
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
The Way (Emilio Estevez, 2011) -- C+

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

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

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

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

Monday, September 26, 2011
30 Minutes or Less (Ruben Fleischer, 2011) -- C+

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011) -- C

Friday, September 23, 2011
Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011) -- C-

Friday, September 16, 2011
Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) -- A

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.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Warrior (Gavin O'Connor, 2011) -- B

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.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011) -- B+

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.
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