cast’s credit, I can’t imagine anyone handling the material much better. The acting here is universally good, especially Beckinsale and Rockwell as the two leads. Beckinsale’s performance has been polarizing. Several critics have said that she is too pretty, too cosmopolitan to convincingly pull of the role of a small town mom, but I think she succeeds rather admirably in playing the role of a woman trying to do the best with the cards that life’s dealt her. For his part, it seems like Rockwell has finally found a role where all his capital-A Acting seems to work. For once, all his nervous twitches and facial tics seem at home in the character he’s playing, and he does a good job at bringing a tough character to life. Similarly, Angarano is near-perfect as Arthur, and the budding romance he and Thirlby have is exceedingly convincing, and one of the few bright spots in the film’s second half. It’s in these little details that Green’s promise as a director is most visible. He includes a number of small, unconventional scenes that prove to be surprisingly moving. One of my favorites was a dialogue-free sequence in a bar where Glenn, drunk and grieving, dances with a couple of winos. On its surface it’s unspectacular, but Green is wise to leave the camera rolling and let the scene breathe, and Rockwell is able to sell it and make it one of the better moments in the film. Green does have a gift for understanding the rhythms and oddities of normal, everyday speech. He knows just when to cut to a close-up of an actor’s hands or let a line of dialogue be cut short, and much like his hero Terrence Malick, he knows how to imbue inanimate objects and small glances with uncommon amounts dramatic meaning.

But it's this same sensitivity and Green's penchant for melancholy that ultimately weighs Snow Angels down. It’s not even the dourness that is the problem, but the unrelenting conviction Green seems to have in presenting it and the overall lack of justification for it. David Gordon Green is undoubtedly a talented filmmaker, and in this film he presents us with some sequences of unparalleled beauty that speak to the complexities of human behavior and the trials of everyday life, but somehow it all feels like a cheat. Snow Angels is a film steeped in misery, and when you get to the end of such a film you expect the director to have reached, or at least broached, some semblance of a point (watch Tarkovsky’s Stalker for a good example). That never materializes here, and simply writing the film off as a character study or a mosaic of small town life would be giving it too much credit. Ultimately, the only thing this movie is for sure is a drag. An entrancing, sometimes interesting drag, sure, but a drag all the same.

The Foot Fist Way (2006)

2008-10-04T18:10:00.007-04:00

After seeing Redbelt, it was strange to finally catch up with the comedy The Foot Fist Way and find that it uses a similar premise and tries to play it for laughs. While Redbelt’s Mile Terry was a Jujitsu instructor whose spiritual purity was at odds with the world around him, Danny McBride’s Fred Simmons is a Tae Kwan Do instructor who grounds himself with the teachings of his craft even as his life is unraveling before his eyes. McBride is solid here, and a great deal of the humor in the film arises out of the way he reads his lines and the odd poses he strikes and facial expressions he uses. Otherwise, though, The Foot Fist Way is a huge disappointment, a film completely absurd and amateurish in its execution that would’ve been much better served as a short. There is little or no story to be found, which director Jody Hill makes up for by inserting countless montages of kids doing Tae Kwan Do in slow motion, and even at only 85 minutes the film feels interminably long. Not unlike Napoleon Dynamite, which the Foot Fist Way mirrors in tone, this is a movie that tries to derive the majority of its jokes from ridiculing its main character. Nearly all of its attempts at humor are based around Simmons' clearly misguided belief that he is a successful guy and a serious martial artist despite his beer belly and the strip mall location of his academy. That’s a premise that would be hard pressed to stay amusing for the length of a comedy sketch, let alone a feature film. But beyond this, there is very little on display here. Even the introduction of Ben Best as Simmons’ hero Chuck “the Truck” Wallace (a clear reference to Chuck Norris) is completely wasted for possible jokes, and the ending confrontation at a Tae Kwan Do demo feels painfully tacked on. What little sly humor is on display here comes from Simmons’ relationship with his wife, played by Mary Jane Bostic, and Hill’s occasional use of slapstick camera work, like a goofy camera move employed when Fred learns his wife has been cheating on him. Other than that, some of the movie’s best lines, like when Bostic describes herself as having been “Myrtle Beach drunk," aren’t likely to register with a number of viewers, and do very little to overcome The Foot Fist Way's considerable faults.

The Wackness (2008)

2008-10-04T17:29:00.009-04:00

For a respected, celebrated actor, Ben Kingsley has certainly made some odd career choices of late. Whether it’s showing up in mainstream failures like Suspect Zero, A Sound of Thunder, and The Love Guru, or making an appearance in a Uwe Boll film (BloodRayne), it seems as though Sir Ben is hell bent on sullying his reputation as an actor of class. Either that or the majority of his recent acting choices have been based on a dare. That being said, Kingsley’s role as a philandering, drug-abusing therapist in director Jonathan Levine’s unfortunately titled The Wackness is one of the most delightfully unconventional roles an actor of his stature has taken on in some time. His Dr. Jeffrey Squires is a shrink as messed up as most of his patients, and whether he’s taking bong hits at his desk, running from the police, or making out with an Olsen twin in a phone booth, Kingsley is consistently the best part of this film.

Unfortunately, though, The Wackness is not his story. Instead, this movie is ostensibly about Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), a depressed weed dealer stumbling through 1994 New York during his last Summer before college. Luke’s parents’ marriage is on the rocks, he is shunned by the majority of his peers, and he has little idea what to do with his life. This is why he’s taken to trading dope for therapy sessions with the immature but well-meaning Dr. Squires, whose advice basically boils down to “get laid as much as possible.” Luke takes this advice to heart, but the girl he’s after is Squires’ stepdaughter, Stephanie, whom he quickly falls in love with despite Squires warning against it.

Josh Peck, best known as an actor on Nickelodeon kids’ shows, is perfectly fine as the awkward, unconfident Luke, but he’s done a disservice by Levine’s script, which commits an unforgivable movie sin: its main character is the least compelling, least likable thing on screen. Peck should be given credit for at least breathing a little life and charm into his underwritten role, but he can only take it so far. We never get to know anything about Luke, apart from learning that he likes weed, girls, and rap music, and that he’s generally pretty glum (which might as well be true of every 18-year-old guy in America). Not only that, but Levine’s whole premise is patently unbelievable: how could a kid who’s managed to talk his way into the heart of the NYC drug trade be so bad at communicating with girls? This bothered me the whole way through the film, and Kingsley is even given a throwaway line in one of the therapy sessions expressing the same disbelief. I guess Levine thought that would be enough to dispel any doubts.

The big problem with The Wackness (other than the title, which I must once again assert to be one of the worst in recent memory) just might be, ironically, that Levine’s supporting characters are so well written. I found myself entranced by Kingsley’s Dr. Squires and Olivia Thirlby as Stephanie, and both characters tower over Peck's Luke Shapiro. Stephanie is by far the most grounded character in the film, and it was nice to see an actress get to play a love interest as though they were a real person and not just a two-dimensional catalyst for the plot. By the end of the movie, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of film Levine would’ve gotten if he’d placed Stephanie or Dr. Squires at the center of his story, and relegated Luke Shapiro to the bit part he deserves to be.

One place where Levine does succeed is in utilizing New York City (dressed here to look like it’s 1994) as another major character. There are definitely one too many references to Rudy Giuliani, who had just taken office in 1994, but there are some nice scenes where the characters discuss the way the city is changing, including one where Squires expresses his fear that his edgy, colorful city will be streamlined into one big “happy meal.” Also bringing some life to the movie is the excellent soundtrack, which features some great old-school hip-hop by the likes of A Tribe Called Quest, De la Soul, and Notorious B.I.G.

But none of this is able to make up for the character problems we find here. I’m not sure if it’s a failure on Levine’s part or something to do with me, but even though I’m not that far removed from the experiences that the main character is going through, I managed to identify a great deal more with Kingsley’s Dr. Squires than I did with Luke. Perhaps it’s neither, and Kingsley is just so good here that he’s able to set himself apart from the rest of the film’s shortcomings. He’s definitely the only reason I’d ever encourage anyone to even consider seeking out a film with such a terrible title.

One Against Many

2008-09-28T22:39:00.004-04:00

From Chan-wook Park's Oldboy. One of the most viscerally cool fight scenes in recent memory, and about the only reason you need to seek out the film if you haven't seen it.

Paul Newman (1925-2008)

2008-09-27T16:52:00.009-04:00

Paul Newman has died at the age of 83. I'll leave the discussions of his life and career to the more eloquent writers out there, but I can say without a doubt that he's been my favorite actor for years, as well as one of my biggest influences as a film fan. When I was 15 or 16 I was a verifiable movie geek, but I wasn't very adventurous in what I watched, content to just see whatever was new. That was until I saw his movie Cool Hand Luke on cable one night. I hadn't ever seen such a great movie character, and soon I was seeking out all of Newman's films, astonished at how many great choices there were. Whether it was Hud, The Sting or The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or The Verdict, this was a guy that delivered in every film he was in. His movies were my introduction to the classics, and they undoubtedly changed the way I look at film as an art form. To this day, Cool Hand Luke is still my favorite movie.

I count Newman among the very best of the great actors from the 60s and 70s that made their craft look effortless. Guys like Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Burt Lancaster never tried to make their characters cool or larger than life, it just came naturally to them. But Newman just might have pulled it off with even more ease than all the rest. He had the gift of being completely at home and comfortable in the skin of whatever character he played. He was one of the very best of the kind of actor that seems to be forever disappearing from the screen: the guy that never has to tell a lie or put on an act to get a reaction from his audience.

"There is Always an Escape": Redbelt (2008)

2008-09-18T13:53:00.013-04:00

David Mamet as a writer has always been hit or miss. When he’s on, you get great character pieces like Glengarry Glen Ross, one of my favorite scripts of the nineties, or tight action films like the underrated Spartan or The Edge (which, admittedly, I might be the only fan of). But when he’s off-- and he very often is-- you can get cheap sleight of hand like The Spanish Prisoner or nonsensical moral fables like the pathologically awful Edmond. 2008’s Redbelt, a modern-day samurai story which Mamet also directed, falls somewhere between these two plateaus. It’s an almost perfect exhibition of Mamet’s amazing strengths at constructing character and themes, but it’s also all too clear a portrait of his weak plotting.

The film stars the remarkably consistent Chiwetel Ejiofor as Mike Terry, a jujitsu instructor whose desire to lead a pure life is constantly in conflict with his need to make a living. His wife (Alice Braga in an uneven performance) pressures him to compete in mixed martial arts fights to supplement his income, but Terry is unyielding, asserting that “competition is weakening.” The film is a character study, and Mamet’s plot is built around the ways in which Terry’s deep sense of honor and morality is tested, whether by a shady fight promoter (Mamet regular Ricky Jay), a neurotic but well-meaning lawyer (Emily Mortimer) or an aging movie star (Tim Allen in one of his better film roles). But all of this is irrelevant, because we know where a movie that owes so much to the Samurai/Western genre is going-- at some point, this guy is gonna have to fight.

Mamet’s plotting is typically haphazard-- characters are introduced and then forgotten, people change from friend to foe on a dime, and no plot point ever seems to happen quite the way that the audience feels it should. Even after over twenty years’ experience in the film business, it seems as though Mamet still tries to maintain a playwright’s aesthetic in his film scripts, letting the characters say outright what is happening rather than letting it be shown by action or camerawork. So when Terry runs out of cash, Braga’s character says quite simply, “you have no cash,” and later, another character tells him that he is “addicted to poverty.” This kind of on the nose dialogue is actually less annoying here than it has been in Mamet’s past work, but the sheer amount of coincidence, chance, and downright absurd plot points he uses to advance his story isn’t, and the audience isn’t likely to buy a number of late twists. To his credit, Mamet knows where his story should be taking these characters, but he can’t seem to figure out how to move them from one scene to another, and while he eventually works his way to a good ending, he makes a mess of his plot trying to get there.

Still, as Mike Terry is wont to tell his students, "there is always an escape," and in the same way that Mamet’s compact and talky theatrical style hurts his plotting, it’s a revelation for his characters. Mike Terry is the kind of smart, sympathetic, classically constructed hero that we get all too little of in the movies, and the fact that Mamet can drop an honorable warrior with a personal moral code into modern day L.A. and still have it feel believable is a testament to his writing. He effectively layers the film around his main character. Every plot point-- no matter how amateurishly it may be reached-- is the result of a motive or action that seems perfectly natural and at home in Terry’s character. The mistakes he makes and the triumphs he has are all the result of something unique to him. That’s enough of a rarity that it just might win you over to the film’s side, and it shows where a writer like Mamet can excel when he wants to.

Of course, Mamet can’t be given all the credit here for making Mike Terry such a fine character-- a great deal of that is thanks to a superb performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor, who once again proves that he is one of the very best actors around. In a relatively brief career, he’s managed to cover a lot of ground, from playing a drag queen (Kinky Boots) to a New York City detective (Inside Man) to a futuristic, sword-wielding government operative (Serenity). He’s playing an archetype here--the skilled fighter who considers violence an affront to the purity of the code of the warrior--and he pulls it off rather impressively. He has a gift for being able to evoke the sympathy of the audience whenever he wants it, and even when he’s playing a character that’s more virtuous than most of us could ever hope to be, he manages to make him feel real and flawed. Ejiofor has proven himself adept at carrying the moral weight in his films-- just watch his turn as an immigrant doctor in Dirty Pretty Things-- and it’s probably only a matter of time before he gets cast as the lead of a sweeping epic about a great historical hero. Redbelt is just more proof that he is up to the task. His Mike Terry is the best kind of film hero-- the kind of person that you hope exists somewhere out there in the real world.