Last(ing) Impressions

If I Picked The Oscar Winners (or, who should win the golden statues)

2012-02-05T09:59:00.000-08:00

Every year, I like to give my personal choices as to who should be walking away with Oscars, while assuring you that my choices are (usually) not my prediction, since The Academy and myself will likely disagree about 90% of the time. If I had it my way, The Social Network, David Fincher, James Franco, Michelle Williams, Christopher Nolan, and Dogtooth would have all walked away as winners in 2011. None of them did, making these awards as obsolete as ever. Things don't look to get any better this year, as sentimental, nostalgia porn is back in fashion (if it ever went out with these goons)! Here are my picks and shot at prescience, nonetheless:

SHOULD WIN BEST PICTURE: The Tree of Life
Will Win BEST PICTURE: The Artist

SHOULD WIN BEST DIRECTOR: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Will Win BEST DIRECTOR: Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist

SHOULD WIN BEST ACTRESS: Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Will Win BEST ACTRESS: Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady

SHOULD WIN BEST ACTOR: Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Will Win BEST ACTOR: Jean Dujardin, The Artist

SHOULD WIN BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Will Win BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Octavia Spencer, The Help

SHOULD WIN BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Nick Nolte, Warrior
Will Win BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christopher Plummer, Beginners

SHOULD WIN BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation
Will Win BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris

SHOULD WIN BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Will Win BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, The Descendants

SHOULD WIN BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Rango
Will Win BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Rango

SHOULD WIN BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree of Life
Will Win BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robert Richardson, Hugo

SHOULD WIN BEST EDITING: Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Will Win BEST EDITING: Thelma Schoonmaker, Hugo

SHOULD WIN BEST ART DIRECTION: Hugo
Will Win BEST ART DIRECTION: Hugo

SHOULD WIN BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Hugo
Will Win BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Anonymous

SHOULD WIN BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Alberto Iglesias, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Will Win BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Ludovic Bource, The Artist

SHOULD WIN BEST SOUND EDITING: Drive
Will Win BEST SOUND EDITING: Hugo

SHOULD WIN BEST SOUND MIXING: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Will Win BEST SOUND MIXING: Hugo

SHOULD WIN BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Will Win BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

SHOULD WIN COUNTS:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: 3
The Tree of Life: 3
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: 3
Hugo: 2
A Separation: 1
Bridesmaids: 1
Drive: 1
Rango: 1
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: 1
Warrior: 1

WILL WIN COUNTS:

Hugo: 5
The Artist: 4
Anonymous: 1
Beginners: 1
Midnight in Paris: 1
Rango: 1
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: 1
The Descendants: 1
The Help: 1
The Iron Lady: 1

(sigh)

The Best Films of 2011

2012-01-29T11:05:00.000-08:00

20. An instant-classic of sorts (though that certainly depends on who you're asking), Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (I'll stick with Joe) latest patience tester returns him to Tropical Malady form, engaging another Thai folk legend as the central conceit for family strife - this time, red eyed, furry creatures who allegorize the dieing recollections of Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), which, in turn, gives the film a highly episodic nature, each development more bizarre, fascinating, and worthwhile than the last. Elliptical and meditative, there is an essence, an evocation consistently present, attaining intimation through suggestion rather than direct or obvious statements, which keeps the family dynamics unstable, the filmmaking responsive.
19. Many critics have championed Midnight in Paris and Beginners as the best love stories of the year, but in Weekend, director Andrew Haight gets by those films’ juvenile proclivity for whimsy and precious nostalgia with only a dash of fairy tale ethos planted inside a thoroughly neo-realist conversation piece that rarely wallows in its own indie-ness. That’s a major accomplishment , even if a relative one, and if Haight doesn’t yet have the delicate eye for textual detail and intimacy of a John Cassavettes, his handling of leads Tom Cullen and Chris New proves his measured work with actors is somewhere close.
18. It should almost go without saying that Werner Herzog conjures up gorgeous, mesmerizing, and wholly transcendental images in his latest documentary, also in 3D, though that's more of a tangential perk than anything worth discussing. What truly brings vitality to the material are the interviews with numerous scientists and archeologists, all of whom have devoted significant amounts of time to studying the Chauvet caves of Southern France. Human idiosyncrasy (of the interviewees) parallels the incomprehensible drawings of cavemen, still preserved and astonishingly legible. Herzog posits the findings as lost or forgotten dreams, even going so far as to refer to their attempts of depicting movement as "proto-cinema."
17. Unlike Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, which is the greatest sports film ever made, the question of desire (and how brutish assertion approaches the Lacanian jouissance) remains an inconsequential one in Warrior. Nevertheless, O'Connor's visual work with the male specimen (actual bodies) is one of the finest breaks from contempo-cliche in recent years. O’Connor knows when to go in for a close-up on Tom Hardy's ferocious mug. In many ways, actor's presence supersedes directorial authority, compelling mainly because of O'Connor's conduits, rather than his mise-en-scene or insights. Nick Nolte enervates the veneer of method-acting histrionics by encircling actual, palpable pain, a "papa" that permeates archetype to unearth pure emotion. It's a performer's showcase, especially between Hardy and Nolte (Joel Edgerton is good, but nowhere near his fellow actors' levels of unrestricted feeling). Were they not contained in a film heavily reliant on cultural pandering, they would qualify as stand alone works of art. Perhaps they still do.
16. Never have Steven Soderbergh's detached, clinical formal techniques been put to better use than in Contagion (well, except for his masterpiece, the recent Haywire) - in fact, the prolific director's latest is arguably the first time he's ever managed a successful synthesis of form and content. Contagion never stops to mourn its lost human lives, but that doesn't make it passionless. In fact, through subtle close-ups and moments of human pain, Soderbergh communicates far more humanist concern than ever before. The world he depicts is cold, calculating, distant, but he finally removes himself from that alignment, recognizing the banality of apocalypse without rooting for destruction. Almost Kubrickian at times, Soderbergh solves the misanthropic puzzle that's plagued his entire filmography by separating himself from the destructivist impulses of his Darwinian milieu. Cliff Martinez's kinetic score verges on sensationalism at times, but Soderbergh's restraint resonates more as a waking-fever dream, succinct in its humorless resolve, human life as a societal contingency of postindustrial isolation.
15. Surfaces and depths become indistinguishable from one another in Lynne Ramsay's most provocative film to date - We Need To Talk About Kevin emits a suffocating, claustrophobic intensity throughout, even though there's nary a sequence that seeks to exploit the central quandary - what compelled Kevin Khatchadourian (Ezra Miller) to go on a high school killing spree and, more intricately, what blame is felt by his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton)? In a sense, Kevin is Ramsay's built in defense for her own film, based on the bestselling novel by Lionel Shiver, since every potential rebuttal to his portrayal, to psychoanalyze him, must run head-on into the fact that any reason, suggestion, is arbitrary in that it cannot achieve a universally affirmative causation for moral breakdown and absence. Ramsay tells the story more sensory than causal too, refracting memory, color, sight, and sound through Eva's broken, post-homicide body - pale, sickly, abject.
14. Gregg Araki's kaleidoscopic tale of young lust, ennui, and angst is also a perversely subversive rebuttal to both Indie and Hollywood filmmaking, where sex is either sugar-coated or ignored altogether. It may be the director's most accomplished satirical work to date - though Mysterious Skin remains his magnum opus, Kaboom intricately sets itself up as playful auto-critique, especially in the final third, when literal apocalyptic doom becomes a credible threat, inherently making fun of Blockbusters that take such spectacle-driven nonsense seriously. That the protagonist's roommate is named Thor is not a mistake - Araki is fusing his own intimate pop sensibilities (what must unfortunately be called esoteric) and imploding them (thus the title). The results are giddy with sophistication: Kaboom does to the summer Blockbuster what Scream did to the slasher film.
13. The Skin I Live In, Almodóvar's most impassioned film since Bad Education, the contorted, almost amorphous body of Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya) stretches, bends-backwards over a couch. Her body becomes the locus of filmic (image) obsession, seeking to capture (enclose) through understanding, mechanism, form, flesh, reconstruction, (re)imagining, the means by which touch, contact (and perpetual, existential isolation) construct an understanding of individualistic worth, coded through patriarchal sexuality. Though perhaps more explicit than ever before, Vera's eventual plight is essentially that of any Almodóvar protagonist, male or female - a line dissipated here. To say Almodóvar has finally made his horror film is to miss the message - he's always made horror films, the horror of confinement, the border, the frame, the limits of corporeal control. Striving for liberation, Almodóvar remains among the most refined, progressive, thoughtful contemporary filmmakers.
12. Lee Chang-Dong makes sprawling, expansive films about individuals grappling and seeking meaning at various stages in their lives. His films are about duration, temporal, geographical motifs abounding, in Poetry seen through the deteriorating health of Mija (Jeong-hie Yun), whose early onset Alzheimer's symptoms compel her to join a poetry class, to reclaim her individuality. Far from the soapy smile-and-cry hokum a brief synopsis may suggest, Chang-Dong uses Mija's condition to address numerous other issues, among them the intrusion of technology within youth culture, which deteriorates emotive expression just as much as Mija's memory loss. Micro and macro intersect, one of many subtle, intelligent moves made by Chang-Dong's steady, mature directorial hands.
11. While Attack the Block and Martha Marcy May Marlene may be the best feature debuts of 2011, it is Evan Glodell's Bellflower that suggest the most distinct vision in how it takes a central conceit - a fractured relationship - and injects that sense of loss and disillusionment into both its aesthetic and characters, all of whom thrive on endeavors that are either illusory or surely doomed from the get-go. Eventually vacillating between perverse male fantasy, nihilistic destruction, and a calmer sense of forward-progression, there's much that's messy and seemingly illogical (no one works or ever even mentions a job, as the film ignores (or is unconcerned with) its characters social status), but amidst the fuzziness, Glodell uses the medium to symphonic ends. It's unfortunate that so many filmmakers feel the need to align their symphonic desires with violence, but Bellflower, like Drive, is honing in on both cinematic fetishism and male psychology, and has ideology beneath the havoc.
10. Encompassing the holistic experience of viewing The Woodmans must begin with a reconciliation of its often suffocating moments – some filled with joy, others with pain, the majority somewhere in between. It is, indeed, a film of moments or, perhaps better stated, moments of refracted memories. Francesca Woodman, at the age of 22, took her own life after years of struggling with both herself (her body) and the means with which she was (un)able to satisfactorily express a passionate artistry, emotionality. Director C. Willis Scott situates her struggle within a moderately conventional documentary framework, using talking heads of friends and (primarily) family. However, Willis uses this form not to patly situate a psychological rendering, but to abstractly emote Francesca’s truly unknowable essence – that, being her disembodied consciousness, still pulsating from within her raw, mature art works.
9. Beneath the surface of Scream 4's jokey dialectic lies an ambivalent bitterness. Nothing explicates this better than a kill late into the film, as a victim lies upon the interior of her front door, only to be stabbed in the back, through the now anachronistic mail slot, a relic of cordiality and domesticity erased by the intrusion of e-mail, texting, and electronic subterfuge. That which brings us closer draws us further apart - a literal stab in the back to decency. Moreover, as the film's tagline asserts and is stated in the film: "New Decade, New Rules." Yet, this should not be taken as a thoughtless maxim, but an ironic moral question: Do the changing times excuse/explain historical disregard? Imitation (or, more precisely, replication) as murder begins the film, yet the remake craze also cannibalizes and distorts socially conscious investment for profit. "Don't fuck with the original," as Sidney tells a killer. But Scream 4 is doing just that: fucking things up, but surely just as fucked as the milieu from which it springs. Is Scream 4 too much? Of course it is - grossly so, it defies rationality with its intrinsic absurdity. Nevertheless, it is a necessary film, a much needed reminder of how stupid life becomes when culturally fueled instant gratification devours a calmer intuition.
8. Young Adult corrects Diablo Cody's Juno sins, with a shift in emphasis, away from solipsistic smart-assery and towards a more thoroughly satiric, but genuine examination of generational anxiety, of a distinctly feminine variety. By integrating not just more-obvious allusions to reality-TV image-making, but implicitly condemning the malpractice that goes into forced cultural construction, Cody and director Jason Reitman excavate the crux of both contemporary malaise and displacement. There were few better performances this year than Charlize Theron's heartbreakingly self-inflicted wounds, festering beneath her veneer of strength and agency. Her vulnerability goes a long way to refuting faux-outcast syndrome (unlike Glee, Cody and Reitman have no prescription or remedy for privileged isolationism) and joyously breaks away from something like Bridesmaids's false catharsis.
7. The bleakest, most perverse satire of American, patriarchal domesticity since A History of Violence, Lucky McKee returns after two lukewarm entries (The Woods, Red) to finally fulfill the promise of his debut feature (May). Unlike in his lesser films, The Woman challenges dominant norms that resonate more through suggestion of a prolonged period of exploitation than explicit real-world links; here, it's the American narrative of nuclear family under patriarchal rule, the "in the name of the (white) father" order that facilitates racism, misogyny, and bigotry. There's a persistent ambivalence concurrent throughout, and right when The Woman feels like it's about to go off-the-rails, McKee tightens the screws, ups the ante, and dares you, to use a crude (but appropriate) colloquialism, to "pull-out." When McKee's at his sharpest, there are no easy answers.
6. Great horror films express themselves in a way that's inseparable from the milieu they inhabit - environment is the direct correlative for enabling a breakdown of order, consciousness, and control. Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, while not outwardly projecting archetypes that readily signify its terrifying implications, functions on dread (the obvious term), but more precisely, the horror of post-dread, not that something bad is inevitably going to happen, but that there's no solution to correct said inevitability - a sense that an abject past, an intangible sin, has solidified (predetermined, if you will) an unwavering temporal logic, irrational in its seeming fixity. Nichols brilliantly takes these sensations and anxieties, then deftly ties them to a zeitgeist that feels nearly prescient in its class-based specificity. Everything about Take Shelter is implicit.
5. Tomas Alfredson, based on the quality of his first two features, deserves immediate consideration as perhaps the classiest, most distinct new filmmaker of the past decade. Many will see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and claim tedium or a lack of significance, based on Alfredson's deliberate pacing and disinterest in providing readily identifiable signifiers to "pay attention now." Much looser, sprawling, and impeccably timed for subtle revelation, especially in virtuoso performances from Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, and John Hurt, the inquisition-style narrative, based on John Le Carre's novel, recalls and updates The Third Man's post-war sense of chaos and corruption for the 21st century's fascination and near-obsession with conspiracy and suspicion of governmental agencies and appointed officials. Instead of sensationalizing these impulses, Alfredson gives George Smiley (Oldman) the diegetic wherewithal to align these allegorical postulations, a man detached and calm, calculated and almost post-human, were it not for glimpses of humility and empathy towards his ratted-out comrades and lost love-affairs. Classical but contemporary, Alfredson isn't making a period piece for a bygone era - he's speaking to contemporary anxieties with the nerve and precision of a great, refined filmmaker.
4. I was certain it would happen someday; A filmmakers has finally made a contemporary, near-equivalent to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 - that someone being Joe Cornish, whose writer/director debut Attack the Block amicably demonstrates his flair for minimalist depth, utilizing the cinematic medium nearly as centrally as he places genuinely emotive characters, whose camaraderie is rooted within a discernible sense of the social real, but tinged with a proclivity for genre archetypes. Even sharper, using teenagers who're dropped into an adult narrative, Cornish deftly negotiates a terrain between Goonies-like adolescent bait and hard-edged affect, stylish and genuine. Listen to Cornish's ear for a minimalist synth-score as an accompanyment to his stripped down, but crystal-clear humanist ethos. Flippant viewers will try and pinpoint a Spielberg lineage, but Cornish's terse style never bogs down in sentimentality, staying true to its we-don't-give-a-fuck protagonists.
3. A recent trend towards so-called “sociopath porn” in indie cinema is undeniable, as debut feature filmmakers begin satiating their infatuations (and dissatisfactions) with societal division and trauma, while leaving a distinctive formal mark. Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, however, transcends any of these potential trapping by taking a page from cinematic greats like Bergman, Polanski, and Altman, all of whom exist somewhere in Durkin’s deliberate, elliptical provocation. Durkin does not intend to valorize the ugly, the poor, the geographically "imparied" (to explain poverty-porn critical hits like Frozen River, Winter's Bone, and Precious, all of which received a Sundance stamp of approval). It takes sly aim at not simply class (the aforementioned films are not about "class struggle," but the exploitation of class to assuage liberal, humanist anxiety guilt), but the deeper-rooted tenants of exploitation: ideology.
2. Like many of the characters in Drive, director Nicolas Winding Refn’s hands are dirty; honing a reflexive postulation of the postmodernist hero while infusing pop art gravitas via neon flared mise-en-scene, tracks by Kavinsky, College, and Desire, and an original score by the great Cliff Martinez, Refn’s fetishistic modus operandi blatantly flaunts moral consideration for aesthetic nihilism: beautiful, horrifying, and deranged. It’s a vision to rival the sure-handedness of cinema’s greatest “underbelly” filmmakers (Kubrick, Lynch, Ferrara), made lithe and piercing by Ryan Gosling’s adolescent, violent love, Carey Mulligan’s meet-cute vulnerability, Oscar Issac’s bittersweet machismo, and Albert Brooks’ hardened cynicism. Rather than using genre for product, Refn’s film is an ambiguous step-forward into the abyss of implosive hyperreality, where character, actor, and motivation become indistinguishable. Is Drive critiquing these impulses or engaging them? Like any great work of art, the ends aren’t so readily perceptible, and the polemics remain bubbling and intimating, rather than overt.
1. What is great filmmaking, a lucid envisioning, at its core, if not a wholly personal endeavor? Positivists may try to downplay or negate Malick’s affectual output through a rationalization of nostalgic tendencies, anchored by sentimental melodrama – but these images are irreducible and impressionistic, not trite or manipulative. In fact, by beginning with the micro story of a single, fractured family in 1950’s Waco, Texas, and projecting their uncertainties towards the cosmos, Malick fuses silence, movement, music, and scale – lingering, while he never stops plowing forward. The Tree of Life is fleet and determined in its pacing; time keeps moving, which reveals the unrefined perceptions of critics and viewers who deemed it “ponderous,” pretentious,” and, worst of all, “uneven.” A rebuke to conventional filmmaking, storytelling, and structure, Malick manages to evade simple nostalgia by complicating subjectivity, never wholly forthright about exactly why or how the images come forth, and comes staggeringly close to a truly profound postulation on life lost, memories muddled, and the medium through which one may try to resuscitate them.

NOTE*** Due to my own negligence, there are several films I suspect I would like/love that I have not yet seen. Among them are A Dangerous Method, A Separation, Pina, Margaret, Mysteries of Lisbon, and Pariah. Once I see them, I will update the list accordingly, if necessary.

BEST DIRECTOR: Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Runners-Up: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive & Tomas Alfredson, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

BEST ACTRESS: Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Runners-Up: Charlize Theron, Young Adult & Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

BEST ACTOR: Gary Oldman, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Runners-Up: Michael Shannon, Take Shelter & Antonio Banderas, The Skin I Live In

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Jessica Chastain, Take Shelter
Runners-Up: Hayden Panettiere, Scream 4 & Pollyanna McIntosh, The Woman

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life
Runners-Up: Nick Nolte, Warrior & Albert Brooks, Drive

BEST SCREENPLAY: Joe Cornish, Attack the Block
Runners-Up: Pedro Almodovar, The Skin I Live In & Jeff Nichols, Take Shelter

WORST FILM: The Adjustment Bureau
Runners-Up: The Artist & Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star

Films I haven't seen that are getting awards buzz and I suspect I would hate them: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, War Horse, The Iron Lady, and Albert Nobbs.

The Last Leg of 2011: Part IV

2011-12-27T18:28:00.000-08:00

We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) -- B+

Surfaces and depths become indistinguishable from one another in Lynne Ramsay's most provocative film to date - We Need To Talk About Kevin emits a suffocating, claustrophobic intensity throughout, even though there's nary a sequence that seeks to exploit the central quandary - what compelled Kevin Khatchadourian (Ezra Miller) to go on a high school killing spree and, more intricately, what blame is felt by his mother Eva (Tilda Swinton)? Ramsay slyly goes a tongue-in-cheek route to these issues, suggesting Kevin as a Damien-esque monster, not a kind, empathetic bone in his body, though grounding both his utter indifference (Kevin collects computer viruses for fun, "for no reason,") and piercing perception (a scene where he predicts every word Eva plans to say over dinner is of particular note) as a demonstration of societal disconnect and savvy. He knows what people desire, their weaknesses and emotion, but feels none of it himself. He is not evil, so much as empty. When asked at the end of the film why he committed such a heinous act, he says: "I used to think I knew, but now I'm not sure anymore." In a sense, Kevin is Ramsay's built in defense for her own film, based on the bestselling novel by Lionel Shiver, since every potential rebuttal to his portrayal, to psychoanalyze him, must run head-on into the fact that any reason, suggestion, is arbitrary in that it cannot achieve a universally affirmative causation for moral breakdown and absence. Ramsay tells the story more sensory than causal too, refracting memory, color, sight, and sound through Eva's broken, post-homicide body - pale, sickly, abject. Ramsay's craft convincingly constructs Eva's subjective disembodiment, if less so Kevin's social environment (Ramsay refuses to provide any context outside of the home). A kindred spirit to this year's Martha Marcy May Marlene and, more obviously, Elephant, Ramsay's film is more to be felt than examined, since it sees psychopathology much like a dog chasing its own tail.

My Week With Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011) -- B-

My Week With Marilyn epitomizes a cinematic trifle, but director Simon Curtis deserves credit for making it a breezy, handsome, and generally mawkish-free one. It's no surprise from Curtis's filmmography (which consists solely of British television enterprises) that he relies primarily on actors over affect to propel the based-on-a-true-story account of aspiring filmmaker Colin's (Eddie Redmayne) stint on the set of The Prince and the Showgirl, with a chauvinist Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) directing and starring alongside a distraught, confused Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), whose erratic behavior (and new-found interest in Colin) puts the production in jeopardy. Curtis has little vision beyond star-gazing, fascination and small moments of human empathy, and he keeps the film on a rather general plane of cadence and progression. Fortunately for him, Williams's bravura turn, which is neither showy, imitative or histrionic, but carefully managed and subtle, keeps the wheels chugging with enough energy and goodwill, that gusto marginally prevails over the lacking gall to attempt anything a bit more irreverent.

Le Quattro Volte (Michaelangelo Frammartino, 2011) -- C

Precious idiosyncrasia, through and through, Le Quattro Volte, Michaelangelo Frammartino's second feature film, writhes in its dulled, pastoral sentimentality, rejecting any sort of piquant, eclectic sensibilities (absolutely stagnant mise-en-scene). Conveying birth and life through stillness flaunts mere contradiction and engages esoteric artistry of the worst sort. Shame on critics for falling over this nostalgia-porn drivel.

Poetry (Lee Chang-Dong, 2011) -- B+

Lee Chang-Dong makes sprawling, expansive films about individuals grappling and seeking meaning at various stages in their lives. His films are about duration, temporal, geographical motifs abounding, in Poetry seen through the deteriorating health of Mija (Jeong-hie Yun), whose early onset Alzheimer's symptoms compel her to join a poetry class, to reclaim her individuality. Far from the soapy smile-and-cry hokum a brief synopsis may suggest, Chang-Dong uses Mija's condition to address numerous other issues, among them the intrusion of technology within youth culture, which deteriorates emotive expression just as much as Mija's memory loss. Micro and macro intersect, one of many subtle, intelligent moves made by Chang-Dong's steady, mature directorial hands.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011) -- B+

An instant-classic of sorts (though that certainly depends on who you're asking), Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (I'll stick with Joe) latest patience tester returns him to Tropical Malady form, engaging another Thai folk legend as the central conceit for family strife - this time, red eyed, furry creatures who allegorize the dieing recollections of Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar), which, in turn, gives the film a highly episodic nature, each development more bizarre, fascinating, and worthwhile than the last. Elliptical and meditative, there is an essence, an evocation consistently present, attaining intimation through suggestion rather than direct or obvious statements, which keeps the family dynamics unstable, the filmmaking responsive.

The Last Leg of 2011: Part III

2011-12-23T10:23:00.001-08:00

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2011) -- B-

Everybody moves West in Meek's Cutoff, except for director Kelly Reichardt, who takes a slight step South with this handsome, rigidly composed, but textually hollow meditation on Manifest Destiny gone awry, primarily through a hackneyed opposition of nature and nurture, patriarchy lost amidst moral absence, all before the horizon dissolves as the Native-American walks into the sunset. Nothing about Reichardt is obvious or overtly dramatized for easy digestion - instead, she goes the other way, sharing similarities with Steve McQueen, portending significance without ever arriving there, the static takes, somber surroundings only sporadically effective, and generally aesthetically stagnant. Reichardt directs actors well, getting particularly strong turns from Bruce Greenwood and Michelle Williams, but little congeals beyond momentary relevance; like McQueen, Reichardt is verging on self-righteous artistry, deaf to criticism, and tunnel-visioned.

Paul (Greg Mottola, 2011) -- B

While not the purely joyous adolescent romp that Adventureland was, Greg Mottola solidifies his comedic worth and presence with Paul, one of 2011 sharpest and most consistently amusing comedies, if only because the director and writers/stars Simon Pegg and Mick Frost have such a firm satirical grasp on pop cultural worship, here of that particularly geeky variety - sci-fi fans. Though mixing metaphors and tones galore, there remains a persistent recognition (and reverence) of irrational cultural obsession, without becoming overtly precious or outwardly cynical. Pegg and Frost avoid ironic detachment by sincerely engaging with not just their characters (sure, these are caricatures, but imbued with humanity by Mottola and cast), but the hilariously hostile oppositional rhetoric that facilitates cultural disintegration, epitomized no better than the film's best visual gag, a t-shirt worn by Kristen Wiig's dogmatic evangelical, that's too hilarious to spoil here.

Your Highness (David Gordon Green, 2011) -- B

David Gordon Green, in an ironic turn, is now making better films in Hollywood than his last independent efforts (Snow Angels being the most laughable, egregious offender). Pineapple Express and, especially, Your Highness, display the sort of absurdist impulses missing from contemporary comedies. Predicated on being a "stoner comedy," Green approaches the inherently juvenile material with an appropriate degree of irony and sincerity, not outright castigating The Lord of the Rings films for their silly, mistaken sense of importance and relevance (the most overrated films of the past few decades), but fusing contemporary vulgarity and adolescent culture, aligning their sensibilities. It's a deft move, one which seems to go unnoticed by the bland taste-buds of most critics.

The Future (Miranda July, 2011) -- C

Ah, the hip. Little is more insufferable than deliberate idiosyncrasy - except when it's made precious. Alas, such is the case with Miranda July's latest, infused with solipsistic glum to spare, so forcefully preaching difference and individualism (but with mumblecore detachment), that the incongruities begin to overwhelm, and it becomes nearly impossible to stay tuned in. Nevertheless, there's an undeniable charm and effervescence in July's sense of humor (one should suspect much of this is meant to be ironic/satirical), but slathered in Indie cliches and epitomizing some of the worst Sundance-stamped characteristics, The Future renders itself immediately obsolete.

My Reincarnation (Jennifer Fox, 2011) -- B+

2011-12-22T17:17:00.000-08:00

My Reincarnation, a new documentary from director Jennifer Fox, is culturally specific, yet universally drawn - no easy task, but Fox's steady, affectionate reveal of the tumultuous generation gap between Tibetan Buddhist leader Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and his Western-born son Yeshi manages to locate such a balance. Norbu believes Yeshi to be the reincarnation of his uncle, a revered Buddhist master and, naturally, wishes him follow his footsteps. Nevertheless, Yeshi prefers the arts and education ("I want to be a photographer and play music"). While Fox spends much time following Norbu's public speeches, which have attained an almost celebrity status within the Buddhist community, the film primarily remains concerned with the relationship between father/son and their reuniting as Norbu, now 70, is dying of cancer.

The most impressive aspects of My Reincarnation are its specificity of tone, insight, and focus. At a mere 82 minutes, Fox juggles various interests, but ultimately is most concerned with parsing through each man's inclinations - Norbu's being a complex sense of duty, honor, and heritage for Yeshi's subsequent path, but Yeshi, essentially a full-blooded, middle-class secularist (in other words, of his society), seeks a path of education and individual betterment, diverging the two from one another. Fox rarely lets the material go astray and, seeing that she has been following her subjects for nearly 20 years, it's no surprise that My Reincarnation avoids simplistic moralizing or sentimental moments. Far from seeking easy pathos, Fox allows her subjects to do the talking - the best kind of documentarian - and instead of forcing her feature's relevance or significance, in turn, allows humanity and familial struggle (never precious) to convincingly achieve these ends.

My Reincarnation will play @ Roxie Theater in San Francisco from Friday, December 23rd - Thursday, December 29th.

The Last Leg of 2011: Part II

2011-12-21T14:49:00.000-08:00

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011) -- B-

Though a considerable stylistic improvement over the Swedish adaptation (the opening credit sequence, in terms of virtuoso thrill, is something of an instant classic), David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo merely plows through Stieg Larsson's lurid material with little distinct vantage point or insight, playing things at a sprinter's pace, rarely slowing down to even absorb ambiance and aura (a club sequence lasts less than 30 seconds, as does most every scene), much less any sense of character, feeling, and significance. As a 158 minute, break-neck bubble gum rush, Fincher delivers the goods, but his career should have progressed beyond this sort of exercise, especially if he's going to be so transparent in his textual apathy. Rooney Mara deserves kudos, however, for potentially the year's best lead performance.

Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder, 2011) -- C-

As forcefully puerile as they come, Zack Snyder continues to display his visual flair amidst narratives suited only for 10-year-old boys who don't know any better or cultural schizophrenics who relish utter annihilation of context, significance, and sincerity. There's no one to blame here but Snyder, whose writer/director/producer credits fully reveal his true interests: comprehensive fetishization, be it computer animated Nazi guards or a pack of skirt-wearing, weapon-wielding heroines, whose "dance" is revealed in an insufferable series of action set-pieces, each more muddled, meaningless, and indistinct than the last. Snyder likes it loud, be it images or sound, and though stretches (say, 10-15 seconds) of the film achieve their giddy ends, on the whole, it's less pure cinema than cultural enema.

Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, 2011) -- B

Striking a balance between cosmic inquiry and human proclivity is never an easy task, but Patricio Guzmán generally (and, at times, gorgeously) locates such an even keel in Nostalgia for the Light, which pits the filmmaker's existential questions amidst the recovery of murdered Chilean civilians during Pinochet's reign. The film's overall metaphor of illumination, be it the unknown or the past, searingly functions to hybridize his intentions and solidifying that human loss and strife will always (or should) supersede theoretical and/or theological anxieties.

Margin Call (J.C. Chandor, 2011) -- C

Stagnant, slogging, and generally flat-footed, writer/director J.C. Chandor views 2008's financial meltdown from the Wall Street genesis, over the course of a single day, attempting to show just how cold, calculating, and uneventful malice and greed can be. In that sense, his film succeeds, but his ends are rather obvious to begin with and, outside of serving as an admirable ensemble showcase, featuring the likes of Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, and Stanley Tucci, the tone and aesthetic resemble an HBO production more than a nuanced, feature film.

The Last Leg of 2011: Part I

2011-12-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

Young Adult (Jason Reitman, 2011) -- B+

Young Adult corrects Diablo Cody's Juno sins, with a shift in emphasis, away from solipsistic smart-assery and towards a more thoroughly satiric, but genuine examination of generational anxiety, of a distinctly feminine variety. By integrating not just more-obvious allusions to reality-TV image-making, but implicitly condemning the malpractice that goes into forced cultural construction, Cody and director Jason Reitman excavate the crux of both contemporary malaise and displacement.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011) -- C+

Let's admit it: Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol is essentially just a white-collar version of Fast Five, decking-out the franchise with several rousing set-pieces (especially in IMAX), but with very little interest whatsoever in rooting any of the proceedings in a genuine sense of the social, real, or global. Though fashioning a globe-trotting plot, there's a thoroughly feigned sense of awareness, since there are essentially nothing but archetypal characters, with the same sexist, racist, and homophobic baggage that generally accompanies the genre. Moreover, the underlying mold longs for a simpler, more conservative era, where baddies were international stoics rather than domestic threats - but what MI:4 forgets, is that the genre's best entries, from any era, are rooted not in a puerile sense of the fantastic, but a piercing, allegorical fascination with the political, dispersed through character.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011) -- B

Herzog has rarely been so patient and straightforward - Into the Abyss seeks not to neatly place polemics or problematize morality through outside testimonial. Concerned only with individuals close to the Texas case involving a triple homicide, which sent one killer to death row and left the other with a life sentence, Herzog hurtles ahead with more of a reporter's eye than a documentarian's, at least, without the usually elliptical insight that imbues much of his work by taking the micro and turning it grandiose (Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man). Here, the pathos come less from Herzog than his subjects - meaning, by establishing a de facto testimonial presentation, pain and emotion come from subjects grieving over the death of loved ones, lamenting their situations, and coming to little nuance other than the lingering sting. None of this is to say Into the Abyss isn't riveting at times in its small revelations of permanent loss and essence - but it plays like a hop-and-a-skip work for Herzog.

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011) -- A-

I was certain it would happen someday. A filmmakers has finally made a contemporary, near-equivalent to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 - that someone being Joe Cornish, whose writer/director debut amicably demonstrates his flair for minimalist depth, utilizing the cinematic medium nearly as centrally as he places genuinely emotive characters, whose camaraderie is rooted within a discernible sense of the social real, but tinged with a proclivity for genre archetypes. Even sharper, using teenagers who're dropped into an adult narrative, Cornish deftly negotiates a terrain between Goonies-like adolescent bait and hard-edged affect, stylish and genuine.

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011) -- B+

Andrew Naigh one-ups Mike Mills and Woody Allen by insisting on keeping his love-affair romance grounded and wholly tangible, without losing a canny aesthetic emphasis, aligning Naigh's film with the Nouvelle Vague in the most direct way - not just through form, but genuinely entwined, inseparable in that text and form are not merely complimentary or arbitrary, but necessary. There's no gimmick or amplification in terms of textual pretension and, thus, Naigh is able to stay above the line of Indie-bloated preciousness, without insisting his two-guys-talking narrative has added significance. Perhaps Steve McQueen could also take a note or two.

The Muppets (James Bobin, 2011) -- C+

2011-12-05T01:06:00.000-08:00

Having never seen a single episode of The Muppet Show, I am likely not the best person to critique a film featuring the same characters, many of whom I am unfamiliar with. In fact, I grew up with The Muppet Christmas Carol more than any other Muppet affair and, thus, when Kermit the Frog first appears in The Muppets, I half wanted to call him Bob Cratchit. Little of any said prior knowledge ultimately seems to matter, however, since writers Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller essentially begin tabula rasa, with a new Muppet named Walter and brother Gary (Segel), the pair setting off for Los Angeles with Gary's squeeze Mary (Amy Adams) to both see the Muppet's old studio and celebrate the couple's tenth anniversary. Of course, the film reintroduces many old faces, inserts countless cameos, and proceeds with an admirable degree of zest and self-awareness, if the latter becomes slightly grating. Nevertheless, amidst all of the singing, dancing, and charm, lies a greater sense of requisite commercialism, particularly in the film's inherent plea to rekindle old (consumerist) flames. Add another nostalgia piece to a seemingly endless 2011 laundry list, though The Muppets is by no means the most despicable offender, if only because its effervescent satirical impulses often eradicate the unspoken glamorization of branding. However, in one of the lamest decisions of the year, Disney chooses to insert a billboard not once, but twice, for Cars 2, as to coincide with that film's DVD/Blu-Ray release a little over a month ago. The well-oiled merchandising machine steadily chugs along and just like with nearly any Pixar entry (ironically, excluding Cars 2), the culture appears to abide. Let's look at it like this; Disney releases Tron: Legacy last fall, their first piece in reconstructing their attempted retrograde puzzle - they are out to literally make the old new again, with the post-conversion 3D of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo. The Lion King 3D already raked in close to $100M, and now The Muppets comes along as further primer, to solidify the (false) need, the desire for "old friends," as Kermit puts it. Were Disney not planning to re-sell their products to susceptible children/consumers, the underlying message would simply be capitalist. Nothing wrong with that. Yet, knowing what Disney has coming down the line, The Muppets becomes deceptive and disingenuous, regardless that Segel worked on the film for a reputed four years. These intentions don't matter when they are subsumed. No one escapes the jaws of string-pulling authoritarianism - not even The Muppets.

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011) -- D

2011-12-04T00:38:00.000-08:00

Midway through The Artist, restless, perturbed, and realizing Michel Hazanavicuis' multiple-count offender had no chance whatsoever of redeeming itself in the second half, I reached into my pocket to retrieve a pack of cigarettes, following the lead of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), whose fledgling career has just been cemented by the flop of his latest, big-budget silent film (talkies are in full-swing, leaving poor George to sit, sulk, and drink). Pouring his shot of scotch onto the table and taking a drag off his smoke, Hazanavicius neatly, literally frames the shot as a perfect mirror image, doubling, certainly to reflect the forsaken actor's fractured state; it's a move that would still be obvious regardless of the circumstances, but seeing how Hazanavicius takes every opportunity possible to neatly situate and explicate his insufferable homage (?) to silent cinema, the moment plays far more requisite than intimate. Now, back to that desired cigarette. The Artist sees life, art, and cultural significance in the most reductive of terms. It harbors nostalgia in droves, precious to the very end in its desired replication of the past, culling cutesy effrontery from nearly every scene, and neglecting to revise almost anything (aside from a dream sequence that's nothing more than bubblegum surrealism). As such, one gets the sense Hazanavicius believes it is 1929 or, even worse yet, wishes it were. Meaning, in the thrust of his icky sentimentality, how could one not wish to light up that cigarette, to dissolve into the grain of the film, to reject contemporary relevance and become lost in a world devoid of consequence, meaning, and time? In other words, a vacuum, a black hole, perhaps even, a heaven. At least, these are one's desires if they succumb to his cultural handicaps.

Heaven apparently can't wait for Hazanavicius, who should take any and all scathing criticism his innocuous, petty, puerile film deserves. The Artist is for those who wish to slide back into a place of pacification, a milieu that values (or more appropriately, valorizes) regression as a means of grappling with hard times, rather than pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. In other words - reassurance over reification. Much like last year's The King's Speech, Hazanavicius views history not with a critical eye (and certainly not an artistic one, as his title oafishly alludes), but as sentimental fodder for one man's ultimate triumph over hardship via a circle of caring, compassionate people. While The King's Speech is far more egregious in its flippant disregard for sanguinely shifting historical discourse, The Artist might be equally detrimental in its condensed explanation of cinematic desire (made even more grating by its literal, meta elements). A silent film about a silent film star? Even Chaplin never went that far. Moreover, there's nary a single satirical angle to any of Hazanavicius' executions, almost as brazenly ignorant as Steven Soderbergh's epic failure, The Good German. Here we have the converse of movie love - its incessant tainting by solipsistic filmmakers.

Parsing through the faults of The Artist, even just in terms of narrative, is almost too easy. But go ahead, give it a go: take a few minutes, write down what you think is likely to happen in the film from this set-up, at least, what would be the least offensive, most middlebrow road to take (think in terms of form and content): *It's 1928. Valentin is on top of the world. His latest film is a massive success. He's the biggest star in the world. Everyone loves him. Posing for a photo, clumsy aspiring actress Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) accidentally bumps into Valentin! Their moment together is captured on the cover of Variety (rancid Hollywood masturbation from Hazanavicius), leading to nationwide speculation as to whom the mystery girl might be. Scoring a series of roles and ultimately attaining leading lady status, Miller's rise peaks right at the introduction of sound.* Now, suppose you were asked to fill in the blanks following, as to hit the most obvious beats. Would Valentin be apprehensive about the introduction of sound? Yes. Would Miller, in turn, fully embrace it and become the biggest star in the world? Yes. Would Valentin blow every dime he has independently financing a big-budget jungle movie of his own? Yes. Will his wife leave him? Yes. Will Miller talk shit about Valentin, only to find out he's sitting right behind her? Yes. Will Valentin have to sell off his entire estate? Yes. Will he drudge out nitrate prints of his earlier films and watch them alone? Yes. Will, in a drunken anger, he set fire to those very prints? Yes. Will he almost be killed in the fire trying to save a single print that has sentimental value for him? Yes. Will Miller reach out to him, feeling guilty for his current state? Yes. Will Valentin realize that Peppy actually purchased all of his shit at auction, out of said guilt? Yes. Will Valentin become even more depressed, and stick a pistol in his mouth? Yes. Will Miller make a mad dash to save him? Yes. Will there be title card asserting ambiguity as to whether or not Valentin actually killed himself? Yes. Will Valentin actually kill himself? No. Will Miller's presence be the saving grace? Yes. Will Miller and Valentin ultimately team-up, at film's end, to become an Astaire & Rogers dancing duo? Yes. Oh yeah, and throughout all of this, will there be a cute dog that does tricks, rescues his owner, and generally looks adorable? Of-fucking-course there will be!

Now, take a look at our script. Pretty bad, eh? Pretty...lame, yes? Lame, in the truest sense of the word: crippled, impaired, disabled. In essence - deficient. Uninteresting. Yet, these are the very plot points The Artist functions with and, to my and any half-conscious thinker's chagrin, without even a hint of suggestivity to something larger, or even, something else...at all. In fact, Hazanavicius is one of few directors that come to mind who unblinkingly sees imitation, pure homage, as true expression - he seeks to make a silent film as if it were the late twenty's, with no more cultural, industrial, or aesthetic awareness than any placating melodrama from the 1950's, when untroubled escapism reigned. Problem is, as with nearly all escapism, this is not an escape from, but an escape to, an inherent devolution of cinematic totality, the reversal of artistic progress made by a filmmaker like Guy Maddin. There's no pain here; not even the slightest hint of real suffering. Silent cinema enables empathy and, when at its best, with films like The Last Laugh and The Passion of Joan of Arc, boils human compassion down to a discernible essence, which wields a power the spoken word lacks. The Artist is content to trample any of these self-evident images with its hackneyed, deplorable case of mistaken decency - it's one of the least compassionate films of the year, if you can see through its inches of goup, slop, and subterfuge.

Shame (Steve McQueen, 2011) -- B

2011-12-02T17:28:00.000-08:00

There's an undeniable emptiness in Steve McQueen's Shame, something the viewer is consistently forced to reconcile throughout, to attribute the said lacking to an overall sense of ennui/malaise, or textual flatness and, potentially, triteness. It's easy to see how one would fall on either side; McQueen privileges the long take, whether tracking or stable (as he did in his near-masterpiece Hunger) and in doing so, inherently valorizes a degree of detachment, an absence of interference or manipulation, imbuing the proceedings with a greater sense of verisimilitude, neo-realist in its desire to depict social zeitgeists. Fair enough, but unlike the greatest filmmakers of this sort (Rossellini, Olmi, Burnett, Clark), McQueen lacks any perceptual end or, perhaps better stated, context. Certainly, set in contemporary New York City, Brandon (Michael Fassbender) works a vaguely defined finance job (visions of Patrick Bateman are inevitable), outwardly attached, driven, and committed, but harboring an overall dissatisfaction, momentarily assuaged by recurring sexual endeavors, some with prostitutes, random women, men, and, in Brandon's hope for salvation, a woman named Marianne (Nicole Beharie) from his work place. These issues become further problematized by the arrival of Sissy (Carey Mulligan), his sister from Los Angeles. While the markers of social meaning and significance are present, there's very little actually implemented to instill a sense of cultural specificity or ethnicity into the proceedings (Brandon claims he moved to New York from Ireland when he was a teen, but it's merely part of the film's simultaneous lip service and stubborn denial to commit to any statements, whatsoever). It's not surprising to learn McQueen originally planned to set the film in London, only changing his mind after budgetary reasons forced his hand.

Nevertheless, this lack of definition does not prohibit McQueen from successfully probing what seemingly drives his interest in the material: displacement. In terms of this key conceptual anchor, McQueen masterfully uses Brandon's spaces (home, work, streets, bars) to formally suggest circuity, rather than simply through text, (the film's script by McQueen and Abi Morgan is surprisingly structured, at least in terms of action). The opening sequence (along with a later sequence in which Brandon hits rock bottom) rivetingly display McQueen's flair for composition, montage, and suggestivity. I might even go so far as to say without these virtuoso structures, Shame would unquestionably succumb to a totalizing ambiguity (and, thus, shallowness) that unfortunately characterizes much of the film. In fact, there are moments when McQueen is so obtuse, unwilling to insert any form of meaning into his sequences, that the film flirts dangerously close with becoming inert. McQueen may be close, himself, to becoming that sort of ugly director, so enamored with his own brilliance and artistry, that he forgets to, or is incapable of, communicating significance. Every scene of Shame feels as if it should be more significant than it is (sans the two sequences previously mentioned). They are marvelous, breathtaking, and artful incarnations of personifying longing and fear, the two inextricably intertwined. Then there's stunningly bad scenes, mostly involving Mulligan's character, as when she risibly performs the entirety of "New York, New York" in almost unbroken close-up or Brandon's race home to find Sissy with her wrists-cut in his bathroom. All of the brooding, all of the sporadically convincing artistry, is supported by very little textual conviction and, even worse, a sense that McQueen is playing dress-up, unable to locate the crux in any of his characters, which might inevitably be his point, but becomes beside the point once his point fails to impart distinguishable social significance or, dare I say, pathos.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011) -- B

2011-11-25T17:26:00.000-08:00

Any viewer that has an invested interest in the future of cinema, as it becomes obfuscated with television, digital media, and assorted forms of technological emergence, must view Martin Scorsese's Hugo with equal parts enthusiasm, apprehension, and castigation. Let's parse through the film's outwardly jejune interests (Dickinsian abbreviation, wonderment, isolation) to Scorsese's core interests, as artist and filmmaker: the emergence of technology, a nostalgic view of the past, and, ultimately, synthesizing the two using altered apparatical forms (3D) with classical cinematic mise-en-scene (deep focus, tracking shots), to explicitly reconcile the early days of sound (the contemporary parallel obvious) as progenitor of progression and inhibitor of expression - in other words, a reductive, derivative view of history and technology that filmmakers have been grappling with for the better part of the last half century. Moreover, in Scorsese's first attempt to confront these apparently engrained emotions, he does precisely what a thoroughly modernist filmmaker would: instead of anything slightly askew or avant-garde, he makes an accessible film, a potentially simplistic one, though beautifully rendered and played, in the traditional sense.

Here's how we know Scorsese has devolved into a filmmaker that's merely a level or two ahead of someone like Tarantino (a back-handed compliment) in terms of text: he likens his use of 3D in Hugo to the emergence of technicolor in the 1940's, an aesthetic tool that has no explicit ties to theme or form (color does not alone comprise form), much like 3D simply tightens the frame, but provides very little by way of altered affect, at least in how contemporary Hollywood is using it. Meaning, Scorsese's awe at the new technology (he has since claimed he wants to do every subsequent film in 3D) reflects his artistic regression, wishing to engage an inherently consumerist cinema that offers little by way of depth, personality, or subversion. Sure, there's potential subversion in the way Scorsese reintroduces silent cinema, in 3D, full clips from A Trip to the Moon or The Great Train Robbery, but only in the sense that it reinvigorates the potential for interest in repertory cinema. Hugo is not a political, personal act. It may reveal Scorsese's unfortunately nascent state of filmic adoration (much like Shutter Island merely afforded Scorsese the chance to make a film noir, devoid of conviction), where the enchantment, the awe, supersede the desire to engage pure expression without didacticism, which Hugo nearly packs to the brim in its lecture-heavy second half.

Furthermore, there's something purely middlebrow about screenwriter John Logan's situation of personal failure, particularly in Papa George (Ben Kingsley), whose ultimate dissatisfaction lies in self-pity, that his illusions and predilection for performance are no longer valued by a rapidly evolving society. Logan purposefully seeks to induce empathy via isolation and Scorsese misinterprets Jacques Tati by turning rigid artistry/satire into sentimentality and lament, stuck in a psychological stasis, unable to move past his debilitating focus on the past, in both form and content. Critics and others can claim Scorsese has done that by embracing 3D, but that's little more than wishful thinking; those who view cinema-love through a Spielbergian lens are very likely to hail Hugo as a masterpiece; actual cinephiles, who view the cinema as more than simply a facilitator of child-like awe, will smile sporadically throughout, but on the whole, be left with more than a slight sense of suspicion at Scorsese's aims, dubious of his CINE 101 historicism.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, 2011) -- C+

2011-11-23T19:58:00.000-08:00

The Descendants finds Alexander Payne caught between a rock and a hard place; dealing with, by far, his most ambitious thematic material yet, in which nearly every scene, to some capacity, deals with jilted, multi-millionaire father/husband Matt King's (George Clooney) dying wife, a confrontation of her infidelity, and what that may suggest for Matt's teetering sense of worth and individualistic purpose, there's little room to claim Payne's opting to play it safe - he's undeniably dealing in weighty themes, approaching each scene with a deftly cynical hand, obscuring and problematizing any sense of cues for easy laughs (the trailer displays the most obvious of these moments). Though the material remains vaguely/adjacently close to a sitcom-esque realm, Payne does an admirable job of steering clear from obvious pratfalls, wrangling excellent performances from Clooney, Shailene Woodley as conflicted daughter Alexandra, and Robert Forster as a begrudging father-in-law. By all conventional accounts, Payne's sensibilities are well-guided, walk a fine line between offensive and placating, never falling too sternly on either side of the line. In other words: he has nuance.

Unfortunately for Payne, the script itself, yields very little; the material is inherently flawed, in that it implicitly ignores the issue of class or, at least, obfuscates its characters' titular, unearned privilege by reducing their dilemmas to unconvincing humanist pap, though Payne does his best to understate these moments (namely Clooney's intended, penultimate announcement that he doesn't wish to sell his family's numerous acres of inherited Hawaiian land). Moreover, early voice-over work nearly tanks the film immediately, as when Clooney claims: "Everybody thinks Hawaii is all-day sunshine and paradise, but the divorces sting just as much and the cancer kills just as fast." Such bittersweet-cute reductionism appeals to the film's overall sense of guilt, which cannot be assuaged merely by asserting remorse, much less from the vantage point of a character whose humanity allegedly comes from his familial interests, seeing his daughters avoid harm, etc. Whenever it's necessary for Payne and company to confront these issues head-on, they balk in favor of re-affirmative pandering, much in the same way that The Kids Are All Right and Little Miss Sunshine use stereotyping/caricature as a means of abstaining defeat - there is nothing subversive about these films. In fact, Payne's usage of Hawaii isn't more than a click or two away from the Peter Segal/Adam Sandler trainwreck 50 First Dates (those who will immediately scoff at this suggestion should be reminded that Payne co-wrote the screenplay for Sandler's I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry). Comparisons to the Farrelly Brothers wouldn't be out of line either, particularly in the way background, bit parts, and passerby characters are played by non-actors, who are treated with equal parts "ain't they cute" admiration and condescension. Finally, the film's closing scene, in which the family trio come together, under a blanket, in front of the TV, is perhaps the most risible ending since Clooney's previous Michael Clayton.

What's perplexing about all of this contrast is that Payne had a hand in the script, and likely a significant one. Yet, his comedic tone and sensibilities as director seem completely at odds with his touches as writer, a conflicting wound that inevitably bleeds The Descendants dry. Nevertheless, Payne has assembled a film that, in spite of all of its plentiful flaws, gets as close as any film that comes to mind in addressing the ever expanding generation gap, one that, paradoxically, may suggest the kids are now more sophisticated than adults, as Clooney's character almost plays protege to his savvy daughter. Without making these scenarios gratingly obvious, Payne still can't shake a greater sense of insignificance, that his barely afloat material yields pathos beyond simplistic ironies and normative familial anxieties.

Melancholia (Lars Von Trier, 2011) -- B-

2011-11-23T19:56:00.000-08:00

Lars Von Trier...ah yes, Lars Von Trier. Every time I sit down to evaluate the Danish provocateur's latest faux-opus (here the term is more appropriate than ever), I find myself of two minds, often fascinated by Von Trier's bravado, artistry, compositional knack (these qualities are relatively undeniable), yet infuriated by his outward, bratty sense of artistic self-worth, amplified by his so-bleak-it-borders-on-sadistic-farce material. Thus, in Melancholia, that border has almost comprehensively been dissipated, projecting Von Trier's material, especially in its second half, into a hysteria-driven, lushly photographed bit of empty insanity, assuaging claims that the director lacks a sense of humor. Almost undoubtedly, Melancholia is high farce, a film stretched to a 136 minute runtime with so little to say, that one can only imagine the most aristocratic cinephiles will even be able to conscionably endure it, out of some completist masochism, to possess the "knowledge."

That, indeed, may be a strange way to suggest that Melancholia is likely the best film Von Trier has ever made, though it only strikes that way since it's the first time, in his entire filmmography, that he imbues the admittedly hacky material with a visual, aural sense so symphonic, so driven by affectual interests, that it consistently propels the mundane, repetitive narrative anxieties (Kirsten Dunst plays naked and hysterical, Charlotte Gainsbourg is again obsessive and neurotic) towards a useful, contrapuntal experience. In using the latter word, perhaps Von Trier is, and would always have been, best suited to embrace his films as spectacle, not just of grandiosity, like here, in the film's stunning prologue, but of the body, of human pain, of corruptive, venal power. Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville: these films all inextricably fail because of their Dogme 95 gimmickry, a fake manifesto, propagated by minds that can't think beyond the literal, that see cinema as a basic set of tenants, not an organism that breaths, lives, and imparts feeling. With Melancholia, Von Trier convincingly retraces many of these formal steps, but his material, as unabashedly cruel as ever, relishes destruction for its own sake, gleefully nihilistic, but lacking sincere conviction in its stance. That's what makes Von Trier a hack; not that he's incessantly nihilistic, but that his preferred discursive method is wholly unconvincing, "punkish" in its irreverence, lacking experiential fortitude. Von Trier isn't even making films for human beings anymore - who could embrace this, beyond those who valorize weird, strange, thoroughly kinky disjointed behavior? Since I include myself in this latter category, I suppose that may partly be Von Trier's point, that rationality, the conscious denial of his material/aesthetic modes on purely moral grounds, constitutes an inherent act of nearly primal reckoning (this film being the yang to Antichrist's yin), where any rejection or attempt to make concrete, oppositional sense of what's being seen hangs the viewer by her prejudices.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin, 2011) -- A

2011-11-19T19:29:00.001-08:00

Martha Marcy May Marlene breaths not just life back into American independent film - it oxidizes the tenants that have plagued Indie films for the better part of the last two decades (precious-cute attitudes, ironic-detachment pathos, callow, dysfunctional family neurosis). While first-time director Sean Durkin may not entirely escape the confines of the latter (though, given his thoroughly rigid, airtight narrative (De Palmaesque in its efficiency), scoffing away such an impedance is more than effortless), his gut-punch artistry, in terms of mise-en-scene and temporality, displays a toughness, a resistance, that only the greatest of filmmakers are able to achieve in any of their films, much less the first. In fact, if one has to align Durkin's debut with another, perhaps the best comparison is with Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, because of similar themes in the narrative, yes, but even more so, a patience, a guiding, propelling directorial intuition, coupled with an eviscerating knack for directing actors - there's nary a moment in Martha Marcy May Marlene that seems to allude Durkin and this mastery ultimately cleanses any minor defects his comprehensively original vision might hold.

Alas, the latter compliment would be sufficient only in expressing a command of personal vision (an impressive, but not particularly lofty feat), were Durkin's aims not so remarkable. Modest at first, then hauntingly revelatory, the truth of Martha's (Elizabeth Olsen) past becomes clearer during her stay with bourgeois sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and hubby Ted (Hugh Dancy) on their lakeside, Connecticut vacation home. Piecing differing chronologies proves less a means of misdirection on Durkin's part, but an intricate means of questioning the medium itself, often using match cuts to switch between time-frames, a choice which inherently convolutes a clear sense of linearity, memory dictating narrative, rather than an explicit causality. Martha's past with a cultish, Manson-esque leader named Patrick (John Hawkes) provides the facade of genre thrills, the consistent mixing of time frames suggesting a degree of "sorting-out" will occur to alleviate the psychological fracture. Yet, Durkin never succumbs to these lesser impluses, refusing to give-in and degrade his loftier aims, a mix of the metaphysical and social, deftly, almost satirically mounting a Bergman-esque country house farce (Smiles of a Summer Night) or drama (Through a Glass Darkly), amidst an Altman-esque hybrid of irreverent humanism and the fantastic (3 Women). Reducing Durkin's achievement to a paradigmatic alignment with previous filmmakers is not my intention; rather, by pointing out these potential reference points (my subjective cinematic lineage), once can begin to discuss Martha Marcy May Marlene outside of its connotations, ranging from the Sundance stigma to the 60's-European Art House similarities.

Durkin's does not intend to valorize the ugly, the poor, the geographically "imparied" (to explain poverty-porn critical hits like Frozen River, Winter's Bone, and Precious, all of which received a Sundance stamp of approval). It takes sly aim at not simply class (the aforementioned films are not about "class struggle," but the exploitation of class to assuage liberal, humanist anxiety guilt), but the deeper-rooted tenants of exploitation: ideology. Absolute power, in all cases, corrupts, no matter if it dictates the unconscious need to own a lakeside townhouse (Martha hilariously asks aloud, perplexed, why the couple are the only people occupying the large home-away-from-home) or the disingenuous philosophy of Patrick, whose "family" is literally patriarchy in crisis, turned horrific. Equally irreverent recent films like Dogtooth and The Woman focus less on striving for social commentary than understanding a humanist ontology; Durkin's tongue is planted so firmly in his cheek here, that his biterness, pessimism, and antipathy towards human nature, in general, threatens to propel his film into utter misanthropy which, given Durkin's compelling argument, may be just the place it needs to go. Perhaps the director's only misstep is in partially satiating his otherwise ascetic aesthetic with far too literal presentations of rape and murder (choosing to simply "show" the deeds proves Durkin still has some growing to do), but these scenes don't sully the piercing effect of the film's larger implications, schizophrenia as human condition, less about the suffering individual, than the fractured, false consciousness whole. Like any great philosophical piece, the "right" answers aren't so readily available, morality seemingly more opaque at the end, than when the film began.

The Woodmans (C. Scott Willis, 2011) -- A-

2011-11-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

Encompassing the holistic experience of viewing The Woodmans must begin with a reconciliation of its often suffocating moments – some filled with joy, others with pain, the majority somewhere in between. It is, indeed, a film of moments or, perhaps better stated, moments of refracted memories. Francesca Woodman, at the age of 22, took her own life after years of struggling with both herself (her body) and the means with which she was (un)able to satisfactorily express a passionate artistry, emotionality. Director C. Willis Scott situates her struggle within a moderately conventional documentary framework, using talking heads of friends and (primarily) family. Willis uses this form to abstractly emote Francesca’s truly unknowable essence – that being her disembodied consciousness, still pulsating from within her raw, mature art works.

In terms of said artistry, there’s no mistaking that Francesca was a wunderkind, possessing a “rock star quality” as one of her former classmates puts it. Parents George and Betty, lifelong artists themselves, marvel in recalling her resolve, persistence. Often baring her entire body for the art, but as a means of rejecting explicitly heteronormative, patriarchal expression (she denies absolute scopophilia, as seen in this piece), she shares qualities with the work of Cindy Sherman in how history, art, and mise-en-scene (the collective hell of connotation) refute bourgeois practices of advertising, consumerism.

Nevertheless, The Woodmans is really about family dissolve, the ways in which recuperative, repressive memory seeks to grapple with death and guilt, especially the suicide of a young one. Betty Woodman perhaps states Willis’ enigma best, speaking about Francesca’s fractured self: “She was vain but also masochistic – how can they co-exist?” Willis lets remain implicit that Betty’s artistic pursuits, detachment from emotional support, approval, cultivated Francesca’s desperate seeks of approval, affirmation, and worth. Moreover, Willis brilliantly correlates art, memory, and emotion, seeking Francesca’s lost humanity, attempting to reify an essence through testimonials and art. He excavates personal moments of history without motives of psychological reduction or succumbing to that dreaded Indie valorization of dysfunctional family neurosis – disorder is not celebrated. Willis seeks unity, without the pretense of seeking absolute knowledge, total understanding. How to speak the confluence of haunting, confined energy, amidst a society that’s unreceptive to difference, pain, and irreducible yearning? Willis enables a direct confrontation with Francesca’s attempted expiations, perhaps no more eloquently than in the sparse use of voice-over entries from her private diary.

Willis has a gentle, but unsentimental touch. There’s nary a sense that he’s milking the material, nor simply paying reverence to artistic martyrs – he’s not motivated simply by ideology. Isolation motivates much of his selected material, made complete by a late quote from George Woodman, now 77, struggling to choke back tears, lamenting the fact that Francesca will never get to see the later stages of life. George’s conclusion, that “to stay alive is a pretty good thing to do,” pierces with its potentiality for ambivalence, suggesting language does not equal art, but that the two are inextricable and must be reconciled – Francesca is alive in her art, but only in a cultural sense, her person (like her art) in a persistent, unknowable limbo.

The Woodmans will play @ Roxie Theater in San Francisco from Friday, November 18th – Thursday, November 24th.

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011) -- B+

2011-11-13T20:02:00.000-08:00

The body, a locus for transgression/transformation, has always been Pedro Almodóvar's central thematic concern - he peels back the layers of sexual difference, embracing (or, at least, striving towards) a sensual cinema, textually concerned with anatomical identity, but visually, it's like Vincente Minnelli meets Dario Argento (meticulous, virtuosity, haunting). Moreover, Almodóvar shares a common link with Brian De Palma, in that each use the frame as boundary, the separation between outside/inside, too intelligent to merely be meta, their frames pulsate with affect. Now, it's of my humble opinion that De Palma (the master) should belong a couple rungs above Almodóvar, but then my taxonomic preferences essentially negate the cinema each yearns to create. In a recent interview, Jean-Luc Godard says, speaking on the films of Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol that, "This was not the cinema we had dreamt of." The same could not apply to either De Palma and Almodóvar, who both literally and figuratively dream of an alternative cinema; they do so with the image.

The titular skin, for Almodóvar, is cinema. He lives in cinema, much like De Palma. Hence, they speak from within the elements inherent to the medium. Such a distinction should not be confused with filmmakers like Tarantino or the Coen Brothers, who use cinema rather than speaking it - they do not feel in the same manner. Thus, almost as a confession, Almodóvar grapples with a similar claim made by Michael Powell, when asked about his visual style. He replied: "I do not have a style. I am the cinema." Such seeming arrogance (only to those short-sighted enough to care about semantics) becomes validation when, in his films, Powell does indeed speak with (moving) images.

Thus, arriving to The Skin I Live In, certainly Almodóvar's most impassioned film since Bad Education, the contorted, almost amorphous body of Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya) stretches, bends-backwards over a couch. Her body becomes the locus of filmic (image) obsession, seeking to capture (enclose) through understanding, mechanism, form, flesh, reconstruction, (re)imagining, the means by which touch, contact (and perpetual, existential isolation) construct an understanding of individualistic worth, coded through patriarchal sexuality. Though perhaps more explicit than ever before, Vera's eventual plight is essentially that of any Almodóvar protagonist, male or female - a line dissipated here. To say Almodóvar has finally made his horror film is to miss the message - he's always made horror films, the horror of confinement, the border, the frame, the limits of corporeal control. Striving for liberation, Almodóvar remains among the most refined, progressive, thoughtful contemporary filmmakers.

The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson, 2011) -- B+

2011-11-13T08:59:00.000-08:00

The Rum Diary may lack for the appropriately gonzo filmmaking of Terry Gilliam, but Bruce Robinson's no slouch either and, through his socio-contemporary use of hedonism, satire, and adulthood, might have even made a film that tops Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In what initially seems to be a conventional, episodic narrative meant to playfully indulge Hemingway-esque male adventure, Robinson slyly inverts perception through cheekily allegorical musings on adolescent yearnings for autonomy, brazenly denying the efforts of filmmakers like Judd Apatow, Todd Phillips, and Dennis Dugan to infantilize the male ego. Not so with Robinson, who uses the Hunter S. narrative to embrace rebellion and burgeoning adolescence, not shun it via sexually inept sociopaths (this should be a catch-all for the aforementioned directors), nor merely use it as hero-worship (here is a film that's finally not so bloody obsessed with reaffirming the individual). Moreover, the use of fourty-somethings Johnny Depp and Michael Rispoli to play the good-natured dupes is brilliant, implicitly suggesting the film's fallibility/construction, a bizarro expiation of Superbadian mythmaking - The Rum Diary romanticizes drunken/drug-induced excess only to the extent that it has to, in order to achieve it's desired symbiosis of product/critique, recognizable in relation to its puerile counterparts. Furthermore, the ingenious casting/scenario becomes compelling when subterfuge turns to violence by the presence of local gangster/lothario Aaron Eckhart, especially in a scene that's a direct homage to Roger Vadim's ...And God Created Woman, the tenants of progressive, politically correct rhetoric a failure when it equally facilitates a uniquely American retardation, the inability of children to leave the nest and assimilate into the world, on their own. Tis' a double-edged sword, the line between excess and self-sustainability, but it's a valid question, pressing in its sociological implications, and one that Robinson slyly configures as inherent to the Thompson legacy.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, Tower Heist, J. Edgar

2011-11-13T01:02:00.000-08:00

In varying ways, Tower Heist, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and J. Edgar are all three tired, silly, and lacking sufficient reason to exist; when not treading ultra-familiar territory, they're embracing their own inconsequentiality. Such a tactic works more in the favor of Harold & Kumar, a third weed-anthem, perhaps their most inspired yet, if self-negating in its persistently ephemeral, reflexive demeanor. Problem is, there's nothing about this duo (nor the filmmaking) that resonates beyond the male-bonding ritual satire, which, since the pieces are so disparate (faux-gay Neil Patrick Harris, a snatch seeking bestie, a doped-out, CGI baby, to name a few) is as much a hindrance as a boost to imbuing the proceedings with a genuine sense of the Carnivalesque, rather than a run-through of potential subversion only to complacently arrive at adamant, male-assertion affirmation. There's little more ridiculous than a film that lampoon's consumerism, advertising, yet is released in surcharging 3D (the film has gags which merely poke fun at the extended medium, rather than using it for truly homosocial commentary/critique). Like the similarly disappointing Jackass 3D, ample potential is squandered on empty provocation. The joke's over, at this point. Same could be said from the intro gags of Tower Heist, "a Brett Ratner film" that can be esteemed only by ranking its effrontery to political sense slightly above In Time, though both heedlessly lurch along, paying lip service to "class warfare" in some bizarre, perversely-tuned denouement of economic revenge/wish-fulfillment. Were Ratner even slightly attuned to the inherently problematic ironies of an assembly-line film ineffectually preaching the detriment of assembly-line political unconscious (In Time even more so), perhaps there would be an inverse effect/pleasure to be had - instead, there's mugging all around, very little laid on the line, even less restoration of comedic dignity to the careers of Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, and Matthew Broderick, if one cares about such things. Speaking of careers, Clint Eastwood may have the most overrated directorial oeuvre of all contemporary directors. Sure he's made some good/very good films (High Plains Drifter, A Perfect World, Mystic River), yet these are merely a few gems amidst other ridiculous, insulting, haphazard efforts. His prolific work ethic isn't helping either, turning from the shamelessly pandering Invictus and the wholly risible Hereafter, to J. Edgar, a biopic whose artistic and political sensibilities are indicative of a film made five decades ago. To call this thing nostalgic and anachronistic wouldn't begin to explain Eastwood's regressive tactics (along with hack screenwriter Dustin Lance Black), using a flashback structure to problematize historicity (Edgar (Leonardo DiCaprio) dictates his memoir while pontificating on the struggle to differentiate "heroes and villains"), yet indulging Oedipal hilarity (including an especially hilarious scene where mother Judi Dench flatly tells Edgar she'd rather seem him dead than become a homosexual, then proceeds to teach him how to "dance"), latent homosexual desire (Eastwood only has the balls to show hand-holding and a kiss amidst a violent struggle), and the often monochromatic, nearly black & white cinematography (capping a retrograde trifecta). On top of this is DiCaprio's worst performance since Gangs of New York, yet that matters little when Eastwood refuses to use the material for subversive/political means. Questioning historical authenticity? Not exactly provocative, especially when Edgar's words ("a country is doomed once it forgets its history") merely pay lip service to postmodern crisis (though the claim that "America must never let down its guard," when spoken in DiCaprio's twang, sounds a good bit like "we must never let down our God," an amusing contrast). Problem is, Eastwood's too busy pacifying (who exactly?) to muddy the waters, providing not a single, memorable cinematic flourish amidst 137 minutes of cinema fit only for those who have trouble remembering what year it is.

Immortals (Tarsem Singh, 2011) -- C-

2011-11-13T00:20:00.000-08:00

Question One: The image. Question Two: Montage. Both questions fail to be answered in Immortals. Instead, we're left parsing through the dialectics of Tarsem Singh's obvious, traditionalist narrativity. Those expecting more of an impressionist, silent, visually driven opus of slo-mo, color, and synecdoche - look elsewhere, since Tarsem's avant-gardist sensibilities appear only in flashes; Immortals is more 300-esque pap for kids who still get their rocks off on blood, tits, and puerile affect - not real artistry. Unfortunately, the opening image teases with its eloquence, starkly framing the stunned, frozen faces of a dozen Titans, trapped in a cage, holding the bars with their teeth, the body in place of structure, architecture as intertwined with human subject. Such a breathtaking introduction gives way to meddlesome, "arise a knight" oppositions, any sense of visual style and/or personal infiltration consistently squashed by a script chock-full of frustrating, meaningless, empty exchanges, nearly all of them too asinine to remember (or even pay attention to). Tarsem could be working to bridge the gap between screen and viewer, but instead he's content to assimilate with the same trite, "storytelling" methods as nearly every "filmmaker" to come down the pike. There's nothing remotely subversive, affectual, haunting, sensual here. The image doesn't speak - it's stunted amidst a confluence of regressive inclinations/forces.

In Time (Andrew Niccol, 2011) -- D

2011-11-11T18:58:00.000-08:00

Praising In Time would require considerably ignorant joviality, a demeanor so pleased and amused to merely be in the presence of a film, that its searing, painful deficiencies become carelessly subordinated to "ignorance is bliss" securities. Andrew Niccol proves the literalist, absent-minded douchebag his eariler efforts (Gattaca, Simone, and Lord of War) only hinted towards. Regressing to consumerist fetish par excellence (just look at that fucking poster), Niccol engages reactionary "political" filmmaking of the most fickle variety, exploiting real-world economic crisis and amping individualistic savior nonsense into an action concoction whose most compelling dimension is Justin Timberlake's always two-day facial hair, even when he and fembot squeeze Amanda Seyfried have been on the run for days (time-space ceases, latent dysmorphophobia persists). Never clean shaven and not quite growing into a beard, his face remains ever so slightly scruffy, rugged. Perhaps it's the year of the stubble. Ryan Gosling sported a similar no-shave (but always trimmed) look in The Ides of March. Does JT have a little tool in his coat-pocket, using it between shoot-outs to keep everything just so? If such is the case, why would Niccol keep such a detail hidden? Hidden. That's where Amanda Seyfried's dignity remains throughout, trotting along, doting, without agency (JT lets her perform a few times -- mostly on him). JT, metonymically standing in for some displaced, absent, condescended to, forsaken proletariat, Niccol succumbs to every worst instinct, sexualizing his aesthetic, indulging sentimental entropy, then lazily offering a triumph of the individual (class) over systematic disavowal and repression. Few films work this hard to slap viewers on the ass and in the face simultaneously.

The 15 "Scariest" Movies Since 2000

2011-10-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

1. Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2001)
2. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
3. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
4. Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 2008)
5. Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2008)
6. Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2010)
7. Bug (William Friedkin, 2007)
8. Mad Detective (Johnny To, 2008)
9. Inside (Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury, 2007)
10. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
11. High Tension (Alexandre Aja, 2005)
12. The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
13. Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001)
14. Audition (Takashi Miike, 2000)
15. Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005)

Horrorthon 3: Day Twenty-Two: Bad Biology (Frank Henenlotter, 2008) -- B+

2011-10-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

Bad Biology aka The Girl With the Crazy Pussy aka You Dirty Little Cunt-Bitch-Whore, went relatively unnoticed in its 2008 release (even by a cinephile like myself), because the marketing/product machine has become so large, so looming, that there's no room for a true visionary like Frank Henenlotter, whose entire oeuvre has been marginalized because it exists within the system, to a certain extent, and is a palpable threat to dismantling the "values" of a cinema predicated on maintaining a hegemonic order that never too forcefully deviates from those parameters. Now, I'm not suggesting Henenlotter functions as a part of the system, more that his films suggest genre works gone awry, injected with a subversive tinge, using sex, the body, violence, and the grotesque as a means of over-satiation; Henenlotter is funny and genius because he's refracting Americana, disavowing scopophilia through a Carnivalesque wit - not enough contemporary filmmakers have it.

Jennifer (Charlee Danielson) has a problem: she's a nymphomaniac like no other, she "feeds on orgasms," with needs physical not psychological, she believes "God wants to fuck me." Art, excess, pornography implode amidst sex sequences that evoke jouissance, death/pleasure inseparable, copulation inevitable (Jen also has, let's just say, very active genitalia). Speaking of, Batz (Anthony Sneed) is her unbeknownst soul-mate, struggling with his active, mind-of-its-own cock, which has "troubled" him since he was a tyke (his member seems to deliberately evoke Duane's troubled "little guy" from Basket Case). Reporting on the specifics of the narrative is useless, since Henenlotter's brilliance comes in his spirit, critical but fascinated, disgusted but enamored - ambivalent. Such a film must remain in a "cult" realm, so long as more obvious, literal, and finite fare receives cultural perpetuation.

Horrorthon 3: Day Twenty-One: Paranormal Activity 3 (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2011) -- C-

2011-10-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

Aside from offering an adept tutorial regarding On and Off-screen space, Paranormal Activity 3 provides little to legitimate its "Where's Waldo?" gimmick, as ephemeral as it is cynical, not utilizing its "personal" aesthetic for political means, but merely as an asinine piggy-backing ploy, seemingly oblivious or apathetic to why its domestic terror via home video footage resonates so forcefully with audiences (PA 3 became horror's biggest opener this weekend with a haul of roughly 54M). Not that any of this should surprise considering filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman's previous film, Catfish, equally exploited and remained oblivious to its faux-documentary foolishness, the opposite of self-reflexive, questioning representation by accident rather than through an honorable attempt. Though Catfish could at least offer an interesting case study of ever shrinking lines between (non)fiction, Paranormal Activity 3 merely seeks to fulfill itself as a product of Paramount's ingenious marketing campaign (anchored by a "Bloody Mary" scene which does not appear in the feature, itself).

Moreover, Joost and Schulman prove to be the philistines their debut suggests, in that their interests are so miniscule, so detached from the personal becoming the political, that Paranormal Activity 3 could barely even be called ephemeral, its phantasmagoric pretenses masking retrograde narrative nonsense that literally devolves into haggard old-woman paranoia, without the slightest hint of satire. Expect straight-faced babysitter screams and scared best friend sequences too; Joost and Schulman are embarrassingly prideful about their derivative demeanor, aping from the franchise itself and other films so liberally, but disguised under a suggestion of innovation, that by the film's limp-wristed, "that's it?" conclusion, the stringent odor of consumerist, naif-devised bullshit abounds.

Horrorthon 3: Day Twenty: They Came Back (Robin Campillo, 2004) -- C-

2011-10-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

A thoroughly inert attempt at aristocratic horror, They Came Back attempts to situate itself as worthy of inclusion within the horror genre through its use of "zombies," though these folks look like they were buried yesterday. Essentially, a small French town becomes perplexed when its buried patrons arise from their graves and return, not to feed on the living, but to assimilate back into society. That this is "a zombie flick like no other" should not suggest quality, since director Robin Campillo cannot shake his wholly metaphoric pretensions, not revising genre so much as belittling it. Were he more keyed into the potential satirical dimensions of his narrative (this only sporadically manifests), the literal title could simultaneously dismantle and pay reverence, both to zombie films and social reform. Not interested in cracking much of a smile, Campillo is potentially at his strongest when focusing on smaller relationships, between the dead-come-to-life and their loved ones - but even here, there's a consistent sense of muddied intent and execution, disjointed not to imbue a degree of ambivalence to the proceedings, but seemingly because of an uncertainty or (more likely) unfamiliarity, coupled with an arrogant disdain towards genre filmmaking, in general.

Horrorthon 3: Day Nineteen: Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (Kôji Shiraishi, 2007) -- B

2011-10-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

With Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, director Kôji Shiraishi doesn't so much make a compelling, intelligent horror film as he does a potentially iconographic one, more impressive in its return-of-the-repressed, towering, massive scissor-wielding slasher than anything the film can muster in terms of thoughtful dialectics. Nevertheless, the latter's deficiencies will only negate filmic pleasure if such criterion are one's sole method of achieving it; in fact, Carved's use of a generic plot and narrative mold almost work in its favor, ultimately, since this is really a horror film for the fans - a new slasher is born. In a small Japanese city, the patrons begin to notice several children disappearing. A few people, having contact with a tall, strange, vengeful woman when they were younger, begin to suspect the figure has returned. The specifics of "why" the figure seeks said retribution is relatively meaningless and Shiraishi treats it as such, instead keeping things lean and more geared towards visual thrills. Of course explicitly linked with A Nightmare on Elm Street (and nowhere near as profound as Craven's film), Shiraishi has fun upping the ante in terms of who's on the chopping block, as well as lingering on the titular slasher, lumbering slowly forward, scissors-up, eyes wide open. In a few particular sequences, the film proves adept simply in terms of genre, understanding the slasher film in its inherent ability to emphasize isolation, difference, and individuality gone awry, the community dissolved because of apathy, disinterest, and complacency. These themes appear steadily throughout, making anyone who's a fan of slasher films immediately attuned to Shiraishi's brand of havoc.

Horrorthon 3: Day Eighteen: The Ordeal (Calvaire) (Fabrice Du Welz, 2004) -- C

2011-10-18T08:41:00.001-07:00

Like many failed horror films of the past decade, Fabrice Du Welz's The Ordeal miscalculates its dosages of homage and ingenuity, remaining far too much in awe of its predecessors (in this case, Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) to create anything new or, even, worthwhile. Chilling and intriguing as some of Du Welz's sequences are, little coheres or resonates past its derivative genesis. Traveling magician Marc (Laurent Lucas) is almost to his next gig when his car breaks down. Too bad for him, he's trapped in a French countryside where some odd fellows reside, the worst of which, it turns out, is the seemingly friendly Mr. Bartel (Jackie Berroyer), who warns Marc that he "shouldn't visit a nearby village," claiming that "not too many artistic types live there." The film's eeriest scene comes in an explicit Psycho homage, where Marc/Bartel sit in the parlor, exchanging stories, until Bartel requests that Marc sing a song for him. Unto this point, The Ordeal works as a derivative, but clever slow-burner. However, once Bartel actually captures Marc, tortures him, and sits him down at the family dinner table, where a 360 degree camera reveals all of the demented family members cackling uncontrollably, Du Welz loses grasp on his earlier, more subtle sensibilities, ultimately settling for perfunctory, literal intimations that lack resonance beyond an ephemeral gag-reflex at the depravity.

Horrorthon 3: Day Seventeen: The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (Tom Six, 2011) -- C

2011-10-16T11:12:00.001-07:00

The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence might be more schizophrenic and creatively impotent than its overweight, mimetically-driven lead character; in a meta-device that consistently keeps the narrative from approaching any sort of resonance or sincerity, parking-garage attendant Martin (Laurence R. Harvey) is obsessed with director Tom Six’s debut feature, The Human Centipede. He watches it every day and night on his laptop while at work; he keeps a bounded scrapbook under his bed, full of fetishizing over the original’s reputedly “100% medically accurate” mantra and especially lead actress Ashlynn Yennie, who unsurprisingly turns up as herself, late into the film. Are these ironies particularly inspired or compelling? Not really. Six situates them as some sort of perverse, socially refracted mirror, but to have any success with this brand of purported of insight, he needs more than a simple (solipsistic) idea. If M. Night Shyamalan took shit for casting himself as a prescient writer in Lady in the Water, Six’s sophomore feature merely cannibalizes his original film and ventures so far into self-effacement, one can only suspect the original as the set-up for this ludicrous, feature-length payoff (however, The Human Centipede III: Final Sequence is underway, apparently).

Nevertheless, while the high-concept stuff is easily the film’s weakest point (it does little more than allow unhinged crudity and excess), the strongest material comes during the first half, inside Martin’s home, where he lives with mother (Vivien Bridsen) and frequent visits from grossly-bearded, pervert (shock) shrink Dr. Sebring (Bill Hutchens). When questioned about Martin’s obsession over “making a centipede with twelve people,” Dr. Sebring responds: “The centipede is likely a phallic substitution for Martin’s displaced feelings of hostility and anger towards the probably sexual and psychological abuse of his father.” Six’s play is not to make this a viable explanation, but to lampoon any sort of reductive psychological or sociological reading. Problem is, Six’s treatment is nothing remotely new, denying Martin any voice whatsoever (he literally never speaks a word), then littering the film with allusions to previous trauma, albeit (again) outrageously (there’s the suggestion that “baby’s tears make daddy’s willy hard”). By suggesting there are no explanations (and, ultimately, intimating the film’s events may never have even happened), Six intentionally effaces his entire film – something, while moderately interesting conceptually, that’s simply faux-bad-boy antics, much like the bulk of The Human Centipede II’s purported “depravity.” Six lacks the ability (or will, could be either) as a filmmaker to give his horrific deeds any gravity; For example, Martin beats a pregnant woman, strips her naked, makes her part of the centipede. Near the end of the film, she escapes, hops in a car, dazed and frenzied, trying to start the engine. Before she can, she goes into labor, the baby plops out, lands by her feet. She’s elated; however, a scare from Martin cause her to scream, she puts pedal to metal – only her newborn baby’s head just happens to get in the way and she crushes it like a fresh cantaloupe. Now, the moment surely elicits groans, gasps, and guffaws (all three at once, even), but it’s hardly “provocative,” because the image, the deed, is merely exhibition, a singular act devoid of any ties outside of simple exploitation. If this is Six’s point, it’s self-defeating; moreover, Six’s mostly clinical approach to terror, shame, and gross-out lack artistry, or, even cohesion in argument – if Six is attempting to get academic, he’s too iffy in that pursuit to maintain consistency.

Thus, everything about The Human Centipede II is a bloody, shitty mess. Six commits to at least four different thematic and tonal pursuits – even chaos and nihilism needs consistency and some sort of internal “logic” (the word is insufficient) to be effective. So, when shit literally sprays onto the camera (the only color that’s (ahem) inserted into Six’s black & white cinematography), when Martin jerks-off with sandpaper, when an actress mistakes Martin’s luring-in for a Quentin Tarantino film audition, when Martin has an actual centipede funneled into his ass, when 12 people are successively executed at point-blank range, when Dr. Sebring claims he’d like to “fuck that fat retarded boy up the ass,” – the reaction is laughter, cringing, or head-shaking – the specificity of which is seemingly irrelevant to Six, so long as it’s one of the three. Is it a good thing The Human Centipede II exists? Yes. Does that make it a successful film? Not by a long shot. Nevertheless, Six’s freak-show, mad-scientist mentality does sporadically induce more than simply self-consciously trite excess, but since Six is so wrapped up in himself and his (delusional) role as provocateur (need it even be suggested that Martin is Six’s stand-in?), he comes off as little more than a self-professed, prideful, badge-wearing pervert, chasing his own ass.

Horrorthon 3: Day Sixteen: The Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., 2011) – C

2011-10-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

The sun does not shine, it is too wet to play, so Columbia paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and a team of Norweigian scientists sit in their Antarctic campsite all the cold, cold wet day. Kate sits there with Braxton (Joel Edgerton), they sit there, they two, and Kate says, “Oh, I wish we had something to do.” Too wet to go out and too repressed to bawl, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. has them sit in the house and do nothing at all. But then!

SomeTHING went bump! How that bump makes them jump. They look and then see it crash in with a spring, the CGI-ing of The Thing. “I know some dull games we can play,” says The Thing. “I know some old tricks. A lot of old tricks, but I will act like they're new, John Carpenter will not mind the blatant 'screw you!'” Since there’s no one here to say, “make this Thing go away,” Heijningen and company get to stay in and play. He claims homage, but making easy cash is his wish, and he’s taking a shit on one of Carpenter’s most cherished. Exposition overload, no humanist recall, Heijningen is a hack – and lets everything fall.

And I say: “Do I like this? Fuck no I do not.”

Out of his box come Thing one and Thing two, so overblown and ridiculous, one wonders what to do? These things will bite you, they want to have fun, but as for Heijningen, well, he seems to have none. Kate is the leader, she knows what to say, round everyone up, and check teeth for decay. Fillings over feelings, the dance is inert, unless your knowledge is lacking, and you’re a cinephilic squirt.

Bump! Thump! Thump! Bump! Down the wall in the hall. The Thing morphs and devours so sillily, it matters nothing at all. Carpenter’s film trampled, what would he say? Oh, he would not like it to find his Thing this way. Fast as they can, a plan made by the crew, a way to get rid of the thing, some creativity is due. Nope, as it were, flamethrowers and a grenade, Haijningen’s film is a crock, though sturdily made.

Horrorthon 3: Day Fifteen: The Woman (Lucky McKee, 2011) -- A-

2011-10-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

The bleakest, most perverse satire of American, patriarchal domesticity since A History of Violence, Lucky McKee returns after two lukewarm entries (The Woods, Red) to finally fulfill the promise of his debut feature (May). Unlike in his lesser films, McKee now challenges dominant norms that resonate more through suggestion of a prolonged period of exploitation than explicit real-world links; here, it's the American narrative of nuclear family under patriarchal rule, the "in the name of the (white) father" order that facilitates racism, misogyny, and bigotry. McKee's dealings aren't particularly timely, per se; in fact, the film lacks cultural specificity to place it in the "here and now," and could almost belong to the early wave of domestic terror films in the early 1970's, begun by The Last House on The Left, Deathdream, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Nevertheless, in refusing to make allusions to reality of any sort (other than grand narratives), McKee's film takes on an uncanny quality, even more terrifying in its implication that these issues aren't so much a "return of the repressed," since they remain firmly in place, hardly absent even amidst claims of "radical" social reform and politically correct speech. When sociopathic/rapist father Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers) finally spews his hate-filled, epithet-laden rhetoric - it stings quite a bit.

The Cleek family lives in a middle-class country area; under the father there's mother Belle (Angela Bettis), quasi-goth loner high-school daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter), young teenage son Brian (Zach Rand), and post-toddler Darlin' (Shyla Molhusen). The facade of their normalcy is revealed through Chris's depravity; finding a mysterious, "uncivilized" woman (Pollyanna McIntosh) in the woods while hunting, he bags her, clears some space in the cellar, and chains her up. She's ferocious; a mesmerizing opening sequence suggests she's been raised by wolves, but that's the extent of her background. Quite like Terrence Stamp's unnamed visitor in Pasolini's Teorema, her presence bubbles tensions lying just beneath the surface, eventually bringing them, by turns both hilarious and horrifying, to an irretractable boiling point. Much like last year's Dogtooth (the first masterpiece of the new decade), The Woman is not so much parodic as embittered by its almost ineffable anger directed towards hegemonic cultural codes. However, by turning hostility into humor and irreverence, both filmmakers imbue a degree of sincerity, which makes their blood-soaked codas equal parts indeterminate and cathartic, but not illusory - the problem still lingers.

Most interesting about The Woman is the "battle-of-the-sexes" showdown that materializes throughout; suggesting "boys will be boys" rhetoric as the ignition of sexist subterfuge and nationalistic pride (an irrational belief of self-righteousness), McKee goes to dark (but necessary) places in fulfilling the totality of his satirical grasp, keying in on (as few filmmakers have been able to) a distinctly American focus on materiality and capital. When Brian sneaks into the cellar to torture and rape the eponymous Woman, the father's ultimate assessment is: "Well, if no one was harmed, then everything's fine." In concentrating on tangible results (visible evidence of bodily damage), McKee implicitly critiques capitalistic drives, the belief in "no harm, no foul" if the damage cannot be evidenced in empirical ways. Ignoring shame, pride, honor, dignity (emotion, essentially), morals and ethics are irrevocably cast-aside, enabling a rationalization of depravity. While one of the sole references to religion is a bit egregious (Chris cartoonishly claims he "still wants to get to heaven" after committing rape), it nevertheless problematizes a reductive reading or take, since McKee is not pinpointing a specific genesis for this sort of chauvinist, "mightier-than-thou" behavior. There's a persistent ambivalence concurrent throughout, and right when The Woman feels like it's about to go off-the-rails, McKee tightens the screws, ups the ante, and dares you, to use a crude (but appropriate) colloquialism, to "pull-out." When McKee's at his sharpest, there are no easy answers.

Horrorthon 3: Day Fourteen: Maléfique (Eric Valette, 2002) -- C

2011-10-14T13:45:00.000-07:00

Pervert A Man Escaped to include four loopy characters, black magic nonsense, and an ending with Child's Play implications (awesome, at that), and you have Maléfique, less compelling horror film than one-trick hokum. Belonging to a subgenre of subsequent films to include Saw, Buried, Devil, Pontypool, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, and Exam (among others), director Eric Valette concentrates the growing dread and satanic implications into one space - a prison cell holding four considerably different inmates. Carrère (Gérald Laroche) is a career family/businessman serving time for fraud; Marcus (Clovis Cornillac) is a transvestite (is that his crime?), egging on retard protege Pâquerette (Dimitri Rataud), who apparently ate his six-month old sister (you read correctly). Finally, Lassalle (Philippe Laudenbach) murdered his cheating wife - but also holds knowledge about a book found in the gents cell, containing the (mad?) ravings of a century old inmate, who believed he could use satanic forces to escape the cell. Naturally, the book's teachings prove true; utilizing various symbols and commands, the odd-foursome can cause blasts and fire, potentially leading to a successful escape. They also learn (unfortunately for them), that the author's spirit remains alive in the book, angered when it's put in jeopardy, and seeking violent vengeance against anyone who attempts to extinguish it. If the exposition is tiring to read, it's even more so to watch, as Valette plugs along with his supernatural inclinations, without any greater sense of self or purpose. Moreover, even on a basic narrative level, the characters are silly and transparently manufactured - their choices and backgrounds are irony-filled, rather than causal. Nevertheless, the final implications are almost hilarious enough to warrant a look - but that would mean slogging through the rest of it - an insignificantly conceived bit of gorehound inanity.

Horrorthon 3: Day Thirteen: In My Skin (Marina De Van, 2002) -- B-

2011-10-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

In My Skin begins with various split-screen shots, the right screen reflecting the negative image of that on the left, an obvious but useful evocation of subjective division, something director Marina De Van's convincing foray into body-horror acutely, if ultimately underwhelmingly, deals with. Esther's (also Marina De Van) bourgeois status is readily apparent; she has a nice job with a marketing firm, loving boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas), and a group of supportive friends. All of this stability becomes an issue when Esther gashes her leg at a party, becomes fascinated with her torn flesh, and transitions into systematic self-mutilation, cutting and knifing herself, at times for real, others imagined (a dinner scene is especially notable). De Van explicitly links these acts with Esther's ennui and detachment from feeling, which her "life of comfort" does not facilitate. Moreover, every character around her is less concerned with Esther's health than their own vanity/self-preservation; the boyfriend wonders aloud what's wrong with him, as to make her behave this way; her boss threatens to "cut her loose" after an unprofessional display; the only real concern comes from best friend Sandrine (Lea Drucker), but even she holds a grudge for Esther's upward mobility within the company. Metaphors of suffocation abound; the growing division between self (the flesh) and other (the constructed business woman) leads Esther to literal self-cannibalism. In My Skin isn't nearly as provocative as, say Denis's Trouble Every Day, but it is more precise and convincing than something like Black Swan - bubble-gum hysteria if there ever was. De Van's ends aren't very compelling (she seems uncertain on where to go next), but when Esther's bodily obsessions and mutilations take shape, few horror films have the ability to make you squirm quite like this one.

Horrorthon 3: Day Twelve: The Dead (The Ford Brothers, 2011) -- D+

2011-10-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

A UK import that’s as lifeless as any domestic variant, The Dead (literal title should be hint #1) does little more than flip the post-apocalyptic setting from stateside to Africa, a move that could (and should) yield fascinating results. Instead, the Ford Brothers come off as fanboys rather than satirists/sociologists, flat-out banal in their derivative dialogue, plotting, and approach to scares. The failure is fascinating in-and-of itself: how can such an inspired geographical shift yield such meddlesome results? Well, when cultural specificity succumbs to hackneyed screenwriting tactics (there are strains of motivation, backstory, and unlikely partnership throughout), all that’s left is the fat – homogenized at that. Moreover, in the decision to have a displaced American Air Force Lieutenant (Rob Freeman) as one of the leads (or, in usual white-guy-steals-black-guy’s-movie terms, THE lead), the Ford Brothers forgo a more compelling alternative to appeal to populist expectation. Their attempts to guise this decision as purely narrative driven falters (local Sergeant Daniel (Prince David Osei) criticizes the white man’s hypocritical arrival of “raised weapons, medicine hand-outs”), in that it’s merely another screenwriting trick to establish conflict (to be resolved, surely). Furthermore – this is an ugly looking film by any stretch. To say “it’s supposed to be ugly” misses the point; the directorial duo lack a sense of economy, their mise-en-scene merely “point-and-shoot,” rather than tightly composed. Like many indie filmmakers, the pair have little-to-nothing to offer outside their shoestring budget pride, which even loses its charm when one realizes this is just the same sort of ho-hum hack-work big-budget Hollywood churns out. Either way, the results are the same.

Horrorthon 3: Day Eleven: Love - Zero = Infinity (Hisayasu Sato, 1994) -- C+

2011-10-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sharing many similar themes (and quite a comparable scenario) to Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, Hisayasu Sato’s Love – Zero = Infinity (great snarky art-house title) appropriates a real-world setting for a vampire-cum-AIDS allegory (or, not so allegorical, since these terms are explicitly used in the film) concerned with isolation, sickness, sexuality, and consumerism – all of which is shrouded under the pretense of tragedy. So, a disillusioned twenty's-something wanders the streets of Tokyo, seeking strangers to latch onto, and follow for a glimpse inside their lives. He soon finds a young woman who, he comes to suspect, may be a vampire. Less visionary than forced provocation, Sato lingers over shots of his lead characters standing, walking, staring, and talking, with lines as straight-faced as “I wonder if I wander around the city…or if it wanders around me?” Not exactly daunting stuff (neophyte existentialism), especially since Sato’s two-dimensional scope (fucking, extended ennui) never cohere with the sillier strands involving a corporation who sells HIV-infected blood, or the rather trite approach to its vampirism (“In a way, she’s a modern vampire.”). Nevertheless, Sato's dealing with AIDS is rare for Japanese cinema at the time (I'm struggling to think of any films that explicitly dealt with the matter, but my knowledge is by no means comprehensive on this topic), and there are several visually compelling moments dispersed throughout. Sato’s tendency towards heavy-handedness remains mostly in-check – the real problem is he has an idea, an eye for composition, but not much else to work with or expand upon. But at 64 minutes, maybe that’s all he felt to be necessary.

Horrorthon 3: Day Ten: Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008) -- D+

2011-10-09T14:12:00.000-07:00

Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs is a horror persona non grata, a misappropriation of the horror ethos for a “genre-bending” (as knee-jerk enthusiasts like to call it) exercise in banality, feigning provocation and anger as it blindly drives to its fashionably nihilistic conclusion (one of the most risible in recent memory). Several have claimed this as some sort of “stunning masterwork,” “unforgettable experience,” and “masterpiece that transcends the genre” (all quotes taken from the DVD jacket), but one wonders after enduring such puerile inanity (make no mistake, this is idiot savant stuff par excellence) what exactly its enthusiasts find so rewarding? Is it what they perceive to be its depravity? The levels of gore? Profound narrative implications? Hardly. Martyrs is merely prolonged foreplay – it never really gets down to business.

Such a film inherently forces one to confront taste, to make an aesthetic judgment amidst the revenge-driven shotgun-wielding (whoa! So nutzz!), the return-of-the-repressed golem/ghost figure (fucking creepy!), the aged matriarch with delusions of grandeur (what a sick bitch!), and the skinning, beating, whipping, and (let’s face it) crucifying (the film more than alludes to “stages of the cross” pretenses). Anyone not tricked by the numbly outlandish visual fetishes will be able to permeate Laugier’s thin layer of obfuscatory bullshit, and discover that, indeed, very little lies beneath. Early in the film, during a chilling opening credits sequence, there’s a sense that Martyrs will be a rebuke to art house and bourgeois voyeurism, establishing pretenses of discourse only to dissolve them for untamed sequences of brutal torture. Laugier is far too self-absorbed and aware to participate in, what I’ll call, “Trojan-Horse” cinema, a film that outwardly appears to function under genre archetypes, only to systematically implode these signposts and force complacent viewers to confront subsumed truths that govern their capitalistic, patriarchal desires. Nah, Laugier’s too worried about fucking-up rather than fucking-with genre, an imperative distinction that separates art from a growing trend of red-herring cinema.

Martyrs plays on recreating images of historical trauma, only it has absolutely nothing to say or offer (aside from exhibiting extremely poor taste), exploiting instead of expanding. Moreover, Laugier engages in the same sort of scumbag lesbian fantasies as Alexandre Aja’s High Tension, but he’s added an additional element: a matriarchal, guilt-ridden hag, who receives the pleasure of ultimately blowing her brains out, the film’s concluding image (how daring). She gets to say hilarious lines like, “There are only victims left. There are very few martyrs anymore,” and, referring to the lead’s prolonged punishment: “She experienced authentic martyrdom.” Laugier has clearly watched (and probably jerked-off to) Saló an unspeakable number of times, seemingly infatuated with its unrivaled postulation of fascism, cinema, and degradation as abjectly intertwined. Fair enough – but Laugier’s interests bend more towards the degradation, the guy who likes the film because of how “fucked-up” it is, rather than for its more suggestive qualities. Gorehounds, scumbags, assholes – dig in.

Horrorthon 3: Day Nine: The Ward (John Carpenter, 2011) -- D

2011-10-08T15:33:00.000-07:00

The Ward proves imprisoning on many levels, namely that John Carpenter, arguably the greatest horror filmmaker of the past 30+ years, returns to feature filmmaking after a decade’s absence with something this limp, literal, and undistinguished. Something’s amiss from the opening sequence, as a nameless psych-ward patient has her neck broken by an unseen zombie/ghost-like figure, before transitioning into a creative, but unremarkable credits sequence. Without a hand in the writing and score, Carpenter’s auteur touches remain on the periphery – this may be his ugliest film visually, his most depressing thematically. Essentially, the film revolves around Oregonian psychiatric hospital newbie Kristen (Amber Heard), whose presence brings with her an unnamed ghost, wreaking havoc on an annoying troupe of female inmates, most of whom speak in little-girl voices and generally act deranged. If most of the characters appear too alike and/or too distinctly separate from one another, there’s a tidy plot twist coming to clarify this paradox.

Never once is The Ward compelling. Not really, anyway, except for maybe the recognition of Carpenter’s signature metonymy, focusing on the descending hand of his ghostly killer rather than the entire figure, (a continual allusion to Rodin’s famous piece, surely), especially when the girls get strapped to a gurney and have a long metal instrument plunged into their eye socket. Aside from these acute visual touches, The Ward offers very little formal mastery – Carpenter’s stock and trade. It’s also difficult to think of another recent film that’s this much of an aural assault, dispersing jump scares like they’re going out of style and dialing the “BRUMM!” noises to eleven. Enough already. After the tenth one, it’s tempting to just press mute. Moreover, the script (by two hack brothers named Michael and Shawn Rasmussen) desperately culls elements from much better films, churning out scenes lacking the slightest idiosyncrasy or subtlety. To say Carpenter remains on autopilot here would be an insult – it’s sub-autopilot, catatonic in its inanity, a disrespectful slap-in-the-face to the director’s fans. Carpenter has always projected a veneer of cynicism and disregard in interviews, letting his films reveal themselves, a master, minimalist filmmaker. He doesn’t appear to be having fun anymore and that loss makes The Ward an unendurable mess, numb, hackneyed and fragmented as to dispel all artistry, meaning, and, most certainly, feeling.

Horrorthon 3: Day Eight: Bio Zombie (Wilson Yip, 1998) -- C

2011-10-07T22:44:00.000-07:00

Described in its advertising campaign as "Hong Kong's answer to George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (about two decades late, at that), Bio Zombie deserves no such alignment with Romero's masterpiece (not even close) and actually belongs in the sub-bargain-bins of your nearest retailer for films lacking any perceptible purpose for existing other than a quick cash grab). Directed by Wilson Yip (he would go on the helm the stellar IP Man films), a group of shopping mall temps and punks are left to fend for their lives after a tainted soft-drink leads to rampant zombification (always a shame when that happens). Less concerned with consumerist critique than genre exercise, Yip goofily traverses the well-beaten path, vacillating between comedy and horror to muddled effect. Though there's a fair amount of amusement to the typical proceedings (especially for horror buffs) there's also a dearth of inspiration; aside from a split-screen bit, the tense retrieval of some necessary keys, and flashes of succinct cultural humor (visual allusions to Resident Evil and The House of the Dead video games), Yip merely plugs a youthful Asian cast into the slasher/zombie template, less about emphasizing the cultural shifts than hitting the identically trite notes of its North American counterparts. Genre is about conviction, not convention, something Yip's wholly derivative film remains oblivious to.

Horrorthon 3: Day Seven: Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011) -- A-

2011-10-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

Great horror films express themselves in a way that's inseparable from the milieu they inhabit - environment is the direct correlative for enabling a breakdown of order, consciousness, and control. Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, while not outwardly projecting archetypes that readily signify its terrifying implications, functions on dread (the obvious term), but more precisely, the horror of post-dread, not that something bad is inevitably going to happen, but that there's no solution to correct said inevitability - a sense that an abject past, an intangible sin, has solidified (predetermined, if you will) an unwavering temporal logic, irrational in its seeming fixity. Nichols brilliantly takes these sensations and anxieties, then deftly ties them to a zeitgeist that feels nearly prescient in its class-based specificity. Everything about Take Shelter is implicit.

Underlying the overt narrative, which involves Ohio based, middle-class family man cum construction worker Curtis (Michael Shannon) experiencing a series of nightmares and delusions, is one that devastatingly attests to the fragility of middle-class security; as Curtis's delusions grow more intense (pissing the bed, seizures), his inability to seek help stems from both his own stubbornness (bred from culturally-specific shame and fear in failing to serve as familial patriarch) and health care/treatment insufficiencies (the doctor Curtis really needs is a few hundred miles away). Feeling the brunt of his deteriorating mental health are wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and deaf daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart), the latter of whom has health problems requiring continual attention. Moreover, once Curtis's negligence, primarily in obsessing over constructing a tornado shelter in his backyard, gets him fired, the health benefits dry up, the beach trip must be cancelled, and a once happy family is forced to go into survival mode. Nevertheless - the question remains: is Curtis slowly becoming a paranoid schizophrenic...or are his apocalyptic visions coming to fruition?

Few of the more literal narrative questions are of much significance, ultimately, since the film creepily, devastatingly reveals its true hand once all of the economic factors begin to become more horrifying than any potential impending natural disaster; more than metaphor, the lightning, thunder, and storm motifs reaffirm an instability crisis, that when the ideal dissipates due to various factors (a falsely conscious ideal at that), there will be no corporeal savior, no one to provide solace other than a community of like-minded, like-class individuals - but only to a certain extent (Shannon's primary Oscar-bait scene proves the tipping point). Practical solutions only tread water; faith and religion (though not directly stated in the film) are implied through Curtis's potentially Biblical visions. Mental illness, financial crisis, familial horror - Nichols's near-masterpiece considers all of these variables in producing his complex vision of tradition lost, future uncertain. Here's the film Dream House could (should) have been. Take Shelter's release amidst the Occupy Wall Street movement is a chilling corollary, one which Nichols obviously couldn't have foreseen, but a direct affirmation of his film's immediacy and gravity.

The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011) -- B+

2011-10-07T10:42:00.001-07:00

There's nothing about George Clooney's oeuvre unto this point that would suggest the understated grace and power found in The Ides of March, not so much subtle (Clooney's agenda consistently remains at the fore) as humble, especially in Clooney's decision to make hot-shot campaign adviser Stephen (Ryan Gosling) idealistic, but intelligent, naive (perhaps) but human - he's not merely a pawn to manipulate political rhetoric (unlike Clooney's hero-worship propaganda Good Night and Good Luck). Early in the film, sitting with cunning, cynical journalist Ida (Marisa Tomei), he gets knocked down a peg: "Your campaign efforts won't matter one bit to the everyday fuckers, go to work, come home, go to sleep - not one bit." A sharp script written by Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon (the film is based on his play Farragut North) offers Gosling, Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tomei, Jeffrey Wright, and Evan Rachel Wood ample opportunity to captivate; though necessarily stagy in its talking heads template, Clooney alters shots well, often reserving close-ups for more tense moments, and ratcheting up tension through mise-en-scene, a lost art even in much contemporary art cinema. In what's essentially a terse morality tale, Gosling's idealist faces corruption via Wood's intern, who reveals a nasty little secret about Clooney's Governor Morris, whose campaign for a presidential nomination hinges primarily on winning Ohio and North Carolina. Naturally, he realizes idealism isn't as easy in practice as it is in theory, but Clooney never makes those choices dramatic tentpoles, instead realizing and offering snippets of discourse and choice, fracturing drama rather than ratcheting it up; the film's best scene may be Gosling sitting in his car, rain beating down on the windshield, realizing the depth of his actions, only a little too late. Some lines are a bit on the nose; Paul (Seymour Hoffman) claims the Republicans "can't find a nominee who isn't a world class fuck up," or when Gosling is approached by rival campaign manager Tom Duffy (Giamatti), Gosling exclaims: "This is the kind of shit the Republicans pull!" The Ides of March is best when it refrains from real-world ties, per se (the choice to use actual pundits is an ungainly error, the same tactics used by the abysmal The Adjustment Bureau) and focuses on what Clooney perceives as a sort of passive venality, alluding to actual politics rather than explicit parallels. In doing so, he offers an ambivalency that walks a compelling line between outright cynicism and hopeful humanism, lamenting corruption, but not pompous enough to suggest a quick fix or reduce the complexity of career aspirations getting roughed-up in the cogs of a permanently broken political machine.

Horrorthon 3: Day Six: Ebola Syndrome (Herman Yau, 1996) -- B+

2011-10-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

Ebola Syndrome functions best as a revolting satire of epidemic-related paranoia, specifically referring to American films of this type (director Herman Yau apparently decided to make the film after seeing Outbreak). However, by relegating the epidemic text to the background (the virus is only an ancillary component) and placing deranged serial killer Kai (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) in the fore, Yau synthesizes anxieties to produce an hilarious, hardly frightening, but often grotesque examination of cultural fears, both of the micro and macroscopic variety.

Beginning in Hong Kong, Kai is a delinquent pervert - his attempted rape of his boss's wife leads to a threat of castration, Kai pleading on his knees for mercy: "I have such a small dick. It's already so small. Don't castrate me, boss." Male insufficiency becomes a bizarrely recurring theme; after fleeing HK for a subsequent murder, Kai settles in Johannesburg, working in a restaurant where he "asks so little salary and does everything." Trying to warm up to the owner, he assures him he must "have a big dick" since he hears his wife moaning loudly every night. The owner agrees.

Bodily fears play out in ways both legitimate and satirical. Kai's genitalia fascinations are meant humorously, not to be refracted through a psychological diagnosis - the Western approach to psychopathology. In fact, much of the sequences seem oddly disproportionate and incongruous, in that the entire narrative mode is often difficult to decipher, since the abject excess of blood, mutilation, and sexist/racist ("The negroes are so dark, you never know if they have expressions on their faces") discourse seems to warrant a film of "higher" aspirations, not tinged with crudities and anchored by a character so overtly perverse as Kai. Nevertheless, in choosing to play Kai's behavior for absurdist humor, Yau inherently improves upon and critiques bourgeois films that use such material to guise the voyeurism of a more "sophisticated" audience. There's no pretense here: just abjection, untamed by the absence of a supportive, "intellectual" narrative.

After contracting the Ebola virus by raping an African woman, spreading it throughout Johannesburg by preparing Ebola-infected meat patties termed "African Buns," then returning to Hong Kong following another murder warrant placed on his head, Ebola Syndrome confirms itself as grindhouse oddity, littered with meta-textual elements and stripped of "art house" presumptions. When Kai proclaims "It's God who invented the Ebola virus, not me!" then runs through the streets repeatedly shouting "EBOL-YAI-AHHHH," there's a curious undercurrent of triviality and significance, contradictory in its obvious inanity, but relevant in its subsumed refutation of Western culture's dominant mores, cultural globalization seeping into Asian culture. If Ebola Syndrome is ultimately silly, amoral, and menial, well, that's pretty much the point.

Horrorthon 3: Day Five: Baby Blood (Alain Robak, 1990) -- B-

2011-10-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

Baby Blood is rife with imagery linking post-adolescent Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou) to animalistic behavior, a connection the film will have much deviant pleasure in fulfilling. Yanka is equal part slave/novice, the young wife of a sadistic circus ringleader who beats and bosses her around relentlessly. After an especially brutal “training” session, her body is penetrated by a snake-like creature, borne out of an imported African leopard (eh), which turns her into a blood-thirsty, man-slaying vampire. The amorphous creature is given an androgynous voice, more old woman than anything, and as the film purports during the opening voice over, amidst images of oozing volcanoes and barren terrain (spoken by the absent creature): “For me, only one thing was needed – to be born.” Director Alain Robak apparently has an unchecked fetish for femme fatales tinged with a degree of Biblical dread (he replays Yanka’s seductions numerous times), but his more flagrant, crude sensibilities are diluted by a genuine flair for body horror, that which grows within, internal threats trumping exterior fears. Moreover, after Yanka’s possession, Robak abandons any pretense of reality (or even discourse), opting instead for bizarrely surrealistic Basket Case-inspired repartee between Yanka and the interior beast, the unseen creature often speaking for the deluded, depleted woman. Robak has fun with his creature too, giving it silly dialogue like, “I am not a monster. I talk like a human, I think like a human,” or the ever subtle: “You fuck him and I’ll grab him by the balls.” More affectual than intelligent, Baby Blood blends misogyny and feminism into an almost indecipherable hybrid, grotesque more often than not, but rarely without sense enough to let the blood-spurting absurdity speak for itself.

Horrorthon 3: Day Four: Dream House (Jim Sheridan, 2011) -- D-

2011-10-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

There are many horrific things about Dream House, least among them the film's content which, once the nauseating narrative twists have taken shape, hardly resembles much of anything at all, and certainly not a horror film. Such a transition would be fascinating if it could be called an evolution, starting with one ethos and morphing into another - rather, nonsense replaces operative logic. If one didn't know any better, it would be tempting to label director Jim Sheridan and screenwriter David Louka (whose previous credits should have tipped-off incompetency) mad-scientist satirists, formulating a truly abject horror film, with the veneer of archetype disguising an impending implosion of normative expectation and diegesis. In fact, nearly twenty minutes into the film, I thought I was witnessing a masterpiece goofily establishing cliche only to (hopefully) deftly deconstruct the facade of domestic security, irrational belief and, as the title alludes to, the "American Dream." Instead, it becomes abundantly clear Sheridan must have suffered some sort of serious head injury during production. The film doesn't make a lick of sense.

Aspiring to cover nearly identical territory as Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, Will Atenton (Daniel Craig) leaves his job and the city (an opening sequence is amusingly surrealistic) for a house in the suburbs with wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) and two young daughters. Unfortunately for Will, the previous owner murdered his family, something he learns about via cultist teenagers, hilariously uninvolved police officers, and neighbor lady Ann (Naomi Watts). Clue #1: Always follow the casting rule: when a big star plays a seemingly insignificant role, it ain't so insignificant. Moreover, those familiar with the film's spoiler ridden trailer know the first eye-rolling twist: Will is actually the same man who murdered his family, freshly out of the asylum, created a new name for himself (in an hilarious revelation, Will took the new name from his wrist-band ID number), and has been occupying the "space" where his trauma rests. Ultimately, and lacking any gall to force Craig to wrestle with repressed demons, Loucka integrates a pathetic sub-plot to alleviate Will of his crime, leading to a fifteen minute finale that's as funny, ludicrous, and pathetic as any film from 2011.

Oddly enough, had Sheridan taken Loucka's script, dialed it two clicks to the right, and amped up the subtext, Dream House could have been genre-busting auto-critique; one might expect as much from Sheridan, whose previous films exist outside of genre, often turning towards familial concerns, but without succumbing to readily marketable signposts. His sensibilities here, however, suggest someone well outside their comfort zone, a deer-in-the-headlights of sorts, so uncertain on how to manipulate a sub-hackneyed script, that he just closed his eyes and hoped it would even mildly gel and disguise his confusion. Themes are just jacked-up; is this an affirmation or critique of domestic-driven desires? Why is David Loucka allowed to keep writing scripts? Has Jim Sheridan gone off the deep-end? Indeterminate, no idea, apparently so.

50/50 (Jonathan Levine, 2011) -- C-

2011-10-03T08:52:00.000-07:00

What an infuriating concoction Jonathan Levine's 50/50 is. There hasn't been a film in some time that's this genuinely admirable, but almost completely misguided; so, Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has cancer. He's 27, works editing stories for a radio station, exercises regularly, doesn't smoke or drink, even refuses to have a driver's license because it's "the fifth leading cause of death." Ho-ho the irony. Nevertheless, his cancer leads him to reevaluate his life, consisting of a troubled relationship with cheating girlfriend Rachael (Bryce Dallas Howard), his potentially selfish best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), a distant relationship with Mom (Anjelica Huston), and his newfound interest in baby-shrink Katherine (Anna Kendrick). Bonding comes amidst chemo sessions with two old-timers, a new-found appreciation for medicinal marijuana, and occasional ventures with Kyle to get laid (Adam reluctantly uses his cancer to attract women). There's much delight to be found in small moments here, such as a brilliant three-way comedic exchange when Kyle discovers Rachael's infidelity, Gordon-Levitt's vacillating levity and anger (strong performance), and the film's refusal to pander by engaging religious matters of any sort. Nevertheless, in opting for the latter, 50/50 panders to secular pride, not choosing atheism via dialectics, but through cowardice, as if screenwriter Will Reiser doesn't have the cojones to broach the subject and Levine isn't concerned about calling him on it.

Moreover, amidst this absence, Levine opts for syrupy indie-pathos, his film custom-fitted with a self-pitying soundtrack, tidy moments of pain and pleasure, and characters that never give the lead any real instances of trauma. Rogen's douchebag demeanor disguises genuine empathy and self-doubt; Kendrick's artless tactics evoke her girlish sexuality; Dallas Howard's shrew gets an audience pandering "fuck-you" send-off. Adam never really has to face death - the film vapidly struggles with repressed fears and incomprehensible mortality. The extent of his pain explodes during a screaming session in a car, followed by an "I love you" phone call to an in-bed, reading Kendrick (what a saint). Where's the shittiness? Where's the subjective trauma, the uncorked rage, the endless questioning, the desertion, the isolation, the feelings of utter helplessness? Reiser and Levine have little interest in really putting Adam up against it for, when one friend leaves, another one enters, inherently sluggish choices that merely placate viewers who want to shed a false tear. Most offensive, though, is the ending, not just that Gordon-Levitt is (spoiler) going to be okay, but that his survival is patly, garishly used for succinct closure, regressing back to opening idiotic behavior/discussion (Rogen swabs ointment on Adam's back scar...with his finger! HAHA), and an official meet-cute between healthy Adam and willing Katherine that completely tanks all conceptions that 50/50 is anything more than liberal-baiting idiocy.

Horrorthon 3: Day Three: Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (Hajime Sato, 1968) -- B+

2011-10-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

Climate has a dual meaning in Hajime Sato's Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell, as weather and politics are inextricably linked. Flying a jetliner, the pilot looks out over the orange clouds and blood-red distance, claiming (as he rightfully should), "never seen a sky like that before." The troubled sky, it turns out, is indicative of an oncoming alien invasion, an event to be felt by the members of the aforementioned flight, after a mean thunderstorm leaves them stranded in the desert, an eclectic cast of characters (a politician, psychologist, terrorist, white woman) left to resolve their difficulties and differences amidst impending doom. Thankfully, Sato's film has far more pep and intelligence than the standard disaster-movie template (in fact, this film arrives well before many of the 1970's American staples), in that the disaster is explicitly (if didactically) tied to Vietnam paranoia, the warring nature of mankind directly responsible for alien intrusion ("Ever since the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, flying saucer sightings have increased dramatically."). More thrilling about Goke, in terms of archetype, is that it integrates a proto-slasher figure, a would-be terrorist taken over by aliens (the film's best sequence), as the gooey, Blob-like creature penetrates through the forehead, an amusing allusion to collective consciousness and body politic, the mind's desires limited by the capabilities of collective bodies to achieve such ends. Sato has a keen sense of humor too, as when the psychologist goes on a rant about caring for fellow human beings and the politician replies: "Humanism. Just what we need." Moreover, orange-tinted Vietnam footage is integrated throughout (to match the ominous skyline) and if these touches weren't enough, a character makes it clear by film's end: "We're so busy killing each other, the aliens have a golden opportunity to attack." The less-than-subtle choices are off-set by Sato's visceral filmmaking in a number of sequences, a proficiency in establishing genre ethos, and enacting a satirical humanism (even if more than occasionally sexist) while loftily probing historicity without being offensively reductive.

Abduction (John Singleton, 2011) -- D

2011-10-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

There's a moment about one-third of the way into Abduction, surely the year's silliest film to date (well, on second thought, Bucky Larson wins every crown for terribleness this year), where Nathan (Taylor Lautner), having just seen his mother (err, wait, his adopted mother?) murdered by two random heavies, stands and watches in terror. The camera goes in on Lautner's face, his lips trembling, his eyes teary - as my friend aptly stated during this moment: "Here comes the acting!" Telegraphed from A-Z, the scene ends on a rarely precise note; one of the heavies, wounded and dying, warns Nathan and neighbor-girl love interest Karen (Lily Collins) that, indeed, "THERE'S A BOMB IN THE OVEN!" Not merely basting, but a fully-cooked turkey, John Singleton (the fuck happened to this guy?) sees this thriller concocted world (Lionsgate paid $1 million for Shawn Christensen's script to boot) as devoid of logic, reason, or continutiy (unintentionally). In what becomes a thoroughly meaningless, unhinged chase flick, Lautner and Collins exchange creaky exposition rehashing dialogue ("I just saw my parents get killed before my own eyes!") and goofy, pubescent glances, culminating in a train make-out (HOT!), right before Lautner must use his martial arts skills to crack-down two more anonymous, gun-toting baddies. One can only sit, face-in-palms, and snicker at the soiled product. We may have a Cool As Ice level disaster here. Were Singleton's sensibilities remotely refined, he could have used this Lautner vehicle as inverted genre cinema, critiquing consumption while providing it - a subversive act. Nope. For, when Lautner claims at film's end that it's been "one helluva first date," patrons must exit the theater in shame, sadness, and perhaps, even tears.

Horrorthon 3: Day Two: The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921) -- B+

2011-10-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

Speaking on ghosts and the cinema in the 1983 film Ghost Dance, Jacques Derrida states: "That's what I think the cinema is all about, when it's not boring; it's the art of allowing ghosts to come back." With The Criterion Collection's recent release of Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage, Derrida's claim has rarely been so apropos; not so much a resurfacing relic as an uncanny (re)presentation of cinematic hallucination (in both form and content), Sjöström's film reenters the cultural consciousness amidst times of amorality, artistic crisis, and deflated aesthetic sensibilities, the eponymous vestige a chilling signifier within and without its own context, exuberant filmic technique (a tangible love for the medium and its subjects) now a phantom unto itself amidst larger goals of corporatism, franchises, and other detrimental cultural illnesses, foremost among them political correctness. The Phantom Carriage is by no means a great film (its views of righteousness are far too reductive), but the level of formal interest (tinting, superimposition, exaggerated close-ups) imbue the Dickensian hokum (albeit via a marvelously fractured chronology) with a larger sense of significance, specifically in the film's final third, as David Holm's (Victor Sjöström) alcoholism becomes less about proselytizing than personal redemption, individualistic perseverance diffusing compassion amidst economic hardship. If The Phantom Carriage can't find resonance in comparable times of various crises, then it curiously reaffirms Nietzsche's maxim to "let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species." An ephemeral culture probably lacks space for Sjöström's prescience.

Horrorthon 3: Day One: I Was a Teenage Zombie (John Elias Michalakis, 1987) -- D-

2011-10-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

More shocking than the utter incompetence of I Was a Teenage Zombie, an affectless genre (spoof?) entry that deserves to be left in 1980's obscurity, is that Janus Films now owns the rights of distribution, suggesting a Criterion release could be somewhere down the pipeline. In what would instantly become the company's worst release, director John Michalakis displays absolutely zero aptitude for anything that could even be mistaken as related to humor, horror, and/or good taste (if you will), assembling a group of high school dorks (none of whose names are even worth mentioning) who pool their money to buy a quarter pound of weed. Unfortunately, their chosen drug dealer deals them some bad dope, they seek revenge for having their money stolen, inadvertently killing the drug dealer, his body falling in a pool of toxic waste, only to have him resurrected as a zombie, now seeking vengeance against the teens who left him for dead. Everything that could be funny here (and it ain't much to begin with) is squandered amidst bizarrely, unusually unfunny choices, a slew of one-liners, nonsensical behavior, and dopey conceptualization, resulting in a dearth of interest or reason to pay the slightest attention to whatever inane point Michalakis might be venturing. Is this parody? Is it simply low-budget failure, an attempt to make a horror/comedy that qualifies as neither? Hard to say, since there's never any consistency of vision and approach. There's a semblance of the types of films made by Troma (there's even a character named Lloyd Kaufman), in that the shoestring budget aesthetic and amateur acting contribute to the film's larger sensibilities. However, belittling Kaufman's endeavors to mere signifiers (he's clearly a satirist) and suggesting any real similarities in terms of approach would bestow a degree of significance to Michalakis that his hackery doesn't deserve. The filmmaking is atrocious, empty, and only fit for nerds who look to horror as a means of fanboy sustenance.

The Way (Emilio Estevez, 2011) -- C+

2011-09-27T00:22:00.000-07:00

Luxury plays a significant role in The Way, director Emilio Estevez's sixth (who knew?) feature film, yet it's something the writer/director neglects to adequately address, opting instead for a more conventional, literal tale of Tom (Martin Sheen), a grieving father , who upon learning about the death of his son Daniel (Emilio Estevez), decides to travel the El Camino de Santiago by foot, a trek his son attempted to make before being killed on the journey. The scenario is trailer-made (see for yourself here), verging on Hallmark-stamped levels of easy irony and unearned pathos. Moreover, the literal journey leads to obvious metaphorical ends (there's symbolism in nearly every scene), as do Tom's inevitable encounters with a host of characters, namely Joost (Yorick van Wageningen), Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), and Jack (James Nesbitt), all of whom have afflictions of their own; Joost is in a bad marriage and overweight; Sarah flees an abusive relationship; Jack suffers from writer's block. Ho-hum to say the least, especially in the utterly lackadaisical presentation. And yet - these very simplicities ultimately (and surprisingly) turn into charmingly small insights, anchored mainly by Sheen's impassioned performance and Estevez's decision to shoot nearly every scene from Sheen's perspective, a tact that imbues a degree of subjective strife (if indulgent) detached from class divide. Much like Sean Penn's Into the Wild, Estevez is too in love with the independent spirit to critique it; in doing so, he valorizes impudence, championing a will that's afforded only by privilege, not dedication. Estevez's film isn't as nearly self-absorbed as Penn's, but The Way can never quite manufacture a reason for its existence, given the often trite, recycled notions of family, faith, grief, and retribution.

Killer Elite (Gary McKendry, 2011) -- B-

2011-09-27T00:20:00.000-07:00

Killer Elite shares considerable commonalities with The Debt, but succeeds because of one major difference: sincerity. Gary McKendry's attention to genre detail makes him far more complex than John Madden; he locates his subjects within a needlessly complex tale of double-crossing SAS agents in 1981 London, caught amidst a suitably (because of time period and generic predecessors) xenophobic narrative involving a sheik of Oman demanding retribution for the murder of his three sons. These plot points allow propulsion towards more dynamic elements, namely the film's inherent critique of politically correct visual rhetoric, which disallows masculine assertion via violent fantasy (the intertwining of history and fetish), Eurocentric in its aims, but proletarian in its grappling with class. Killer Elite is a far better homage to its genre than The Expendables, since it carries its prides and prejudices without irony - there's a degree of resolve missing from most contemporary action films. Nevertheless, McKendry's focus doesn't properly make a 21st century shift, retrograde in its ideas, no more informed than if the film had actually been made in the mid-80's. Both a blessing and a damnation, McKendry is helped immensely by Jason Statham, Robert De Niro, and Clive Owen, who effortlessly carry the flimsy material to loftier heights, even if the effect is ultimately short-lived. If McKendry relied less on emphasizing the veracity of his tale (the end credits go to embarrassing lengths of self-legitimation), he might have been able to turn retro into contempo - a task that (arguably) no action director has been able to successfully complete.

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star (Tom Brady, 2011) -- F

2011-09-27T00:19:00.000-07:00

Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star is one of the most repulsive films I've ever seen. There's almost an abject fascination to be had from its terribleness. Did human beings make this film? Certainly no one from planet Earth could have viewed the final product, been amused, given a thumb's up, and said: "I HAVE to attach my name to this." No. Any rational, even moderately psychopathic individual would go to great links to disassociate themselves from having their remaining filmmaking career resting upon the shoulders of a film this regressive. To possess a view of sexuality that draws "humor" wholly from grown-manchild Bucky (Nick Swardson) having no conception of his own physicality, secluded and repressed (with a miniscule dick, no less), seeing his parents fuck in a porno, then deciding he wants to follow in their footsteps, represents the most puerile sensibilities conceivable - the sort of self-hating confusion that breeds sexual deviants. Yes, it's true - Bucky Larson propagates a brand of humor that, seen by anyone without sexual experience, threatens to twist their anxieties towards shame and away from celebration, the body as a source of self-doubt, Bucky's perpetual adolescence the obsession and fascination of truly disturbed individuals, a retardation of the highest order. Fuck this movie; it's a social cancer. It's as misguided as they come, the absolute converse to the greatest film ever made about human sexuality, Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism. Nothing (and no one) in Bucky Larson resembles humanity.

The Debt (John Madden, 2011) -- C-

2011-09-27T00:18:00.001-07:00

Utilizing the sort of "based on a true story" mold that screams Oscar bait (and, thus, denies nuance), John Madden's The Debt not once questions the veracity it so rigidly propagates, settling instead for top-heavy exposition devoid of larger meanings, a chronology shifting narrative oblivious to its own exhaustive banality, and an aesthetic suitable to any run-of-the-mill politico tale. The film's only potentially interesting tampering with temporality comes via a double take of revisionism, where a man thought to have been killed lives, an implicit proposition of historical ambiguity amidst moral loss, but Madden situates it merely as plot propulsion, a means to get less savvy audience members sitting up straight in their seats rather than furthering any sort of genre revision. Moreover, the central sequences, following Secret Agents Rachel (Jessica Chastain), David (Sam Worthington), and Stefan (Marton Csokas), specifically a few scenes where Rachel gets a medical exam from the ex-Nazi war criminal (Jesper Christensen) in question, are warmed-over bits of better films (Marathon Man specifically comes to mind), and simply fetishize historical narratology, specifically Naziism, for ends devoid of critical consideration. Politics becomes entertainment, feigning pretensions of grandeur, made no more apparent than in the film's jargon-heavy, motor-mouthed scenes that seek to explain rather than show. Madden has no insights - he's just proficient at setting up signposts that stroke the allegiance of cultural false consciousness.

Our Idiot Brother (Jesse Peretz, 2011) -- B

2011-09-27T00:11:00.000-07:00

Jesse Peretz's Our Idiot Brother helps to rescue modern comedy from an abyss of improv-for-improv sake, excessive crudity (comedy = economy), and socio-political subterfuge, the naively eponymous Ned (Paul Rudd) almost a rebuke to contemporary cynicism, his kindness practically anachronistic in relation to his three sisters (Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschnanel, Emily Mortimer) and their significant others (Adam Scott, Rashida Jones, Steve Coogan). Refraining from mere situational insight, Peretz steers Ned's fuck-ups away from fodder for idiot savant beneficence (this is not Forrest Gump), lending his humanity a sincerity and the film a sophistication that, in its best moments, strikes a commendable level of unsentimental pathos, locating feeling instead of fashionable vulgarity. Our Idiot Brother is, in retrospect, the summer's only comedy that treats its subjects with care (Bridesmaids might be sporadically cannier, but it's far less composed) and doesn't abuse the genre for cheap laughs (Horrible Bosses and Bad Teacher being the primary offenders). Peretz's charming direction is a refreshing antidote to Apatowian deception.

30 Minutes or Less (Ruben Fleischer, 2011) -- C+

2011-09-26T23:34:00.000-07:00

It's hard to determine whether 30 Minutes or Less, directed by Zombieland hack Ruben Fleischer, is a work of social relevance cum genre firecracker or merely a nonsense piece of pop-cultural potpourri, as tasteless as it is ephemeral. Perhaps the question is hard to answer because the film is both, at times acutely aware of its characters' post-adolescent (but still nascent) masculinity as tied directly to grander notions of monetary gain (image rules their desire), yet at others merely a product of over-stimulated cultural awareness, no better epitomized than ODB's "Baby I Got Your Money" which plays over the closing credits, a most disingenuous quasi-ironic hipster choice that aligns Fleischer not as a social satirist, but merely a kid lost in a candy store, picking and choosing without discrimination, merely drunk on his own euphoric delusions of grandeur rather than any cogent cultural focus. The film's title cleverly aligns stringent consumerist cannibalism with dehumanization (the penniless pizza boy a perfect metonym for absurdist capitalism), but the only joke that manifests involves Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) getting an extra $20 off a couple of dim-witted middle-schoolers. Funnier than Eisenberg is Chet (Aziz Ansari), though he's generally left to fulfill dutiful side-kick roles. Moreover, the potential for hilarity would seem endless between knuckle-heads Dwayne (Danny McBride) and Travis (Nick Swardson), whose entrepreneurial dreams consist of opening their own massage/fuck parlor (a PERFECT metaphor for the now indecipherable cultural synthesis of sexual unfulfillment and heteronormative psychology), but yet again, petty banter takes the place of irreverent perception. Fleischer seems capable of taking a cultural pulse, at times hilariously allowing an expression of gender hostility (Dwayne's epithet "Quiet down, Slumdog" to Chet's sister stands out) that transcends grab-bag nihilism. Ultimately though, the elements that suggest sophistication are snuffed-out by too much playful apathy, settling for unfocused shenanigans over streamlined satire.

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011) -- C

2011-09-26T22:18:00.000-07:00

It wouldn't be a shock, whatsoever, to see The Help win the Oscar for Best Picture come next February. It has all of the necessary ingredients; a tailor-made script for bi-partisan appreciation that caters to both die-head social liberals and down-south, false consciousness conservatives through its placating demeanor, an "issue" film without any tangible issue, given the one-dimensional approach to racism, empathy, and resolve. It feigns provocative moments and interests in a so-called post-racial climate (the white folks who made the film no doubt see this as their major allegorical aim), yet loses any sort of progressive or forward-thinking points by the very nature of its existence, re-aligning the faux-historical narrative to provide a white lead - spunky, unbiased, fair-to-all do-gooder Skeeter (Emma Stone), whose persistence against the downright evil behavior of Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) in 1960's Mississippi leads to the publication of the eponymous book, which contains anecdotes and testimonies of nearly two dozen black maids, among them the outspoken Minny (Octavia Spencer) and Aibileen (Viola Davis), the latter of whom provides the film a superficial voice-over, essentially serving as a soothing bookend rather than engendering caustic insight. Director Tate Taylor's primary foul-up is that he reduces an unspeakable pain, a tumultuous social milieu, brought on by repressed feelings and unspoken fears, to a three-act structure of melodramatic inertia, situating revelations of disgust, anguish, and, eventually triumph, as merely exploitable moments that will look pretty impressive on Oscar night (Davis and Spencer are locks for nominations and have excellent chances to win), but immediately sink the film as a serious work of art. There's a compelling subplot involving ostracized housewife Celia's (Jessica Chastain) relationship with Minny that, at its best moments, suggests the sort of feminine camaraderie located by Douglas Sirk in his 1959 masterpiece Imitation of Life, but, problem is, Taylor squanders that potential by aligning the two as kindred spirits of inequality, a problematic proposition at best, made even more sour by the film's "you are a Godless woman!" finale, abandoning any degree of subtlety to chastise a character whom, at this point, has surpassed even Cruella De Vil levels of inhuamnity, something the film expects to elicit cheers (and likely has amongst undiscriminating viewers), but only reinforces just how simplistically The Help views racial discrimination and potential avenues for progress and equality.

Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011) -- C-

2011-09-23T00:59:00.000-07:00

Moneyball belongs to a growing species of filmmaking that can only be called anti-cinema, made by pedantic, talentless hacks, utilizing genre not for useful or passionate allegory, but simply an act of obfuscatory solipsism, where the ironically temperate form enables blithely self-absorbed content. Chief offender here is Bennett Miller, following up his equally empty Capote with something even less enticing: a baseball movie that hates baseball movies. Notoriously literal and tactile screenwriters Steven Zallian and Aaron Sorkin provide Bennett with a proper amount of smug for him to unveil his one-dimensional insights and gratingly dry aesthetic taste, insisting not upon an inversion of genre (the proper critical act), but a negation, subtracting archetype, but neglecting to replace said subtraction with any supplemental value. What manifests in lieu of this absence is casual detachment usually reserved for the likes of Steven Soderbergh (though he broke his creep streak with Contagion), epitomized no better than by Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), whom Bennett treats not with a degree of delineating investigation (getting beyond patriarchal crisis), but prissy existentialism, aligning past failure (masculine insufficiency) with present self-pity, a tired neo-liberal anxiety and one that strands the film's foundational aspirations, especially given Bennett's disinterest in dramatics of any sort. No big speeches, no love interest, no final game, no mentor-protege bonding - all well and good, but Bennett proves himself merely a hater, not an artist. He's unable to take his apparent disdain for normative formula and produce anything other than, well, his apparent disdain for normative formula. Billy Beane asks aloud late into the film: "How can you not be Romantic about baseball?" right before statistics wiz Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) shows him a scouting video with a blistering irony. "It's called a metaphor," says Brand. Beane smiles and says, "I know it's a metaphor." Bennett perpetually can't help himself, whether willfully seeping the life out of nearly every scene (he's a horrible director of actors) or relying on Sorkin's (presumably) fake-smart reflexive quips. Problem is, without a compelling proposition to reflect on, there's nothing but dead space, which Moneyball has in droves.

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) -- A

2011-09-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive is a rebuke to nostalgia, seemingly participant what with its 80's synth-pop score, reverent aesthetics, and influence from prolific filmmakers like Michael Mann, William Friedkin, John Carpenter, Martin Scorsese, and David Lynch (to name a few), but adamantly opposed to mimesis as a means of grappling with psychological and cultural deficiencies. Imitation begets confusion, duplication being the avenue to erasure of essential perceptibility, and of purity and goodness. At the core of this dilemma lies mythology, wholly in the postmodern sense, the accumulation of mediated images resulting in an imperceptibility between reality and simulation. Refn has managed, however, to brilliantly extricate this concept from the science-fiction genre, replacing literal machines (borgs and that stupid shit) with a living, breathing automaton, named simply Driver (Ryan Gosling). Under the guise of an action film (this is no more a genre piece than Taxi Driver), Refn produces something akin to pastiche, only in an inverted form, an amalgamation of cinematic influences as testimony to his highly personal form of introspection, not with solipsism or explicit acknowledgements, but a simultaneously critical and participatory discursive mode, both hero-worship and admonition against it, not so much hypocritical as hypercritical, both of fellow filmmakers' contemporary malpractice and of itself - in many ways, Drive is self-effacing, passionate in conviction, but nihilistic and pessimistic that such feeling translates into any functional humanism in an era so detached, unmotivated, and mistaken.

Drive opens by recalling both Thief and To Live and Die in L.A. (particularly the latter), a kaleidoscopic presentation of pulsating rhythms, fetishized images, and stark contrast lighting, isolating Driver as he either frequents his barren, blank-walled apartment, or simply...drives. By day a stunt driver/auto-shop mechanic, by night a getaway driver, the initial minimalism plays as obvious doubling, Driver merely a stand-in, a fake. However, once night turns, Driver steps into his own film of sorts, now the pulse-pounding hero he can only pretend to be on film sets.

His desires tend towards anonymity, at least until he meets neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son Benicio (Kaden Leos), whom he forms an immediate bond with. Refn quickly stamps-out any meet-cute pretensions, however, instead giving Irene and Driver very little dialogue, their relationship founded upon looks, glances, touches, and, perhaps, a deeper understanding of their similarly fractured lives. When Irene's hubby Standard (Oscar Issac) returns home from a jail stint, he enlists new friend Driver to pull off a heist, only to have things go horribly wrong (think Anton Chigurh level-carnage), placing Driver in deep shit with crime boss Bernie (Albert Brooks) and psycho-thug Nino (Ron Perlman). Little do they know the seemingly level-headed Driver is actually a deluded, sadistic psychopath, capable of shooting, stabbing, hammering, and drowning his way through a slew of baddies to protect his "damsel in distress" and her son.

Much controversy will come from the propulsion that leads Driver to risk himself for a woman he's, presumably, not even had sex with. His notions of valor are predicated on fairy-tale conceptions of masculine and feminine, puerile in their short-sightedness, protection through violence as the only recourse to closure. One would be mistaken, however, to simply align Refn with Driver, insofar as Refn's auto-ironic style continually restates his paradoxical desire to both distance himself and get closer to Driver's frighteningly easy ability to flip a switch of bloodthirsty destruction. Much credit must go to Refn's brilliantly ironic song choices (lyrics like "I don't eat. I don't sleep. I do nothing but think of you," "Do you know the difference between love and obsession?" and "Real human being...and a real hero," are eerily celebratory of misguided cultural morality), sexualizing violence (making it emotional/primal) while lamenting the loss of any human connection. When Driver finally dons a stunt mask near the film's end, he's a Michael Myers level psychopath with the abject veneer of normalcy; pop culture and urban nihilism have been fully synthesized, attesting to Refn's madcap vision of culture and decay as inextricably linked.

It admittedly seems hard to believe that such concepts could manifest so palpably with a director like Refn, who, unto this point, has not displayed these forms of cultural interest. His rigid examinations of masculinity have been about the use of violence as a replacement for language, bodily expression transcending denotative meaning to provide symbolic connotation and, therefore, negating psychological explication, instead interested in physiological assertion. The title is a pun, not just referring to vehicular movement, but "drives" in the psychological sense, the unconscious move towards a final goal or destination: desire. From the pink title credits, to a pivotal slow-motion embrace in an elevator, to Refn's self-labeling as a "fetish filmmaker," Drive is ultimately about the genesis of desire, not tied to any discernible reality (the film is set in Los Angeles, but makes little effort towards "realism"), but linked exclusively to its inversions - Romanticism and Heroism, a post-human psychopath without recourse, fulfilling desire (as the film mirrors his endeavors) under media-constructed mores. Drive is the ultimate meta-film of the 21st century, topping even Michael Haneke and Quentin Tarantino's best efforts, because there's little delineation (consciousness) between the film itself, and an act of criticism. Never breaking the fourth wall or explicitly referencing other films, Drive is truly dangerous, an act of subversion so in-tune with societal disconnection from humanity and feeling, that it runs the risk of being mistaken merely as a product of its time. It is to a certain degree. Yet, the end result's implosion of meaning, pulling back a generic veneer to reveal the constructed mechanizations beneath (lacking any psychology) resonates with an emptiness, a sting few other films are able to build towards, much less deliver on.

Warrior (Gavin O'Connor, 2011) -- B

2011-09-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

Two artistic ends tug against one another in Gavin O'Connor's fascinating Warrior: (1) the macropolitics of working-class struggle, men who use atavistic impetus to transcend the emotional and capitalist trappings (both are equated in the film) that inhibit their happiness and (2) the minimalist, physical representations (Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte) of what makes a "man". Unfortunately, Connor is not an astute enough filmmaker to really probe the ontology of their drives, neither psychological or phenomenological, instead casting their ends of desire merely within the realm of commonplace cliche, a stock genre tool. As Simone de Beauvoir might say, "It goes without saying that they are men." Unlike Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, which is the greatest sports film ever made, the question of desire (and how brutish assertion approaches the Lacanian jouissance) remains an inconsequential one. Nevertheless, O'Connor's visual work with the male specimen (actual bodies) is one of the finest breaks from contempo-cliche in recent years.

Many critics often refer to This Sporting Life as kitchen-sink realism, emphasizing its foundational interests on urban verite. A more apropos examination utilizes the Freudian underpinnings of a phallicized industrial milieu, then sees Anderson's inversion of psychoanalysis via poetic montage, aligning Frank Machin's (Richard Harris) rebellious (self-destructive) energies with an unconscious rejection of hetero-normative order, and, thus, capitalism (an exploitation Machin(e)). His collisions on the Rugby pitch don't so much provide an arena for the expulsion of repressed desire as they reflect simulated phenomena of exchange (in the monetary sense), his flesh the direct correlative to profit, which in turn degrades both his emotional and sexual energies. It's a virtuoso visual proposition, lithe and bereft of hackneyed corporatism, reflective not of mainstream political values but phenomenological humanism - essence over capital.

The same cannot be said for O'Connor's conservative inclinations. He positions mainstream sports culture with a fan's eye, not a critic's. He's not out to examine the culture, only to propagate it. The film's set-up, which relies heavily on proletarian anxieties of class struggle, familial fracturing, and their transcendence (through feral behavior and capital) merely reinforces norms of representation. Exposition driven at times, his only worthwhile contribution is a deft montage utilizing split-screen (though to little useful aesthetic ends) and knowing when to go in for a close-up on Tom Hardy's ferocious mug. In many ways, actor's presence supersedes directorial authority, compelling mainly because of O'Connor's conduits, rather than his mise-en-scene or insights. Nick Nolte enervates the veneer of method-acting histrionics by encircling actual, palpable pain, a "papa" that permeates archetype to unearth pure emotion. It's a performer's showcase, especially between Hardy and Nolte (Joel Edgerton is good, but nowhere near his fellow actors' levels of unrestricted feeling). Were they not contained in a film heavily reliant on cultural pandering, they would qualify as stand alone works of art. Perhaps they still do.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) -- B+

2011-09-09T21:22:00.000-07:00

Never have Steven Soderbergh's detached, clinical formal techniques been put to better use than in Contagion - in fact, the prolific director's latest is arguably the first time he's ever managed a successful synthesis of form and content. Soderbergh's filmic concerns have evolved primarily to deal with the ways in which he can subvert convention, subtracting much narrative interest for aesthetic experimentation. While these efforts are commendable, his aims have consistently been muddled,opting for bad-boy solipsism over genuine human interest or sincerity. The Limey, The Girlfriend Experience, and especially Che are direct examples of this specific miscue, diverting viewer (and his own) attention away from narrative coherence and structure towards merely a game of pseudo-intellectual semiotics, a deconstructionist act without sophistication, negating anything about the films that could be even remotely resonant. Contagion, fortunately, breaks this trend.

Beginning with a global-scale montage that could easily be mistaken for something out of an Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu opus, people are getting sick. Coughs, fever, vomiting - all of the images are streamlined for narrative economy, and clinical in the matter-of-fact, temporally-marked subtitles, providing city names and populations to suggest an absence of immunity - everyone is vulnerable. Various familiar faces begin to crop up. After his wife's sudden death, Mitch (Matt Damon) is left to wonder how he will keep his daughter out of the virus' path. CDC officials Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) quickly try and asses the most efficient path to vaccination. Dr. Erin Meyers (Kate Winslet) seeks the location of anyone who's come into contact with the infected. Journalist Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) suspects governmental conspiracy and tampering. Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) is an investigator from the World Health Organization, seeking the cause of the deadly virus.

Though the initial premise sounds dreadfully similar to the condescending, offensive cinema of Paul Haggis and Inarritu, Soderbergh's concern is not to draw cultural parallels or make broad assertions about political hypocrisy. The most political figure in the film, Law's snarky San Francisco based journalist, makes claims and assertions that the film has no interest in commenting on - nothing is tailored to engage polemics. In fact, Soderbergh's detachment makes logical sense in this case, treating a global pandemic not with sentimentality or sensational humanism, but the appropriate degree of nihilism, the rising death toll as a mere figure of multi-media postmodernity, random in its reach, soulless in its grasp. Late into the film, military commander Lyle Haggerty (Bryan Cranston) announces the order of vaccine distribution, chosen in lottery form, drawing numbered balls from a machine. Much like the bulk of the film, there's little feeling to any of it. Contagion never stops to mourn its lost human lives, but that doesn't make it passionless. In fact, through subtle close-ups and moments of human pain, Soderbergh communicates far more humanist concern than ever before. The world he depicts is cold, calculating, distant, but he finally removes himself from that alignment, recognizing the banality of apocalypse without rooting for destruction. Almost Kubrickian at times, Soderbergh solves the misanthropic puzzle that's plagued his entire filmography by separating himself from the destructivist impulses of his Darwinian milieu. Cliff Martinez's kinetic score verges on sensationalism at times, but Soderbergh's restraint resonates more as a waking-fever dream, succinct in its humorless resolve, human life as a societal contingency of postindustrial isolation.

Bellflower (Evan Glodell, 2011) -- B+

2011-08-23T00:34:00.001-07:00

Say what you will about the unfortunate descent into nihilistic wish-fulfillment violence and self-absorption during its final third, there's no denying the passionate ferocity that first-time director Evan Glodell emanates throughout the often exquisite Bellflower; equal parts Blue Valentine personal crisis, Bully amoral societal expose, the eventual turn towards violence and degeneracy is wrapped tightly in the helplessness of Woodrow (Evan Glodell), whose deteriorating relationship with Milly (Jessie Wiseman), which is beautifully, hauntingly established in the film's first half, causes him to lose his grip on reality, decency, and loyalty to often obnoxious BFF Aiden (Tyler Dawson). Glodell smartly chops down on the quirky, self-pitying factor that usually accompanies Sundance stamped pictures by both streamlining all of the relationship insight (every second of it seems culled from personal experience, but not made precious) and catalyzing his gritty aesthetic not with long takes, but quick, non-causal edits, suitably jumbling viewer comprehension of the "facts," just as Woodrow will eventually be unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.

The latter issue will likely stir up much debate with this film; for many, it will be a "did it all really happen?" sort of question, but simply stopping there misses a much greater complexity in Glodell's suggestions about isolation, male camaraderie, and the posturing images of masculinity, embodied by the central pair's favorite film - Mad Max. However, what's so exciting about Glodell is his ability to traverse the referential turf without succumbing to what lesser filmmakers would: hero-worship. Undoubtedly, George Miller's original influenced much of Glodell's boyhood constructions of physical brutality directly translating to manhood (just as it does for Woodrow and Aiden), but he succeeds those influences by channeling his own angsts and anxieties - most notably, the desire to disregard humanity for self-aggrandizing assertion, strictly through violence. Is Bellflower nihilistic and misogynist? Well, the fantasies of the lead characters certainly are, and the trouble with Glodell's debut feature is that it spends much of the duration of its second half treating fantasy as reality, satiating its characters' self-destructively callous (homicidal, rapist) unconscious and, perhaps, the viewer's too. Were Glodell more attuned to spectatorship, he could have one upped Michael Haneke without the condescension - he doesn't resort to those tactics, but he lacks Haneke's keen insight as it relates to cinematic violence. For too much of Bellflower, these sadistic tendencies are presented as primal (an incorrect extrapolation), mid-twenties heartbreak as personal apocalypse, where much of the surrounding milieu literally comes crashing down in flames. These are mistakes, but ones that do not negate Glodell's exhilarating eye for human behavioral traits, individual shots, and moments of grace, even if most of it is unfortunately predicated on celebrating solipsism.

Final Destination 5 (Steven Quale, 2011) -- B

2011-08-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

What audiences and critics alike seemed to miss about Scream 4, above all, is that it takes a pop cultural pulse, concerned foremost with evaluating not only the latest generic artistic endeavors, but also integrating its characters' reliance upon technology, which results in their deaths, socially causal instead of arbitrarily "cool." Now, almost ten years after the first Final Destination, the fifth installment takes a cue from Craven's nearly patented brand of modern horror, new director Steven Quale hinging most of the horror upon class issues, technological failure, and workplace anxieties. In addition, Quale makes appropriately goofy use of the 3D, devises several "oh shit!" deaths, and prizes his characters far more than any of the previous installments (perhaps sans the original).

Unsophisticated horror buffs (gore-hounds, they're called) and especially non-enthusiasts will be unable to see through the IMDB plot synopsis while watching the film, which reads, "survivors of a suspension-bridge collapse learn there's no way you can cheat death." Less high-concept than high-aptitude, Quale takes the franchise's now famous central destruction sequence, which threatens the lives of several employees of an upstairs/downstairs, Marxian office; the workers/groundlings are beneath, slaving away, while the bourgeois, college-educated sit behind desks up top. The desk-jobbers are those whose lives are spared, though of course, that's but temporary, as death lurks for each not far into the future.

Quale's concern with inter-office impersonality makes for amusingly morbid fun, especially when prick-ish boss Dennis (David Koechner) asks to speak with someone in the office, needs to be reminded that they were killed in the tragedy (this comes not soon after the funeral). Even better, Dennis laments when hearing that he might soon lose his job, that the "factory workers are usually the first to go." Playful, understated, but exact, Quale navigates social angst precisely, while systematically killing off characters because of their inadequacies (the highlight is a douchebag who refuses to turn off his cellphone). Furthermore, the franchise finally explores moral dilemma with at least considerate thought, now offering survivors a way out: if they kill someone else, they trade lives, taking the years that person should have had. Preposterous, of course, but that's beside the point - those hung up on the film's "ridiculous" premise are unable to feel Quale's multi-layered depth, taking death seriously and irreverently simultaneously - the best way to play it. Final Destination 5 eventually devolves into routine thriller territory, with people chasing each other around a kitchen, pointing guns, but much of what precedes is proficient genre work.

Fright Night (Craig Gillespie, 2011) -- C

2011-08-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

There's a tedium to Craig Gillespie's Fright Night remake that never subsides, commencing during the film's playful, but routine "jump-scare" intro, and continuing past the point that hot-boy cum vampire neighbor Jerry (Colin Farrell) has been staked and burnt into CGI dust. Tom Holland's 1985 original, while troubled by some self-congratulatory satirical issues, at least moves with enough pep, genre knowledge, and gravitas to warrant its existence and status as a minor horror classic, particularly because of its allegorical (if problematic) dealings with homosexuality and AIDS anxieties. Utilizing the genre for both social critique and genre reflexivity, Holland appropriately applies the ethos. The new version's trouble begins with Marti Noxon's script, which often devolves merely into exposition speak and throwaway jokiness. Her background in TV is apparent throughout; many scenes play without urgency, written to more than twice the length necessary, particularly once attention shifts towards TV persona Peter Vincent (David Tennant), whose "bad-boy" schtick feels like third rate Aldous Snow. Moreover, the central relationship between geek-turned-kinda-geek Charley (Anton Yelchin) and disarmingly cute Amy (Imogen Poots) fizzles rather than pulsates - Charley's emergence from adolescence is doubled by the genre's vampire fears (one of horror's oldest thematic concerns), but even this simple task is too much for Gillespie's disappointingly pedestrian eye, directing scenes (and, even worse, editing them) with little regard for consistency, pacing, or basic film mechanics. Fright Night contends for one of the most poorly edited films in recent memory and cinephilic formalists should recognize the incongruities rather easily. Even more lackluster than the film's technical prowess (including almost pornographic use of CGI blood) is any discernible subtext or reason to revisit the original's timely premise, other than the potential for a box office double dip.

A few gags work; Jerry watches reality shows while waiting between feedings and at one point, a contestant claims they "just want to look normal," which nicely suggests a modern ethos as inseparable from mediated presentation, much like Jerry's own appearance (healthy, normal) makes his "disease" all the more frightening. However, little of this is utilized for any real fun or piercing insight, mostly just coincidental overlap. Unsurprisingly, the film pokes fun at the Twilight franchise's Romanticized skewering of vampire lore, but again, it comes and goes without any real wit or specificity. It's merely pop cultural lip-service. Instead of answering Twilight's teeny inanity, Gillespie merely falls in line with recent remake trends, glossing over cultural relevance or perspective for easier mass consumption. The film's saving grace, however, is Colin Farrell, whose personal life nicely compliments Jerry's womanizing, scorching charm. Farrell seethes and moves his eyes rather than speaking, often waiting 3-4 beats longer than expected before answering a question. It recalls the sort of idiosyncratic star-performances of earlier Marlon Brando or Martin Sheen, dynamic but reserved, method but not histrionic. It's a brilliant piece of acting in a film that is otherwise inert, fun and exciting only if standards have been lowered to accommodate for the discouraging remake trends of recent filmmaking.

The Change-Up (David Dobkin, 2011) -- C+

2011-08-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

Shocking as it may be to acknowledge, The Change-Up is a relatively painless, sometimes funny, and often enjoyable comedic effort that takes its high-concept premise, sets up various obstacles in the first act, then adequately resolves them after the titular reversal takes shape. Surely, the script is wholly literal, taking workaholic father Dave (Jason Bateman) and bong-ripping womanizer Mitch (Ryan Reynolds), each of whom are dissatisfied with various facets of their repetitive lives, then switching them (through a magic fountain, no less), where each can identify solutions to their actual lives, while resolving any animosity existing about the other's chosen path. Souring relevant observations about difference and daily monotony are several gross-out gags, including projectile baby-shit, dancing CGI babies, and the genre's re-discovered sexism (Leslie Mann and Olivia Wilde, though likeable, get the shrew and slut treatment). All unfortunate inclusions (though not the least bit surprising coming from "the writers of The Hangover" as the poster boasts), but what salvages The Change-Up (at least if we're grading on a bit of a curve here) is its reliance on leads to carry the comedic torch - and Bateman and Reynolds are more than up for the task. Knowing each actor's history makes the inside joke all the more humorous, if stale by the film's conclusion. Nevertheless, director David Dobkin deserves marginal credit for insisting his film have a structure, a through-line to comedic ends, rather than choppy, less-focused summer comedies like Bridesmaids, Horrible Bosses, or Friends with Benefits. Perhaps that distinction shouldn't be enough to warrant a warm response to the film's simplistic, muddled understanding of each character and his/her dilemmas, but in the worn-down, dog-days of summer, The Change-Up is oddly refreshing and certainly no worse than most any other mainstream summer garbage.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011) -- C+

2011-08-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

Despite the best efforts of relative newcomer Rupert Wyatt, Rise of the Planet of the Apes can never vanquish a palpable sense of antiquity, that its discrimination allegory has not been properly evolved to deal with a "post-racial" America. Of course, only a self-congratulatory prick would use such a term to begin with, but Wyatt consistently neglects or, essentially, ignores what's required of him: reimagining beyond the CGI-ing of Apes, which is admittedly impressive. Call it a prequel to the 1968 original (the studio sure will), Will Rodman (James Franco) believes he's found the cure for Alzheimer's disease. Testing the drug on Apes (contained in a metal cylinder, which he conveniently keeps in his fridge at home, natch), the cause is particularly of importance to Will, since his Dad (John Lithgow) is battling the disease. Another battle takes shape in super-smart ape Caesar (Andy Serkis), who's given the usual rigmarole of animal abuse, abandonment, and admonishment, before seeking vengeance. Wyatt embraces the film's pulpy, B-movie roots head on, keeping things relatively small, intimate before the Apes do what the title says - this time in modern-day San Francisco. Nevertheless, in spite of some stirring emotional attachment to the monkey (excuse me, ape), little of this plays as anything more than yet another franchise aspiring reboot, equipped with rehashed mythology, exposition overload, and a cliffhanger ending. Wyatt isn't a director without detail (Caesar's ticking time-bomb adequately expresses the lasting scars of oppression), but he favors narrative efficiency (workmanlike is his bag) over avant-garde shocks and subtext. A perfect chance to make a genre classic given current social anxieties and debates, Wyatt ignores much of that, placing product over passion, more concerned with Ape realism than artistic endeavor.

The Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi, 2011) -- F

2011-08-07T12:02:00.000-07:00

The Adjustment Bureau rivals any film released in 2011 (and pretty much any year) for sheer incompetency, inert and incapable on just about every imaginable level, it's a film to distinguish those who have an eye for basic cinematic intelligence, how a film is constructed and what indicates even a passable level of artistry. Writer/Director George Nolfi (his first directorial effort) makes the wrong decision in every scene of his film, explicit and literal when he should be evasive, blunt and trite when he should instill idiosyncrasy and nuance. Less old-fashioned than hopelessly retrograde, the film begins with an hilariously emphatic montage of Senator David Norris (Matt Damon) running the campaign trail, appearing with various real life figures, even getting the insight of James Carville while Norris watches from the comfort of his living room. Nolfi is oddly obsessed with reaction shots, often showing characters "deep in thought" as the director claims on the commentary track, but essentially just lingering on close-ups (Anthony Mackie gets the most, I counted at least eight) while they stare at the floor and/or off into the distance. The dialogue comes in three varieties: expository, questions, or platitudes. Those who claimed Inception featured several characters whose sole purpose was to further expository understanding haven't seen anything yet - every character speaks merely to propel a ridiculously hokey sci-fi narrative or propagate endlessly meaningless, hollow rhetoric about free will, self-fulfillment, and true love. Moreover, the central romance between Damon and Emily Blunt (the worst performance of her short career) is meant to be passionate and sincere - but only because every character keeps repeating this, that the pair are destined to be soul mates. The film never actually shows why these two are inseparable lovers (aside from a few quick scenes of forced, playful banter, they share little time on-screen together). Everything that could be wrong is in Nolfi's horrifyingly lame adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick short story, from his misunderstanding of action sequences (he cuts to Mackie's character running down the same street an astonishing five times without anything detering his route) to the wholly bungled metaphysical discourse, to the amping up of sentimental romance, only to let any passion or gravity elude him. Here's a bad movie that instantly ascends the heights of cinema history's worst offerings, an instant classic of sorts, not offensive in its intent (Nolfi is too soft for that), but brazenly, comprehensively misguided on any conceivable artistic level.

Cowboys & Aliens (Jon Favreau, 2011) -- D-

2011-07-29T23:19:00.000-07:00

There's a scene two-thirds of the way into Jon Favreau's hopelessly inept, infuriatingly hollow Cowboys & Aliens where Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) flashes back to his being abducted by aliens, tortured, and equipped with some sort of laser-shooting contraption on his wrist. He writhes and squirms on the slab before bolting up and fleeing in pain. The scene gets a hand-held, docu-drama aesthetic shift from Matthew Libatique's portentous, dimly-lit cinematography, suggesting (perversely) some sort of visual connection with post-9/11 incarnations of media-obsessed international torture footage - forced subtext. Forced, in that what has preceded this despicably glib inclusion amounts essentially to narrative incontinence, overflowing with nonsense on top of nonsense, as genre mash-up collides with comprehensive genre misunderstanding. This is what you assholes deserve for praising those shitty Iron Man films.

Fact is, Jon Favreau might just be the most incompetent director ever allowed to helm a $100 Million studio production. Such a claim must be predicated on the recognition that Favreau is not without a certain degree of savvy - he at least knows to put big names around him (Spielberg, Howard, and Grazer get executive producer credits) and hires a cinematographer to make his film look like it's sophisticated. One need only peel back these easily crumbled layers to reveal his crux of novice interest - that being merely concept. He's a suitable director for these times of marketing fascism, where consumers mindlessly wander from product to product, week after week, blithely devouring the next "must-see" blockbuster, fitfully amused, but only because they're too chickenshit to dissent. That, and wholly unrefined in artistic appreciation.

Such a digression must preface a brief examination of Cowboys & Aliens, equal parts calculation and artistic dearth; if grossly self-aware dreck like Machete and Kick-Ass are cultural seizures, Favreau invites paroxysm against what his filmmaking stands for. For him, genre is merely a confluence of archetype and setting. Infatuated with facade over feeling, he's content to indulge inanity for the sake of satiating a simplistic physiological fetish - posturing imagery, images as a means to an end; he has not the slightest eye for movement or awe. His tricks are merely grade-school antics compared with the stupefying visceral one-hour finale of Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Oddly enough, scribes Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman also helped pen this...thing (alongside six others!), but the shoddy incongruence lies solely upon Favreau's shoulders, seething in every single frame, simply an idea (a dickhead one, at that) in search of anything resembling human action, thought, reaction, creation. Supplanting even comic book superficiality (not a yeoman's task), this isn't "dumb fun" (is there even such a thing?) so much as a black hole where the cinematically forsaken form for a call to worship.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, 2011) -- C+

2011-07-29T23:13:00.000-07:00

The cast of Crazy, Stupid, Love. is so strong that they almost compensate for an embarrassingly cringe-worthy script by Dan Fogelman and shockingly pedestrian direction by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, who made perhaps the most delightfully idiosyncratic comedy of 2010, I Love You Phillip Morris. Bonus points for refraining from heedless raunch are quickly lost by the realization that none of the filmmakers have a distinct vision or insight for nearly a half dozen intersecting story lines, where Cal (Steve Carrell), having just been divorced by Emily (Julianne Moore), who's been cheating on him with David (Kevin Bacon) meets endlessly cool, sexy Jacob (Ryan Gosling), who'll teach him how to be a player - only Jacob has a hang-up of his own in Hannah (Emma Stone), the woman who might change his womanizing ways. Less interesting subplots involve the adolescent crush of Cal's son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) on babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who just so happens to be secretly in love with Cal. Cal, meanwhile, has a nasty one night stand with Kate (Marisa Tomei), who just so happens to be Robbie's 8th grade teacher. If it all sounds needlessly convoluted, well, it is, and yields little by way of meaningful relationship insight or resonance. Moreover, the "just so happens to be's" take an outrageous turn in the finale, coupled with a painfully saccharine, harmonious cast recognition that love is, indeed, all one needs. Nevertheless - through all of the expositional headache, Ryan Gosling emerges as the brightest talent of his generation, able to seamlessly pull off such comedic material here, right after his marriage-on-the-rocks virtuoso turn in Blue Valentine. Alongside Michael Fassbender, there's no better actor working today. Steve Carrell also delivers an excellent performance, arguably the best of his film career. However, the female characters get really fucked over here, especially Marisa Tomei's psycho-bitch schoolteacher, unfunny caricature and pre-feminist hysteria abounding. Yucky stuff. Likewise, Moore is merely a conduit for Carrell's sexual reawakening - the film doesn't treat her with much interest. Emma Stone is probably the strongest female presence, but even she's saddled with an Asian-American BFF whose sole preoccupation is Stone's happiness. Too bad, as even a marginally satisfactory script would have sufficed with such glowing talent on board.

Friends With Benefits (Will Gluck, 2011) -- C+

2011-07-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

The smarmy self-righteousness of Will Gluck's Easy A has worn off a considerable bit in Friends with Benefits, a hyper-self-aware Rom Com entry that feigns pedigree more than it actually demonstrates sophistication; however, anytime a film features scenes and/or posters from It Happened One Night, On the Waterfront, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, screen-romance afficionados must take note. The postmodern relationship crisis strikes again: can we fuck and just be friends? Resoundingly the answer is NO, and though these traditionalist, heteronormative underpinnings are trite, trite, trite, there's something to be said for Gluck's genuine interest in his two protags, each played charmingly by respective leads Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis (who's especially strong). Moreover, characters act and think with pop culture prowess, chiding the Hollywood romance lessons from the Katherine Heigel canon, predicting beats in standard film fare down to the painfully literal music, and even using the word "postmodern" to describe themselves! Were Gluck less overt in his pop-cock waving (dude's just showing off), maybe he'd have recognized that merely citing cliches does not excuse him from indulging them - which is precisely what Friends With Benefits does when it isn't proudly announcing itself as not one of the pack. Undeniably, Gluck knows the genre - but there's a fine line between knowing and feeling; his lead-pipe direction, exhausting pacing, and zeitgeist infatuation don't amount to comedic ingenuity. Less perceptively quotidian than determinedly "fresh," the leads are buried by Gluck's self-love.

Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011) -- C-

2011-07-25T23:25:00.000-07:00

Captain America: The First Avenger is the corporatist, Hollywood-franchise machine at its most egregiously barren, hiring competent (the most overrated superlative of pop movie critic lingo) director Joe Johnston to craft a thoroughly adequate, formulaic, and (thus) vanilla production, designed and manipulated to suck any and all idiosyncrasy from its straight-forward aesthetic, even more so any cultural and/or historical astuteness. Much like Thor, another Marvel tentpole to preface the soon-to-be mammoth The Avengers, there's little here for a viewer to like, much less love - and theoretically, there's little to hate. That's the franchise way - as long as you don't piss them off, they'll come calling for more later, on the promise of excellence, like a bird that keeps crashing into a window, thinking the glass has finally disappeared. Of course, this promise is predicated on an alternative brand of excellence - technical proficiency and narrative logic. They look at it this way: give the film a slick aesthetic (here smoky and gray because, you know, that's how things looked in the 1940's), provide an "inspiring" underdog character, give him a love interest, throw in the uncertain but ultimately accepting father figure, and set-up a villain with will-to-power interests via global domination, though faltering because of narcissistic tendencies...voilà!

At least it won't elicit statements like, "the worst film I have ever seen," something I heard a recent attendee claim about The Tree of Life. And that's precisely what studio-heads want: a perpetuation, a seemingly endless cycle of superficial films, showing allegiance to cynically devised metanarratives that simplistically (and, in terms of form, causally) depict action, desire, and consequence. Viewers are now brainwashed robots, disparaging (and unable to recognize or feel) artistry and passion, then extolling hackneyed, endlessly redundant pop fare. Such a culture calls for pugilism over compassion - sickeningly unimaginative. Critics are equally to blame, afraid to speak up (or, even worse, just exaggerated versions of the brainwashed viewers) because they face a backlash in readership. If the body of critics across the country truly finds Captain America worthy of a single viewer's time and consideration (at last check, it sits squarely on 74% at Rotten Tomatoes), then we're truly in the dark days of socio-cultural sophistication.

There's a central paradox Johnston fails to probe - the proliferation of "all for one, one for all" militarism (which Captain America endlessly drudges out - not to mention hero worship), but mindless finger-wagging at the numbingly archetypal Nazi villain. An early scene laughably imitates Christoph Waltz's Col. Landa - only it isn't meant to be satirical. That's the issue plaguing much of Captain America, a consistent negation or, even simpler, non-recognition of its inherent responsibility to take history seriously, either through a vision infused with nuanced conviction, or radical revisionism, turning myth into fantasy, identifying the thin line between the two. Nah - to quote a friend of mine: "In Captain America, he has his shield and pretty girls and the trains go boom boom and the bad guys go dead dead, and the world goes save save, and the guy gets strong strong." This movie sucks sucks.

Winnie the Pooh (Stephen J. Anderson & John Hall, 2011) -- C+

2011-07-23T10:04:00.001-07:00

Winnie the Pooh is an inherent relief from Pixar corporatism - minimal, hand-drawn, but more importantly, founded upon a degree of humanism, interested in simple, sincere moral tales. However, to stop here and laud this fleeting 67 minute feature with praise would be bad criticism, no better than the viewer who appreciates a film because he agrees with it's "message," presentation be damned. Fact is, this reintroduction of the A.A. Milne's indelible crew of play things lacks a genuine sense of immediacy and drive towards its desired moral ends, amusing in its minimalism, and approaching excellence in two surrealistic sequences (Pooh has always been a self-reflexive text too; doubters need witness only the characters' interaction with the actual words of the storybook) which deliberately evoke Dali and Cocteau in juxtaposition (and irrationality) of size, scale, and movement. Nevertheless, these evocations are more transitional beats than pointed pieces to a greater, playful puzzle. Pooh has consistently been among the greatest of 20th century childhood narratives (those unfamiliar with Frederick Crews' The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, though only adjacently about Milne's stories, will find much hilarity if knowledgeable of the Pooh characters), primarily because it celebrates imagination and friendship without cynical sentimentality (a deadly combination). Too bad the latest Pooh, while admirable, lazily reaches its humanist ends, as if it were a foregone conclusion, confusing minimalism with simplicity.

Pusher (Nicolas Winding Refn, 1996) -- C+

2011-07-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to place Pusher within the action canon in 2011, seeing how so many films have imitated, borrowed, or straight-up stolen from Nicolas Winding Refn's neo-neorealist crime feature debut. From Snatch to Gomorrah, the film's influence may run nearly as deep as Pulp Fiction, informing both form and content. Unfortunately, Refn's interests are only slightly more sophisticated and relevant than many of his imitators. In chronicling the petty drug pushing of two Copenhagen hoods, Refn's immediate interests are characterized less by a hypocritical examination of will-to-power (the subgenre's staple approach) than an exploration of fragile masculinity, bordering on outright crisis. Frank (Kim Bodnia) and Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) assert their sexual dominance via discussions of orgy dick-sucking, butt-fucking, and past instances where they had to "fuck someone up" for flirting/fooling around with their girlfriends. These early scenes are strong, almost satirical in their awareness of the genre norm. Moreover, by refraining from ironic detachment (unlike cinematic tumor Guy Ritchie), there's a degree of sincerity driving these scenes towards humanist revelation. However, that tract becomes lost less than halfway in, once Refn begins to pile on the cliches of undercover cops, snitching, drug use, and bursts of graphic violence, all filtered through the "gritty, realist" aesthetic (how depressingly literal), wrapped up in a world at once reviled and admired. Refn loses interest in progressive genre critique and, by the film's end, is more part of the problem than subversive visionary.

Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011) -- B

2011-07-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

Give Gore Verbinski credit for not merely replicating the ho-hum fun of his lamentable Pirates of the Carribean films with Rango, easily 2011's most ambitious feature (behind The Tree of Life, of course). With his animated debut, Verbinski calculatingly culls many cinematic favorites (Leone, Chinatown, El Topo, My Darling Clementine are the central referents), gorgeously (and creepily) animates an anthropomorphized pastiche, integrating pop discussions of existentialism and morality. Rango boasts dialogue that, in these near-illiterate times, could only be called verbose, at a whip-snap pace. In abstaining from culpability with Pixar schmaltz, Verbinski inherently makes Rango a refreshing departure - it's just a shame the film becomes thematically unwieldy and, at times, subsumed by the monstration of its breathtaking animation. Not necessarily a bad thing given its texture and fullness, particularly when acknowledging the idiosyncrasy of each possum, lizard, or, even more frightening, giant snake, that gets a leering close-up.

The visuals transcend merely the weird by giving the titular character (Johnny Depp's best work since Ed Wood) a narrative grounding, methodically introducing peripheral characters, and convincingly conjuring a quest to send them on. Yet, there's a nagging problem with all of this, being that Verbinski is, essentially, indulging himself (as many recent filmmakers have) with yet another variant on "homage overload," collecting bits and pieces from various influences, making it explicit, and ultimately falling short of any discernible revision, much less one worthy of further consideration. Viewers should know something is slightly off when the spokesman for the film's recurring mariachi band says during the opening, "sit back and enjoy your low calorie popcorn." Too cute by a half, such an inclusion epitomizes a comprehensive disinterest in making Rango a truly daring mainstream work. Nevertheless, several sequences (such as a mid-film chase through the desert) are wonderfully captured (Roger Deakins acts as consulting DP for the animators) and as a visual work, Rango is unquestionably a masterpiece.

Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinski, 2010) -- B

2011-07-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

As far as franchise flicks go, Tron: Legacy quickly ascends the ranks merely through its emphasis on form, streamlined and devised with the image in mind. Director Joseph Kosnski doesn't necessarily have an acute eye for movement and dimension (his images don't develop a social level needed to constitute feeling or emotionality), but between his bleak, Fincher-esque aesthetic and infusion of Daft Punk's electro-chic score, there's a surface-level visceral quality driving the thankfully sparse narrative. Familiarity with the 1982 original isn't a prerequisite, but Kosinski doesn't conform to reboot banality, less interested in reconstructing the mythology than utilizing details for spinning a new yarn. The four screenwriters play with fantasy/sci-fi standard narrative, allowing brash young Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) less a plethora of daddy-issues than minimal motivation for sling-shotting him into "the grid," a digital realm of creatively rendered mano-y-mano battles (light, sound, aura) and posturing baddies, namely Clu (Jeff Bridges), a tyrannical doppleganger for Sam's father, trapped for years without recourse. Though a more thoroughly felt narrative would constitute deeper consideration, Kosinski at least refrains from expositional overload, thankfully forgoing self-indulgent pop mythology, rather constructing giddy set-pieces of physical grace. An early scene of Sam driving his motorbike through city streets perfectly reflects these interests. If Tron: Legacy wears thin in the final third, Kosinski's previous emphases make comparable boy vs. the world epics like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings seem simplistic and aesthetically unsophisticated.

Monte Carlo (Thomas Bezucha, 2011) -- B

2011-07-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

Little to no one seems to have pointed out that Thomas Bezucha's Monte Carlo shares its title with a 1930 Ernst Lubitsch film, starring Jeanette MacDonald as a Countess seeking financial security, using the titular destination as backdrop and geographical marker for its adult fantasy. It's a wonderful film - socially conscious and endlessly amusing. The same can be said for Bezucha's film, though to a lesser degree. Three Texas girls head for Paris following high school graduation, each with a certain degree of baggage. Grace (Selena Gomez) has been waiting to graduate so she can flee her small-town roots; Meg (Leighton Meester) is still broken-up over her Mom's death, nearly two years prior; Emma (Katie Cassidy) is conflicted about marrying her long-time boyfriend. The early scenes flatly render motivations with little nuance or heft - it's blunt and hackneyed.

Nevertheless, once they arrive overseas, Bezucha surprisingly allows for reflective moments, not just with the girls, but their imaginations and impressions of the city. Like Midnight in Paris (but refitted for the proper demographic), there's a mix of fantasy and social consciousness - Monte Carlo even more so, since its mistaken identity hook (which kick-starts the narrative's crux) affords immersive, Princess fantasy-as-reality for the trio, but consistently (if half-heartedly) questions bourgeois decadence and the cultural construction of girlhood, materialist desires. Moreover, the film almost completely lacks slapstick gags, quipping children, or pandering sensibilities. It treats these three like young adults, genuinely interested in their fears and anxieties. These specifics are less interesting, though, than the film's playfulness in enacting an implicit contextual understanding, reverent to filmmaking traditions, while responding to the pop cultural zeitgeist without explicit referencing or cynical sneering.

Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011) -- C

2011-07-14T10:30:00.000-07:00

Larry Crowne offers a refreshing bit of modesty and humility when compared with its aggressively raunchy brethren (like Horrible Bosses or Bad Teacher), but it's ultimately just as contrived in its wholly complacent, borderline ridiculously naive perspective. Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) loses his retail job (some nonsense about him never going to college), which propels him towards the local community college, where he meets babe prof Mercedes Tainot (Julia Roberts), who's naturally going through rocky times in her marriage and having an identity crisis about her role as educator ("Does anyone even care what I'm talking about?"). Essentially a successive series of meet-cute's and whacky characters, Larry Crowne is cookie-cutter humanism, superficially suggesting self-expression and a positive outlook (Tainot's mantra of "care" makes the rote 180 by film's end) are the keys to happiness and self-fulfillment. Supporting players Wilmer Valderrama and George Takei get some nice moments, and Hanks is considerably nuanced with his schleppy lead. Little of this matters when the script (co-written by Hanks and Nia Vardalos) is so minute, inconsequential, and innocuous, it's a wonder the film doesn't just disintegrate right off the screen. Hanks' direction adds a few deft touches (split-screen work early at least shows some effort), but he directs dialogue exchanges with tone-deaf pacing and beats, leaving the film to rely solely on the goodwill of its characters, which wears thin well before the 2/3 point.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two (David Yates, 2010) -- C+

2011-07-14T03:49:00.000-07:00

There's a moment in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 that seems to suggest a ravishing conclusion will follow; stranded with his peers and professors from the entire franchise in their beloved Hogwarts, Harry and the gang prepare for Voldemort and his crew's descent, recalling the genre perfection of John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. I should quickly add that this moment is fleeting, however, since director David Yates instead negates any such visceral minimalism for Lord of the Rings carbon copy mayhem, replete with Titanic-esque moments of sentimental panic, destruction, and strained pathos. Such a sequence suitably summarizes a franchise that has been content to settle for easy moments of excitement (nothing in this film truly astounds), much less features a single sequence in its eight-film span that warrants notoriety beyond the sufficient. Even at the end, Harry Potter remains a poor-man's fantasy realm, serving up broad themes of regret, destiny, and mortality without ever convincingly addressing any social parallel, much less a compelling aesthetic vehicle.

There are moments in this final saga that approach sophistication, unfortunately stopping just short before reaching said destination. In particular, a surrealistic sequence involving Potter's interacting with deceased Dumbledore, concluding with the line, "If it's in your head, isn't that still real?" Transcending perfunctory existentialism, the line speaks with crude brevity to subjective vantage points, something that could easily have been explored by Yates in the formal presentation. Rather, he's content to represent Potter's final hour with workman banality, jumping between characters and motivations without any concrete rationality. Though the perspective belongs to Potter throughout, the form never compliments this shift in a sufficient way, relegating his genuinely existential feelings of displacement hollow or, at least, underwhelming. That's the whole of the Harry Potter finale - a woulda-coulda-shoulda affair that consistently falters in offering a jaw-breaking knockout blow.

Horrible Bosses (Seth Gordon, 2011) -- C+

2011-07-12T22:34:00.000-07:00

Judd Apatow's reign now extends past the productions he's not even associated with - Horrible Bosses reeks of said director/producer's brand of man-child antics, improv mixed with scripted material, and crude-but-cuddly humor. Seth Gordon's film has a veneer of noir ethos, but the schema is wholly toothless, predicated on naughty words and erratic behavior over situational causality, which would follow the should-be nasty premise to its proper ends (while revealing nuance about work-place dynamics). Instead, the lout characters at the helm are treated as darlings, inept but still nice guys, whose decision to kill their tyrannical bosses is essentially just another frat-boy premise ploy, a vehicle for ridiculousness rather than legitimate consideration. Here's yet another "raunchy" comedy that thinks drug gags (accidentally inhaling cocaine), bad words (nympho Jennifer Aniston gets to talk about her female parts in various terms), and awkward racial dynamics constitute provocative material. For all its mugging, Horrible Bosses never excavates any of the horror implied in its title - this is simply date night fodder. Blame not the cast, which from top to bottom is quite excellent, excluding the incessantly whiny Charlie Day. Too timid to activate any underlying implications that would challenge contemporary comedic convention rather than conform, the flick is funny, but lacking sufficient gall.

Hall Pass (The Farrelly Brothers, 2011) -- C-

2011-07-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

It pains me to see the Farrelly Brothers, whose films have consistently balanced the goofy, human, and absurd over the years, sink to perhaps their lowest point with Hall Pass, a thoroughly desperate and unfunny vehicle that couldn't play more like a tonally uncertain amalgamation of sweetness and gross-out. Even their unsatisfactory remake of The Heartbreak Kid had at least a degree of charm, managing moments (what the brothers specialize in) of cleverness. Now, their latest premise, which could have theoretically yielded a Dumb and Dumber level romp (the underlying idea isn't flawed), sinks fast amidst their confusion. Buddy married bros (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudekis) get a week off from their wives (Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate), each compelled to make the offer after sensing marital dissatisfaction. Nothing coheres comedically, however, from the stupid-serious turns by the male leads (each is fairly awful here) and gags ranging from eating too many pot brownies, Applebees' unsatisfactory chick factor, shitting in a sand trap, and faking cunnilingus. If those don't sound lame or tired enough - well, then we're on different wavelengths. The Farrellys have always been best at utilizing their leads' comedic potential - their material has never really been that funny. That their one strength falls woefully short here should be sufficient indication as to the film's comprehensive inadequacies.

The Taking of Power By Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, 1966) -- A

2011-07-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

Roberto Rossellini's ultra-conscious approach to historical depiction deserves more than faint praise in this era of empty-headed myth making and culturally ignorant sentimentality. With an almost Bunuelian irreverence for dramatic logic (the camera often stays away from the decadent, thoughtlessly spoken characters) and a prescient aesthetic quite close to Robert Bresson's proceeding Lancelot of the Lake, Rossellini's detached precision is oddly intimate and rigorously considerate of the inescapable link between individual canonization and Nationalistic fervor. The trick comes not necessarily in the historical detail, as the filmic presentation. Meaning, simply reading the film's synopsis would be akin to perusing through a history textbook - all fact, no form.

Rossellini's brilliance comes in his ability to take an historical moment (here, the death of Cardinal Mazarin and the ascendance of young Louis), but refuse to make it "accessible." There are no cues for emotional highs and lows, no agenda-driven vilification of one character to meet certain dramatic ends. Every scene is pitched with a subversive degree of complacency, emphasizing banality over personal triumph. Try finding any such subtlety in The King's Speech. None of this should suggest Rossellini engages ambivalence or lacks a distinct comment for his work; wholly unconcerned with the "based on a true story" fetishizing (but nowhere approaching total disregard like Inglourious Basterds), he's able to liberate historicity rather than constrain and reduce it. His emphasis remains implicit, a self-constructing schema that desires interpretation and quietude over cut-and-dry posturing and finalities.

Love and Other Drugs (Edward Zwick, 2010) -- C+

2011-07-10T21:20:00.000-07:00

Love and Other Drugs flirts with similarly middlebrow terrain as Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, their lightly, almost evaporating satirical interests actually just backdrops to attractive people fucking. Director Edward Zwick believes amping up the nudity quotient makes his film sexier and more adult, which isn't necessarily true, though getting more than a few passing glances at the bods of co-stars Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal doesn't hurt the film's watchability. Nevertheless - for a film deliberately set during 1990's pharmaceutical battles (Gyllenhaal plays a go-getter drug rep), very little of Zwick's focus is on health care, much less any tangible argument or discourse. Rather, the film's narrative primarily concerns Hathaway's early stages of Parkinson's disease, and each character grappling with their inadequacies, intimacy fears, and narcissism. Though all of the material more or less plays well, there are significant focus issues in the film's second half, seemingly uncertain where its energy needs to go. Health care satire? Adept romantic dramedy? Whackier screwball comedy? All and none, the breaking point comes when Gyllenhall's character, having taken Viagra, can't lose a hard-on, and goes to the hospital for assistance. It's part-and-parcel for Zwick's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, especially distasteful and sour since it follows a scene that allows Hathaway to work her dramatic (more like histrionic) acting chops. Lacking comedic and thematic fluidity, the functional scenes never congeal into any particularly resonant form.

Little Fockers (Chris Weitz, 2010) -- F

2011-07-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

Disintegrating even the slightest semblance of good taste, cinematic sophistication, and, without question, figures resembling actual human beings, Little Fockers might just be the most excruciatingly worthless film ever made. Where to begin explaining its endless barrage of travesties? Essentially, the third film in this unfunny franchise (okay, the first one at least coasted on the affability of its leads) involves...well, mainly a bunch of gobbledygook pratfalls, anal insertion gags, erectile dysfunction corkers, and, my favorite, children projectile vomiting. Every single scene in the film falls horribly, catastrophically flat almost instantaneously. Newcomers Jessica Alba, Harvey Keitel, and Laura Dern generally make complete fools of themselves. To see Keitel and De Niro, united probably for the last time on-screen, suffer and mug their way through such horrid muck is akin to cinephilic food poisoning - rarely has such an esteemed cast, who've done strong, often miraculous work with other filmmakers, been so egregiously useless. Moreover, the entire film has been written into some indistinguishable black-hole, as none of these characters could ever be mistaken for living, breathing, people. Neither does director Chris Weitz turn the proceedings into outlandish farce, a move which would have, at a bare minimum, given a tonal consistency to the nonsense. Rather, he directs with a moron's eye, relying on excess and strained, desperate gags to keep the incoherent narrative chugging along. Furthermore, there's never even one iota of thought given to thematic formation about family values or aging. Just seemingly endless, woefully unfunny jab after jab. Rarely will "fun" ever be this intellectually imprisoning.

Brotherhood (Will Canon, 2011) -- F

2011-07-09T17:17:00.000-07:00

Any dregs of morality are purely coincidental in Will Canon's appalling, incompetently executed Brotherhood, which is far more concerned with callously constructing masculine identity via cruel pranks, revving up an indistinguishable, metal-driven soundtrack, and filmed with enough murky, washed out cinematography to make Tony Scott blush. Everyone is dripping with sweat from the film's opening scene, but only tasteless, culturally unaware buffoons could be moved or thrilled by such a calculated presentation of forceful pathos. The entire film is predicated on a fraternity prank gone awry, after one of the pledges actually robs a convenience store (a communication mix-up, natch). The remainder dredges out its Tarantino-influenced guns, taking place over the course of a single night, with one of the frat guys bleeding to death. More offensive than every single frame's derivative nature is the disgustingly mistaken sense of moral fortitude; many films preach peace while reveling in violence, but Canon takes it even further, eroticizing the drawing of silver-plated handguns and wearing of ski-masks without irony - he clearly gets off on such pathetically transparent visual puerility. Unlike Larry Clark's Bully, Brotherhood mistakes genre masturbation for generational commentary - that's what great about Clark's film, it peerlessly defied genre (Docudrama? Suspense? Horror? Comedy?) not with pastiche, but by unearthing its lead characters' genuine sense of displacement, malaise, and cognitive misunderstanding of causality. Try finding any such layering of feeling from Canon's poorly scripted (some of the most risible dialogue in recent memory) and embarrassingly adolescent views on violence, sex, and cinema.

The Illusionist (Sylvain Chomet, 2010) -- B

2011-07-08T14:17:00.000-07:00

Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist is not so much a blessing as a needed rebuttal to Pixar and Dreamworks animation domination. Certainly, the Jacques Tati scripted feature is made with impeccable charm, grace, and serenity, beautifully recalling not just a style of animation that prioritizes elegance over polemics, noise, and excess, but also an implicit critique of a knee-jerk pop culture that devours whatever novel product is laid before them. Tati's critique of contemporary diversion through technology (disabling accessible human connection), is perhaps more relevant now than ever. Not to imply that Chomet addresses such issues explicitly, but his anachronistic magician adequately fulfills this metaphor, caught between his own desires/convictions and the consistently (d)evolving artistic preferences of others. With hardly a line of dialogue (much like his equally charming The Triplets of Belville), The Illusionist meditates on a city's expansive beauty (Paris), human behavioral idiosyncrasy, and a bygone era's nostalgic charm, without turning sentimental. Essence is rooted in artistic tradition and a culture's past, so Chomet suggests looking back (through introspection, not thoughtless replication) in order to move forward.

Ip Man (Wilson Yip, 2010) -- B+

2011-07-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

Few martial arts driven films in recent memory are as thoroughly engaging and executed as Wilson Yip's Ip Man, part mythical biopic, part brash, kung-fu extravaganza. Not since Tony Jaa dismantled an army of men in The Protector has the genre been so kinetic. Moreover, Yip's sturdy hand does more than merely string together a few dazzlingly choreographed fight scenes - grounding the battles in convincingly sparse period piece dramatics, there's an impressively multi-layered balance of pathos and visual movement, due much in part to Donnie Yen's sly, understated performance as the titular grandmaster. Rather than unwisely weight down the proceedings in ultra-soapy melodrama, Yip goes light on exposition, primarily establishing scenario through title cards, brief scenes of dialogue, and minimal scenarios. By not overextending the narrative, Yip implicitly deconstructs nationalistic honor and pride through violence, perhaps brazen in his pop-art treatment of history, but no so egregious as to merely gloss through it. The final third especially ratchets up Yip's confluence of interests, enabling a climax that's acutely aware of its inherent silliness, but also deeper cultural convictions that translate well in a cinematic space.

Barney's Version (Richard J. Lewis, 2010) -- C

2011-07-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

With a biopic (in this case, pseudo-biopic), it's all about form over content. Like any number of dutiful, but unremarkable biopics from the last few years (Ray, Kinsey, Frida, etc.), Barney's Version takes the episodic route, encompassing many years into the span of 2+ hours. Bad choice, though undoubtedly done to maintain a degree of reverence to Mordecai Richler's novel. Nevertheless, redundancy and complacency result, as neurotic asshole Barney Panofsky (Paul Giamatti) goes through three marriages, years of ridicule, and even a murder investigation. Director Richard J. Lewis finds no way to transcend a literal presentation, shooting with a pedestrian's eye, and failing to encompass any sort of mounting tension. Each scene is so self-contained, enabling a frustrating start-stall effect. Furthermore, even the scenes themselves mundanely trot through larger themes of artistic failure, Jewish guilt, and cultural ennui. Lewis has no tonal/conceptual vision for either Barney or his film (Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman give strong efforts, nonetheless), resulting in minimal to non-existent resonance, especially given the unconvincingly sentimental conclusion.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One (David Yates, 2010) -- C-

2011-07-08T10:34:00.000-07:00

Harry Potter makes for piss-poor cinema. Other than the books' legion of fans (and granted, they are aplenty), the films offer no recourse for the unconverted - nor do they make particularly compelling vehicles for viewers interested in anything but fidelity. Certainly, there will be a major divide here, between those who've read (and likely, read again) J.K. Rowling's collective apotheosis of modern literature and those who aren't immediately compelled by the boy (now boy-man) wizard and his posse of muggles, dwarfs, ogres, goblins, and wookies. If some of my terminology is wrong, please forgive, but only the most geeked-out fanboy/girl could become excited by such a world of utter nonsense. Moreover, as envisioned by director David Yates, part one of the saga's concluding chapter seethes with self-importance masquerading as atmospheric dread - dreary is more like it. At a ridiculously bloated 147 minutes, every scene comes and goes, meaningless dialogue exchanged, plodding along to the next, without the slightest recognition that what's on-screen lacks passion or artistic weight. With the pacing of an uber-faithful miniseries adaptation (and a now hackneyed, pseudo-serious HBO aesthetic), few films are this hopelessly leaden.

Sanctum (Alister Grierson, 2011) -- D-

2011-07-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Less than five minutes into Sanctum, a James Cameron produced cinematic virus, cave-diving financier asshole Carl (Ioan Gruffudd) cockily states: “As soon as I leave, the whole thing turns into a Mongolian clusterfuck.” If that line isn't enough to make your hand start creeping towards the remote for that fast-forward button, then surely the nature chants (immediate recalling Avatar's grating score), petty bickering between indistinguishable crew members, and wholly trite and transparent narrative concerns will. Comparing this with something like Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there's nary a moment of unsentimental meditation, much less introspection. Just hokey, ever-so-thinly drawn dramatics. Director Alister Grierson earns that title by credit only, shoddily constructing even a remote sense of suspense or natural wonderment; for the man who supposedly lived something close to these events, he directs with little assurance or guidance, recycling hollow adventure film cliches, and failing to provide a single concern outside of his protagonists' survival. To call this drivel third rate would be kind.

Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisner, 2011) -- C+

2011-07-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

Though fronting a grindhouse-inspired veneer, Jason Eisner's Hobo with a Shotgun is actually more of a kindred spirit with Alex Cox's cinema, integrating giggle-driven extreme, cartoonish violence with socio-cultural degradation, culminating in pre-apocalyptic dread. Unfortunately, Eisner is, like all of his peers, driven by the cinematic posturing itself, rather than its underlying mechanism: thematic conviction. Content to rehash rather than reinvent, nothing is allowed to progress past circular logic, since a simple act of reverence is also self-effacing. World-weary Hobo (Rutger Hauer) strolls into a town overrun by young hooligans and headed by a silly tyrant named The Drake (Brian Downey). Cut-up, beaten, and exploited to the breaking point, Hobo snaps up a shotty during a robbery, becomes a "hero", and seeks continual vengeance. None of the exposition really matters - this is all about stylistic flourishes driving empty revenge. Neons, smoke, and harsh chiaroscuro characterize the mise-en-scene: flashy but meaningless. Moreover, Hobo with a Shotgun wholly misunderstands the vigilante ethos, rooting action in wink-wink self-awareness, instantaneously rendering itself insignificant. True vigilante narratives sprung from tradition clashing with post-Vietnam disillusionment; in other words, the place of personal justice in a milieu where governmental law fails. Though far more astute in its style and sense of humor than Robert Rodriguez's train wrecks Planet Terror and Machete, Eisner can't progress past a palpable sense of tedium, failing to provide a reason for his film to exist, other than allowing himself to enact an indulgent homage. If only his understanding of genre theory and practice were more astute.

Battle: Los Angeles (Jonathan Liebesman, 2011) -- D+

2011-07-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

Battle: Los Angeles is unquestionably one of the most interesting films of 2011. That doesn't mean it isn't also one of the worst. Such a seeming contradiction reveals itself through intention vs. execution - director Jonathan Liebesman's ambitions far exceed his abilities. The film deserves at least marginal credit for its focus, that being an assemblage of diverse (black, hispanic, white, female) troops, each given a half-assed, one scene backstory, who are then hurled into battle against indistinguishable robot figures. Liebesman is not concerned with the rationale for attack, nor does he provide much detailed exposition. Instead, an attempt at pathos comes via Sgt. Nance (Aaron Eckhart), whose bravado matches the patriotics of early John Wayne characters - brash, slick, and full-blooded American. In times of intense crisis, he breaks into not-so eloquent monologue about unwavering duty, remaining loyal to the platoon, and putting country before self. In other words - a plea for irrational militarism. Not since Saving Private Ryan has a Hollywood war film so flippantly utilized the heroic narrative. The film essentially turns into an extended military advertisement, verging on propaganda in its straight-faced conviction. Problem is, that conviction plays as merely incoherent filler, not revisionist history for post-9/11 response. Instead of figuring a way to properly update military credulousness, Liebesman concocts an offensive melange of low-budget sci-fi and pathetically derivative docu-drama shaky-cam. His aesthetics clash more than the marines and aliens. Moreover, Liebesman's attempt to make what are essentially backlot sets with green-screens seem like epic, on-location realism is hilariously, almost shockingly, unconvincing. Were his postmodern sensibilities more refined, one could claim such efforts as appropriating the 1950's sci-fi allegory for modern warfare anxieties, thereby simultaneously redefining action/sci-fi genre split through Carpenter-esque formal minimalism and Hawksian propriety. Nope - this is a geek's world, with video game mantras, unremarkable visuals, and thoughtlessly pro-military, dunderheaded naivete.

Just Go With It (Dennis Dugan, 2011) -- B-

2011-07-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

One thing's certain about Adam Sandler: he's riding his patented brand of giddy juvenilia to the end, stopping only seldom to make "real" films like Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People. And so the trend continues with Just Go With It, a remake of the 1969 film Cactus Flower (unseen by me), only I'd imagine that Walter Matthau starrer had less shots to the groin gags and probably didn't contain a scene where someone's hand gets shit on while they lie asleep in a bathtub. Nevertheless - what Sandler and crew never get enough credit for is their sense of the absurd, not so much "random" chic as socio-culturally reactive, prizing sight gags and often puzzled reaction shots over sitcom-level punchlines. There's a silliness that instantly satirizes, especially when something like plastic surgery is the target - Sandler has never stopped poking fun at bourgeois narcissism. Moreover, with Sandler's Danny as the straight-man more than the young hothead (co-star Nick Swardson hilariously picks up the slack on this end), there's a humble maturity present in the relationship with Katherine (Jennifer Aniston), albeit one rooted in goofy naivete and fantasy than any genuine attempt to address an aging man's discontent with the single life. No such luck - but then again, Sandler's chosen comedic mode consistently charms because of its tone and pace, hardly ever smug or overtly precious. Even when not outright funny (probably 80% of the time), Sandler and director Dennis Dugan keep things peppy and fleet.

Unstoppable (Tony Scott, 2010) -- C

2011-07-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

Tony Scott is just obsessed with things that go real, real fast. Following his disappointing 1990's actioner-throw-back The Taking of Pelham 123, he unwisely elects to throw-it-back even further to the disaster/wreckage films of the 1970's with Unstoppable - to considerably muddled results. Lacking enough creativity or passion to circumnavigate the obvious trappings, Scott lazily ticks off the narrative beats: odd couple duo with family issues must ultimately confront their indecision through an act of heroism; tyrannical corporation head holds the company's interests dearer than human lives; eclectic group of supporting characters quip and look with concerned stares from afar; climax gathers families watching TV monitors as their loved ones get banged-up, but save the day just in time. More banal than the narrative beats is Scott's ice-cold visual style, equipped with his usually blurry transitions, and fulfilling nothing more than looking serviceably drab. Denzel Washington has rarely looked this tired. Chris Pine is a decent actor, but he's given nothing more to do than pout and appear troubled about his crumbling marriage. Infused with a tighter sense of blue-collar angst (and exuberant, rather than hackneyed humor), Unstoppable would be exciting - as is, there's a persistent certainty that all artistic parties involved are coasting.

Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011) -- B-

2011-07-06T18:31:00.001-07:00

Commercialism shouldn't stop Cars 2 from being seen as Pixar's best film since Ratatouille - there's an unbridled enthusiasm driving the often spellbinding visuals and director John Lasseter mercifully omits the saccharine sentimentality that ultimately sunk Up and Toy Story 3. There's more imagination on display in Lasseter's presentation (the opening sequence approaches visceral sophistication) and these anthropomorphized cars make better play-date companions than Woody and the gang, especially Larry the Cable Guy's Mater, surprisingly funny and genuine, if slight. Nevertheless, Pixar yet again cannot refrain from attempts at implicit morality building, as the crux of the narrative concerns the emergence of an alternative fuel vs. big business oil. Like Up's corporation baddies or Wall-E's unforgivably smug liberalism, it's an unwelcome addition to a film that should be about wonderment, not polemics. More offensive could be Cars 2's eye-raisingly casual cultural stereotyping (another Pixar staple), but the damage is slight here, mainly because the tone is kept endearing, rather than forcefully sombre.

Beginners (Mike Mills, 2011) -- B

2011-07-06T18:28:00.000-07:00

Beginners is almost a great film. In spots, it feels like one, playfully expressing self-pity, existential woes, and relationship angst without losing its precision and verve - director Mike Mills is, at least, specific in his vision. Bittersweet throughout, the death of Oliver's (Ewan McGregor) father (Christopher Plummer) conjures up Gondry-esque tampering with temporality and montage, implicitly suggesting the transient nature of life, distinguishable only through the zeitgeist's cultural signposts. Nevertheless, an unfortunate degree of cutesy quirk permeates just enough to soil otherwise magnificent work, such as a Oliver's dog, who speaks through subtitles nearly a dozen times throughout the film. Too pandering. Moreover, the film's consistent insistence upon anarchy and "living by one's own rules" plays more as hollow hipsterism than stone-cold conviction, especially since Mills sentimentalizes these assertions, rather than putting them to the test. At its worst, Beginners resembles cinematic migraine Running with Scissors - bourgeois self-hatred played as virtue. Yet, at its best, Mills transcends these trappings and approaches the art of Wes Anderson or Michel Gondry - but he never quite gets there, mainly because his aesthetic sensibilities are ironic rather than expressive, the visual ticks providing polemical commentary instead of organically supplementing the human struggles. The film does, however, feature some of the year's best acting (McGregor, Plummer, and Laurent) and is a step in the right direction for Mills following his muddled debut, Thumbsucker.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011) -- B+

2011-07-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

It should almost go without saying that Werner Herzog conjures up gorgeous, mesmerizing, and wholly transcendental images in his latest documentary, also in 3D, though that's more of a tangential perk than anything worth discussing. What truly brings vitality to the material are the interviews with numerous scientists and archeologists, all of whom have devoted significant amounts of time to studying the Chauvet caves of Southern France. Human idiosyncrasy (of the interviewees) parallels the incomprehensible drawings of cavemen, still preserved and astonishingly legible. Herzog posits the findings as lost or forgotten dreams, even going so far as to refer to their attempts of depicting movement as "proto-cinema." The archeologists muse over a time long since passed, becoming giddy and eloquent when narrativizing what's on the cave walls. They, like Herzog, view the past with equal parts nostalgia and introspection, often mimicking the actions of cavemen (such as throwing a spear to kill a horse) but are humorously unsuccessful. The past cannot be retained in whole - but it can be dreamt, mythologized, and made grandiose. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is an endlessly eloquent manifestation of this phenomenon.

Best of 2011 (so far)

2011-07-04T10:15:00.001-07:00

Halfway through the year, there have been some gems, but mostly a lot of shit. Here's how my favorites are stacking up:

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
2. Kaboom (Gregg Araki)
3. Scream 4 (Wes Craven)
4. Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen)
5. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog)
6. Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay)
7. Beginners (Mike Mills)
8. 13 Assassins (Takashi Miike)
9. Green Lantern (Martin Campbell)
10. Hanna (Joe Wright)

Honorable Mention: Source Code (Duncan Jones), Insidious (James Wan)

Need to see: Hobo with a Shotgun, Of Gods and Men, Rango, Sucker Punch, The Housemaid, Even the Rain, Super, Paul, Incendies, Le Quattro Volte, Meek's Cutoff, Poetry, and Uncle Boonmee

Weekly Viewing June 27th - July 3rd

2011-07-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

13 ASSASSINS (Takashi Miike, 2011) -- 3/4

13 Assassins finds iconoclastic director Takashi Miike in a surprisingly reverential mode, paying thorough and adept homage to Akira Kurosawa's samurai epics, nearly devoid of his more perverse sensibilities, and approaching something almost shockingly grounded. Nevertheless, in terms of craft, scale, and visual sophistication, Miike reveals a classicist knack, focusing on traditional themes of honor, duty, and morality without an explicitly subversive or revisionist tract to be found. In essentially creating a workmanlike film, Miike both facilitates and inhibits his ends, certainly compelling as the rogue crew of ronin are assembled - and stunningly kinetic in the virtuoso, near hour long conclusion (here Miike recalls the unforgettable bloodshed of Okamoto's The Sword of Doom). Yet ultimately there's a feeling of restraint and a disappointing lack of anarchy from one of cinema's most notorious madmen. However, without considering Miike's oeuvre, there's little reason to quibble with straight-up proficiency - 13 Assassins is a professional affair from first to last frame.

TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON (Michael Bay, 2011) -- 3/4

FULL REVIEW

AMERICAN: THE BILL HICKS STORY (Matt Harlock & Paul Thomas, 2011) -- 2/4

Instead of letting Hicks speak for himself (through stand-up), this limp-wristed documentary attempts to narrate the gone-before-his-time comedian's rise from humble small-town beginnings to hilariously controversial (and ahead of his time) politico, using his stand-up for near activist means, challenging mob rule behavior and blind-leading-the-blind governmental actions. However, whenever the film cuts away from Hicks on stage, it regrettably inserts monotonous praise or recounting of specific dates and linearity, rather than finding a form to match his madcap persona. Eulogizing Hicks is not inherently misguided, but directors Matt Harlock and Bill Thomas communicate little passion in their presentation, heedlessly peppy and tritely conceived. Hicks's life and work is fascinating - the film is less than compelling.

THE WAY BACK (Peter Weir, 2011) -- 2/4

Prizing "based on a true story" narrative complacency over rigorous formal pursuits, director Peter Weir is content to shoot amidst vast landscapes without utilizing them for visual splendor, while drearily marching through man vs. wild sequences, as a group of Siberian prison escapees march thousands of miles towards their freedom. Problem is, Weir doesn't weird it up enough, neither conceiving of nature in a surrealistic way or transcending rote dialogue exchanges musing on metaphysical trappings with precise observation. There's a total lack of immediacy or passion in the filmmaking. Any time a film opens with "this film is dedicated to...", it's an immediate recognition of pandering, dramatizing history instead of implicitly questioning that dramatization; in other words, Weir makes the film as if it's 1948, without any clear indicators as to why he's chosen this subject. Films don't tell stories - they show them. Weir's chosen aesthetic plays depressingly antiquated.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED (Ivan Reitman, 2011) -- 2/4

Why is it that nearly every modern romantic comedy lacks any real bite, insight, or specificity regarding class and socio-cultural influence? No Strings Attached presents two single 30's somethings, neither of which seems to hold sincere convictions that have come from over a decade of relationship baggage and emotional scars. Instead, they are caught in a web of sitcom-level scenarios of infidelity, jealousy, and altogether narcissistic behavior. Instead of working class, hell, even professional middle-class, it's Phantom Hollywood time, as the skewered mores of elitist studio execs are passed off as the hopes, dreams, and sexual desires of the masses. Hollywood has always used beautiful people to enact romantic scenarios, but former battle-of-the-sexes verbiage has given way to reductive maxims, tritely summarizing instead of playfully engaging. The film does thankfully spare much of the crude hijinks for a genuine attempt at humor and drama, but the film never dirties nor challenges either star, pre-packaged to sell, and conceived without any desire to truthfully excavate any nuance about contemporary relationships.

RUBBER (Quentin Dupieux, 2011) -- 1.5/4

Absurdity isn't inherently clever. It takes a certain degree of wit, deft application of irony, and a firm grasp of tone to achieve resonance. Director Quentin Dupieux struggles to find these avenues with Rubber, a self-reflexive piece about an anthropomorphic tire with telekinetic powers. Crushing a bottle in the desert, next a scorpion, then a beer bottle, and finally, exploding a man's head, it's a goofy bit of allegorical drivel, the tire's desires driven by empirical instances of power and control. Unfortunately, this already pathetic set-up is sullied even more by painfully indulgent and cutesy running commentary, first through an introduction that asserts there are "no reasons" why certain things happen in many films, then with a group on onlookers who break the narrative in order to provide reflexive insights (none of which are funny or insightful), recalling Haneke's Funny Games - but without any genuine sense of terror, this isn't a sick joke, just a lame one.

THE COMPANY MEN (John Wells, 2011) -- 1/4

Rarely are films as offensively reductive and middlebrow as The Company Men, a "timely" look at the harsh effects of downsizing on career men whose lives are essentially returned to square-one after losing their six-figure salaries. Director John Wells ineptly dramatizes this with one calculated scene after another, forcing pathos through numbingly false introspection and easy payoffs, losing any and all nuance in favor of hokey-inspirational tactics (too many CROWD-PLEASING moments to count), while retaining dour undertones to insist that this is a DRAMA. Nothing transcends a one-note dialectic (everything is made neatly explicit), so that even when characters burst into a rage or display fleeting conviction, the script undercuts it with an immediate reversal or manufactured emotional cue. Lacking even a single genuine, unfiltered moment (and made even more grating by a cutesy score), there are few films as transparently condescending.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon (Michael Bay, 2011) -- B+

2011-07-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

There's more than just the battle between Autobots and Decepticons raging in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Michael Bay's third (and best) entry into the juggernaut franchise. Cynical, jaded viewers will likely be unable to look deeper than Bay's veneer of explosions, car crashes, and clanging metal (much of which, I might add, is adroitly applied for sensory stimulation) to the palpable sense of urgency and artistic desperation that manifests, especially during the film's final hour, unquestionably Bay's magnum opus, a symphonic, self-reflexive, visceral, maximum display of the filmmaker's undeniable talent for large scale spectacle. Those who hate on Bay's insistence of movement, images, and sound over narrative or character development simply miss the larger context - Bay implicitly formulates cultural discourse through his crude sense of sociological humor, filtered by his distinctly American sensibilities, at once xenophobic and playful, half-joking and half-serious. Bay's honest, terse, and purely proletarian look at the political zeitgeist is sure to enrage "progressive" viewers, because it doesn't wear kid gloves or tread lightly around delicate subject matter. Yet, through all of the wreckage and destruction accumulated, Bay retains a degree of subtlety in his ability to suggest subtextual avenues, rather than overtly allegorize his man-child visual fantasy.

Bay's sensibilities have always tended towards hyper-stylized fantasy, even when dealing completely in the real world. The Rock, for instance, plays with Military-Industrial-Complex anxieties by fetishizing posturing, masculine leads, all while reflecting the post-modern mirror back onto itself, cheeky and self-aware, brash and unashamed to perversely distort reality. Few have given Bay credit for his comic book-style takes on politics and bizarro cultural outlook; instead, leftist critics are curiously enraged by him, somehow threatened by his bravado, either lobbing claims of racism, sexism, or chauvinism, and feeling self-righteous for having "defended" fellow human beings. In a political climate where pacification is rapidly becoming a virtue, Bay's "is-it-satire-or-not" ambivalence strikes a resonant cord - and Transformers: Dark of the Moon is one of his most precise, deft applications.

The film's narrative again concerns Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), now graduated from college, trying to find a job amidst a tough financial climate. His determination and persistence aren't enough - he must "impress them," as future boss Bruce Brazos (John Malkovich) states before hiring him. Bay playfully sends up knee-jerk political impulses via the Malkovich character, whose capitalist go-getter mindset cannot be stopped, even following the death of a co-worker ("We can't let his death shut us down"). Such a combination of cynical tyranny and extreme violence recalls Paul Verhoeven's Robocop in its seamless genre critique of American bloodlust (and apathy for human loss). Mentions of President Obama, Twitter, and "Weapons of Mass Destruction" facilitate the film's zeitgeist mode, seeking to address contemporary socio-political climate, but only in passing, a preferably concise approach to any larger, didactic discursive attempt.

Interweaving ephemeral narrative exposition with consistently thrilling action sequences, the film messily (but giddily) builds to the last hour, undoubtedly Bay's finest, where his entire oeuvre comes into play, a conglomeration of everything he's been working towards for the past 15 years. Before all-out war on the streets of Chicago, Simmons (John Turturro) says: "One day they'll ask us, where were you when they took over the planet?" Histrionic rhetoric becomes the action film version of Terrence Malick's opening line from the book of Job in The Tree of Life ("Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?"). Each filmmaker becomes immediately concerned with expressing existential woes through image and sound; of course, Bay's is less philosophically driven, but his kinetic brand of transcendental insight deserves a rigorous consideration for its artistic merits, not to be flippantly dismissed as "loud, dumb, and meaningless" as irresponsible critics are so enthusiastic to do.

Likewise, before Sam enters the war-zone, Epps (Tyrese Gibson) grabs him by the arm and states: "It's over. I'm sorry, but it's over." From that moment on, narrative goes underground, and Bay immerses the film in uninterrupted spectacle, heightened by a visually discursive presentation (at one point, a subjective, first-person shooter POV shot is inserted). Could Epps be announcing the death of the film's narrative? Moreover, is Bay suggesting that his post-modern sensibilities have been exhausted, finally entering a penultimate war-zone where he'll have to give it everything he's got? Perhaps, and likely so, a poignant self-recognition of unfiltered aesthetic vision on its last go-round. Indeed, Bay does not disappoint, offering up ingeniously constructed sequences of movement, collision, and scale (the loss of gravity as a building topples over is the highlight). Certainly, the images conform to a post-9/11 anxiety, exploiting while entertaining, large-scale destruction as the visual metaphor for a deterioration of cinematic and cultural understanding. Many call Bay "the death of cinema," but his use of the medium seeks to transcend the complacent filmmaking of his contemporaries, where nothing is banal or mundane. Humorously enough, the most ordinary part of his filmmaking is narrative emphasis, as it should be - cinema shows, is visually driven, and good at eliciting emotion through montage and juxtaposition. By implicitly questioning the medium's subjectivity and offering up numerous examples of towering spectacle, Bay uses the medium appropriately; those who don't appreciate his sensibilities want to tame his unbridled approach, insisting upon narrative to drive the action, instead of the reverse.