The Ongoing Cinematic Education of Steven Carlson

2009-02-02T15:24:00.001-05:00

Reports of my death, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated.

This site's still going away... but I'm not. Mainly because I realized that, without a website, I can't participate in The Third Annual White Elephant Blogathon. And nobody wants to miss out on that.

What has chafed about this, what I can't really keep up with, is the reviewing load. When you try to review everything you watch, it gets burdensome. Yet I didn't really feel that crunch until several years in, and changing the format just seemed wrong to me. At least, it does here. No one's to say that we can't get a fresh start elsewhere, though. So I've done just that. This will likely be a far more informal venture - just me riffing on movies, music, booze, whatever else. In other words, more like an everyday blog. Exciting, I know.

I have thus taken a page from the Matt Prigge playbook. For those still interested, this is my new home. See you in the funny pages...

2009-01-28T02:45:00.003-05:00

Nobody's going to read this, most likely, but it needs to be said anyway. Long time coming, at any rate.

So. The other day (as in, last month) I saw Werner Herzog's Stroszek, a film that gets better every time I think about it. Stroszek is the kind of film whose impact cannot be judged while it unspools in front of you but only in the space that occurs from the moment you finish watching it to the moment you finish reflecting upon it. It famously ends on a shot of a chicken that has been trained to dance to a rudimentary tune whenever someone drops a coin in a slot. The metaphor seems obvious (the best summation I've read, as usual, comes from Roger Ebert, who writes "A force we cannot comprehend puts some money in the slot, and we dance until the money runs out"), yet it avoids didacticism through the force of its poetic potency. It has stuck with me like few movies have, and here's why.

There are a lot of times through the past couple of years that I've felt like that chicken, and folks, I need to stop dancing. I work too much, I drink too much, I watch too much and I expect too much. This was all easy back when I was pulling forty-five hours a week and scribbling whatever came to mind, but as both my responsibilities and my personal standards have risen, I find I can't maintain this little corner any longer. Most nights, it becomes a choice between watching and writing. With my backlog at over 500 films now, I don't want to make that choice. One of the two must fall. So, here it is. We're pulling down the shutters for good. Thanks for having me.

2008-10-25T19:29:00.000-04:00

Week of September 8th:

The Bounty Man (1972): Bland TV-movie Western starring Clint Walker as a bounty hunter who goes to bring in John Ericson, a dangerous thief and murderer, while another group of unscrupulous bandits stick on his tail, intending to take the bounty for themselves. Does nothing unexpected or especially interesting; has the structure and psychological underpinnings of a Boetticher/Scott Western but lacks the lean, tough vigor. The ending is an abrupt pop-psych botch. Margot Kidder looks lost as Ericson's tenacious lady. Grade: C

Brand Upon the Brain! (2007): Who does alternate-universe perversity as well as Guy Maddin? Nobody, that's who. Even when he's wandering through ideas he's worked with before, he still manages to find new perspectives on them. Incestuous/Oedipal conflicts run through much of Maddin's work, as does gender fluidity; this time around, though, he's bundled said familiar thematics inside a memory piece framing a combination coming-of-age tale/Hardy Boys-type mystery that abruptly shifts into horror dynamics two-thirds of the way through. The genre-hopping craziness of the piece's main body reflects the emerging hormonal roil of the younger Maddin, on the cusp of puberty as he is; meanwhile, the framing device offers a rueful perspective on said flashback craziness, offering us a calmer time where the echoes of a painful childhood still resonate (both metaphorically and literally -- the present-day line sees elder Maddin refurbishing the family lighthouse, long since fallen into disrepair). Through all this, Maddin's dazzling formal abilities wane not a bit. Chews through ideas and images so quickly that it feels on the long side even at a mere 90-odd minutes, but when said running time includes the indelible bit where the narrator (I chose Crispin Glover) howls "RUMANIA!" ever more frantically while a dead man is shocked, Frankenstein-style, back into a grotesque simulacrum of life, it seems churlish to complain. Grade: B+

La Promesse (1997): Breakthrough film for the Dardenne brothers serves as a solid introduction to their neorealism-by-way-of-Bresson ethos. Luc and Jean-Pierre direct with confidence and force yet never seem overbearing or intrusive, important given the hand-wringing potential evident in their socially-engaged scenario. The film deals with the slow moral evolution of Igor, a young man who begins to rebel against his slumlord father and the treatment of the immigrants in Dad's thrall, yet the film doesn't hector or deal in shades of black and white -- Amidou, an African immigrant whose death touches off the boy's epiphany in the form of a promise to look after his wife, has a gambling addiction, and his wife is often adamantly unwilling to accept Igor's benign help. In lesser hands, this material could easily become breast-beating polemics, but the Dardennes, who favor human activity over human speech, keep it grounded in a particular sense of everyday existence and an awareness of physical being. (There's a scene where Igor's father gives him a whupping that's as quick, violent and brutal as anything I've seen.) It becomes less about the politics of the particular situation and more about simply Doing What's Right, and it's wonderfully engrossing. Also, aside from the film's value in itself, La Promesse also introduced the cinema world to a soulful, ridiculously talented kid named Jérémie Renier. And the cinema world is much richer for it. Grade: B+

Postal (2008): Big surprise time: Cinematic bugbear Uwe Boll, as it turns out, can be funny. And I don't mean accidentally funny like Christian Slater shouting, "Don't be insane!" in Alone in the Dark or the sudden appearance of medieval ninjas in In the Name of the King -- I mean in an on-purpose, joke-telling, setup-punchline kind of way. Postal is a teeth-bared tasteless satire in the vein of South Park, and seeing Dr. Boll's tendencies towards the inexplicable harnessed for comedic ends carries its own fascinating charge, as it's the bursts of slapstick weird that keep this from sliding into anti-everything drudgery. I expect a number of the biggest laughs are taken from the source videogame, but that doesn't change the fact that tone is everything and there's a million ways to fuck up, for instance, the cat-silencer gag. That it got a hearty laugh out of this avowed cat-lover is to Boll's credit. But it wouldn't be a Boll film if he didn't ultimately find a way to fuck it up, and Postal goes to shit in a hurry roughly halfway through after it presumably runs out of inspiration and becomes a dull, noisy shoot-em-up. Is it a coincidence that this shift comes right after its funniest and most surreal joke (the ultimate fate of Verne Troyer, playing "Verne Troyer")? I doubt it. Better than anyone had any right to expect, really, but it comes so close to scraping the edge of quality that its ultimate failure irks all the more. Grade: C

2008-10-14T13:16:00.002-04:00

Week of September 1:

Boarding Gate (2008): Another study of alienation disguised as a genre flick from Olivier Assayas, this could be seen as a companion piece to his awesome demonlover. Where demonlover was a tale of corporate espionage that linked spiritual/moral corruption with the ever-widening need to consume as a way to feel something (even something extreme and taboo), Boarding Gate goes the other way and gives us a cast of characters who already do and feel too much, with our heroine's ultimate goal being to unplug from the web in which she's caught and disappear into a more "normal" life. When Michael Madsen breaks out a pair of handcuffs, only to have Asia Argento proclaim, "I don't like them. They hurt."... well, there you go. The film would probably be even better if someone other than Argento was in the lead; though she's clearly been cast for her iconic value and not her acting range, the second half still feels like a letdown, if only because Asia can't really do anything other than feral animalism. Still, Assayas's eye is as sharp as ever, and if the film coasts on a terrific sense of dislocation that's still more than most other films have to their credit. Me like. Grade: B

Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2008): Strong documentary about Acrassicauda, Iraq's only heavy metal band, gets about as much mileage as would be possible out of its focus. By concentrating on the four members of the band, particularly thoughtful bassist Firas al Lateef, directors Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi manage to hit close to home and create the sense of a universal experience with a directness that isn't possible for an overview doc like No End in Sight. The members of Acrassicauda are engaging, angry fellows who remain verbose and realistic about their situation as the country spirals into chaos; when the film picks up with them after they've fled to Syria and documents their first show in four years, you're tempted to cheer in triumph even as their social conditions (no money, no practice space, generally treated like third-class citizens) mean that the film can in no possible way end on an up note. It doesn't matter what you think of heavy metal -- you should seek this one out. Grade: B+

Meet the Spartans (2008): This is what I get for thinking Epic Movie might be a step in the right direction, isn't it? Latest issue from the bowels of the Friedberg/Seltzer "creative" team appears to have slapped together in a fortnight using only the most obvious and glancing nods to its source and pop culture in general, so that the effect is like watching some smarmy douchebag heartily bombing at an open-mike stand-up night. (Hey, did you notice that 300 was really homoerotic? How about Britney Spears, is she crazy or what?) In retrospect, I think what I responded to in Epic Movie wasn't so much an improvement in the humor as an improvement in the casting -- somehow, actual funny people (Fred Willard, Jayma Mays, Kal Penn) thought it might be a lark to fashion a silk purse out of Friedberg & Seltzer's sow's ear, and while they didn't totally succeed, they did make the film seem more bearable than it should have been. Here we're relegated to Kevin Sorbo and a bunch of hacks from "Mad TV." The casting of Sorbo is meant in and of itself to be a joke, which is the ever-present problem with these things; at no time do the dynamic duo behind this try to turn it into anything other than a vast orgy of, "Hey, I understand that reference!" It's the kind of film where they have Paris Hilton in the role of Ephialtes the hunchback, and the fact that she says, "I'm not as dumb as I look," is an automatic punchline. Here's the thing, though: Paris Hilton is indeed smarter and cannier than she likes to appear, which gives her one up on these two self-satisfied assholes making fun of her. Grade: F

Momma's Man (2008): Note the titular irony of this wryly effective portrait of depressive stasis. Matt Boren plays Mikey, a middle-aged married man back East for a quick business trip who visits his parents and then doesn't leave, and his performance is solid, hinting at gulfs of self-loathing agony without compromising the character's dissembling reticence; furthermore, Boren is entirely unafraid to jump headlong into the unsympathetic. Director Azazel Jacobs gets the maximum mileage out of his major set (his parents' loft), with the extraordinary clutter becoming ever more imposing the closer Mikey slides to total regressive stagnation. Mikey's parents are played by Azazel's real-life parents Ken and Flo Jacobs, with several pieces of avant-garde cinematic titan Ken's work making appearances during the course of Momma's Man. Most notably, there's a small chunk of Spaghetti Aza cut in during a crucial late-film moment, which serves as a fine linchpin to the film's (presumably personal) thematic dichotomy between safety and maturity. Also not to be discounted: The film's finely tuned sense of awkward humor. The scene where Mikey buys beer for some teenagers in a park is a marvel. Grade: B+

Shotgun Stories (2008): David Gordon Green served as executive producer on Jeff Nichols's debut feature, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest -- the rural poetry of Nichols's film owes a lot to Green's George Washington and, by extension, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. Here's the thing, though: Neither the Green nor the Burnett really had a narrative, being instead a collection of incidences that added up to the feel of a place and a time. Nichols, by contrast, does have a story he wants to tell, and there's nothing wrong with that in itself; unfortunately, the story he has in mind is shopworn and obvious, a simple iteration on how quests for vengeance can leads to endless vicious circles of violence. The mundanity of his narrative doesn't seem to fit the found-art quality of his visuals; if anything, the yearning for artistry present in his setups and cutting make the tired familiarity of the plot seem that much more glaring. It's not really a bad first film -- Nichols demonstrates a fine eye behind the camera, and he has the advantage of a solid performance by Michael Shannon as an anchor. I just hope his next time out doesn't feel so second-hand. Grade: B-

2008-09-23T09:58:00.002-04:00

And my burgeoning empire of not-for-pay criticism rolls on...

Hey, didja know that the Encyclopedia Britannica has a blog? I didn't. But they do, and right now writer/film historian Raymond Benson is running a two-week series of posts about his favorite films of 1968. I have been tapped as an official film commentator. So, y'know, there's that. Take a look and follow along... should be fun, no?

2008-09-20T08:13:00.002-04:00

Week of August 25th:

Any Gun Can Play (1967): From what I've seen, spaghetti Westerns seem to hit the same blind spot I have for Japanese yakuza films -- while the good ones are very good, the bad ones (which far outnumber the good ones) try my patience with dull, overthought plots involving lots of double and triple crosses by guys with guns who all vaguely look like each other. This one, about a wayward cache of gold and the various unsavory characters after it, settles into that aggravating template nicely. From what I've read, this is intended as a knowing parody of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, complete with Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef lookalikes getting gunned down at the film's outset. All I can say is that if director Enzo G. Castellari demonstrated a tenth of the enthusiasm and invention of Leone's hyperbolic-to-the-point-of-mythic mise-en-scene, this might be worthwhile. Side note: I saw this in a bad video print under the title Go Kill and Come Back which featured quite possibly the worst pan & scan job I've ever seen. I'm not making that a factor in my opinion -- proper framing might make the film more visually pleasant, but it won't help the story, and the ridiculously drastic pans used to fix the framing carry their own unintended entertainment value -- but I thought it was worth mentioning. Grade: C-

A Chinese Torture Chamber Story 2: The first Chinese Torture Chamber Story was about the best possible movie one could make from the material: a sick-minded industrial strength black comedy that aimed for the gross-out and didn't take itself too seriously. This unrelated followup shows that the people who made it missed the point of the first; what we have is a sequel that keeps the grotesquerie but for some reason appears to have been made in all earnestness on a budget of seventeen bucks. Roughly half the film is over before we get any torture, and when it finally shows up in an ever-nastier series of setpieces, it's displayed dispassionately, like everyone on set knew they were making a cash-in sequel and thus decided not to invest any of the trash-fueled energy that made the first film memorable. (No exploding penises, in other words.) I probably think I hate this film more than I actually do -- my aggravation was increased by my recognition of it being the kind of thing I should like were it not so incompetent and lackadaisical. Still, fuck this film. Grade: D

Violence at Noon (1966): I don't feel qualified to talk much about this disorienting film after one viewing, especially a VHS viewing. It's obviously an incredible achievement, and it's even more obviously an elusive one that I haven't quite absorbed. A big-screen viewing would probably help, considering how much information there is to take in, but I'm going to miss its sole screening at the New York Film Festival's Oshima retrospective sidebar. So I'll just say for now that I liked it and hope to encounter it again in the future. Grade: B (a placeholder grade if there ever was one)

2008-09-17T00:37:00.001-04:00

Week of August 18th:

Death Race 2000 (1975): Darkly funny rotgut satire masquerading as just another Corman-branded drive-in smash-em-up. The media-violence-as-pacifier isn't exactly new ground, but director Paul Bartel nails the balance between violence and commentary better than most, so that the film appears more trenchant than it probably is. What came as a genuine surprise to me was the post-script, which says in five minutes what it took Massacre at Central High half a film to say. Makes excellent use of Corman's notorious tight-fistedness -- the sparse, ramshackle art direction, everything pasted together as best as possible, truly gets across the premise of an America dancing on the edge of bankruptcy -- and though legend has it that Bartel intensely disliked directing car-chase films, you wouldn't know it from his sharp, economical eye. Plus it's entertaining as fuck. David Carradine, I'm starting to think, is not a person but a government experiment to isolate cool and give it human form. Grade: B+

Masculin Féminin (1966): "The children of Marx and Coca-Cola" is more than a cute pullquote, it's an unusually clear and handy summation of what Jean-Luc Godard is doing with this playfully knockabout concoction. As the famed phrase suggests, this captures a loose group of young people torn between increasing politicization/dissatisfaction with the Way Things Are and the constant desire for consumption of the capitalistic and ephemeral. The film Godard makes from this is at turns melancholic, hilarious, dull and droll, helped along by a typically winning performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud and the lightest touch Godard ever had and would never have again after his radicalism overwhelmed him. Full of sharp setpieces that may not be meant to add up to anything other than a cultural overview; most fascinating are occasional interludes where characters are peppered with a battery of question by an offscreen interviewer. Here, Godard all but stands up and shouts Do They Know What They Stand For? I Don't Think That They Do. Watching this, you can see how the '68 riots happened, and you can also see why that idealistic fervor collapsed so quickly. Grade: B

Only Angels Have Wings (1939): Mostly terrific Hawksian men-being-men drama about mail pilots in South America and the deadly lives they lead. The flight scenes are expertly rendered, crisp and tense (it was a great idea for Hawks to lead us off with a fatal crash, so that we understand that he just might kill any of these sympathetic characters at any time), but I do think the film loses something whenever it switches gears and goes for the push-pull romantic tension between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. Arthur's character strikes me as too inconsistent, and the chemistry between the two never quite sparks. I kinda wish that Arthur and Rita Hayworth had switched roles, as Hayworth kills in her small handful of scenes. Still, this is at bottom adventure drama at its most solid. Grade: B+

Return of the Tiger (1979): I wonder where Bruce Li's reputation would be if a cynical producer hadn't rechristened him with that name after the death of Bruce Lee. Because, at least on the evidence of this film, Li doesn't deserve to be lumped in with Bruce Le or Bruce Liang. He has an athletic grace in his movements that is far removed from the clumsy thuggery of Li or the abruptly effective savagery of Sonny Chiba, but more importantly he also has a measure of charm that sets him apart from the other Bruce clones. My perception may also be clouded by the fact that, unlike most Lee cash-ins (i.e. The Dragon Lives Again), this is tantalizingly close to being a good movie. The fight scenes are sharp and well-choreographed, the villains are properly hissable and there's a sense that the filmmakers were, for once, in on the joke. (There's no other excuse for the scene where Li avoids taking on a huge henchman until he can oil himself up.) The problem is, then, is in the story -- it's both overly complex and completely unimportant, with a series of double-and-triple crosses that nobody seems terribly concerned about sorting out. Coulda been a minor classic, but I'll stay satisfied with a ferocious entertainment. Needed more Angela Mao, but the glorious heap of Paul L. Smith in Hulk-smash mode at the end compensates. Grade: B-

Rio Bravo (1959): It's iconic! One could criticize Howard Hawks's now-legendary Western for trading explicitly in well-worn Western tropes right down to its casting, but that would be missing the point. From the beginning, where we're introduced to most of the main characters without a word of dialogue, Hawks uses audience familiarity as an entry point to his project. We know these characters and situations. We know them inside and out, and Hawks does too. He's not interested in telling just another story here but a story within those stories. That's why the siege-narrative structure is necessary -- a whole heap of downtime is the aim, so that we can see what these guys do and how they react in relation to one another when they're not beholden to the average B-plot. Though it has some wonderfully choreographed gunplay (not just the opening and closing scenes but a marvelous bit where Dean Martin has to suss out a shooter in a bar) Rio Bravo is more or less the opposite of what we expect -- the Western as inaction movie. Terrific, at any rate, and helpful for me in that I now understand what the big screaming deal about John Wayne is. Grade: A-

2008-09-11T11:05:00.000-04:00

Week of August 11th:

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957): With this and Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean forever ruined the epic for everyone else. Here he is, making this ginormous movie with tons of extras and elaborate sets and on-location shooting and he forgets to leave behind the obsessive eye for tiny detail and refined character work that defined the spate of quiet British dramas and literary adaptations he was doing prior to blowing his muse up large. What a complete bastard. I mean, how are people supposed to get away with lazy, slipshod "spectacle" like Around the World in 80 Days or The Greatest Story Ever Told when this guy is stuff that's both terrific eye candy and psychologically valid character drama? Stirring, dynamic war saga with a performance from Alec Guinness that's a miracle of reserve. Why, though, did nobody warn me that this film is also an incredible downer. Why. Grade: A-

The Hidden Fortress (1958): Rousing historical action spectacle by Akira Kurosawa, whose sense of assurance is kinda scary. The avaricious peasant leads grate at times, but they also provide a useful contrast to the nobility of Toshiro Mifune and Misa Uehara. Mifune is his reliable badass self, and his spear duel with Tadokoro is one for the ages. A movie for the 12-year-old in us all, and there's not a damn thing wrong with that. Grade: B+

It's a Wonderful Life (1946): I never expected this film to live up to its lofty reputation, but it's thoroughly great. People speak of "Capra-corn" this and "heartwarming" that and "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings;" what they don't warn you about is the nearly two hours of hardship and misery that have to be waded through to make that happy ending feel earned instead of cheap. Yet it's never a pessimistic wallow, either -- Frank Capra's touch is light but honest, and he grounds his can-do little-guy optimism against the realities of the economic times, somehow crafting a quintessential crowd-pleasing slice of Americana out of what's essentially a Socialist parable. Also: Hey, I can understand what attracted thorny auteurs like Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock to Jimmy Stewart. Underneath that aw-shucks folksy exterior, he's got a surprising reserve of piss and vinegar; the scene where, in a fit of misplaced rage, he tells off a well-meaning schoolteacher carries an unexpected brutality with it. Summation: In expertly showing both the ups and downs of small-town America circa the Depression on into WWII, Capra's film becomes the best kind of uplift: The kind where we can celebrate our commonality and (hopeful) essential decency while acknowledging that sometimes shit's gonna get rough. Grade: A

Mad Dog Time (1996): A little better than writer/director Larry Bishop's subsequent Hell Ride, if only because there's a larger complement of real actors desperately trying to render Bishop's terrible dialogue in a manner that could be termed deliverable. Still DOA, though, boiling down as it does to a lot of posturing and yakking with occasional gunfire. Maybe worth seeing once for Gabriel Byrne's mesmerisingly awful performance -- rarely does a talented actor go so completely wrong -- but then again maybe not. Grade: D

Mafioso (1962): Nearly gave up on this one halfway through, as it appeared to be mining the same broad, braying strain of Italian farce for which I've recently discovered a distaste, thanks to Big Deal on Madonna Street and Divorce Italian Style. I'm rather glad I didn't, though; director Alberto Lattuada eventually reveals his film as an inversion of these films. While the aforementioned use serious subject matter as fodder for comedy, Mafioso is a comedy that unexpectedly turns deadly serious when the culture-clash stuff falls away and genial hero Antonio (played well by Alberto Sordi) is forced to confront what his heritage truly entails. An acidic social satire with a Kafka edge. Grade: B

Mirrors (2008): What a piece of unreconstructed shit. Alexandre Aja spends much of the film's first half trying (poorly) to build some manner of creepy atmosphere, but shortly after Amy Smart has her jaw ripped off by an evil ghost, he gives up and just lets the increasingly-retarded plot play itself out to its moron end. (I know I've said it before, but I am so fucking sick of the J-horror discovery narrative.) A lot of bad laughs, a lot of dumb character moves and a waste of a premise fertile to bursting with potential for mind-bending, body-twisting balls-out horror. I no longer give a crap about whatever Aja's next project is. Kiefer Sutherland tries to grit his teeth and get through the film by pretending he's filming an episode of 24; maybe this is why he fell off the wagon. Grade: D

The Prodigal Boxer (1973): Stock-issue kung fu flick. Story feels far too distended to support even its slim running time (structure is essentially revenge-minded young upstart challenges bad guys, upstart gets whupped, upstart recuperates and trains more, repeat), though it does end strongly. More interesting to me than the film itself is its exhibition state; like so many others in its genre, it's been poorly dubbed, cut up and improperly framed. The downmarket treatment given these films, transforming potentially interesting work into fodder for drunken yahoos, is regrettable. Maybe this film works better when seen as intended -- there are still traces of themes that emphasize its plot as a progress towards maturity. Then again, maybe it would still seem repetitious. Grade: C+

Step Brothers (2008): More interesting to think about than to watch. There's a weirdly fascinating thread running through the heart of the latest issue of the Ferrell-McKay collaborative sweepstakes. In portraying the regressive mindsets shared by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Step Brothers uses juvenilia as a blatant metaphor for the kind of unhinged adolescent creativity that is no doubt tapped into by all involved parties when crafting a film such as this. Thus, the effectively melancholic third act where the boys join the straight world -- where their fault through the majority of the film was an overindulgence of their ids, the denial of such is seen as an ever greater transgression. The problem is that Tom Green already made a film about this in Freddy Got Fingered, and Green's screaming anti-everything hostility is more bracing to me than the lumpy solipsism embraced here by Ferrell and company. Also, this film really needed to be funnier -- some of it works (Jenny Sekwa correctly cites Richard Jenkins' dinosaur monologue as a highlight, though the biggest laugh for me came during Ferrell's incongruous lumberjack burlesque), but a lot of it just kind of sits there, too impressed with its own vulgarity to make something out of it. Grade: C+

2008-09-02T22:50:00.001-04:00

Week of August 4th:

Mean Frank and Crazy Tony (1973): The 'and' in the title is more important than you'd expect, since this Italian crime flick is really two films grafted onto each other. The first film is a wacky caper comedy about small-time dreamer Tony, played with a notable lack of subtlety by Tony Lo Bianco, and his attempts to ingratiate himself with imprisoned hardass capo Frank, played by Lee Van Cleef. The second film is a gritty action drama about steel-spined Frank and his inexorable progress towards settling a score with French rival Jean Rochefort. Combining the two makes for a strangely schizo buddy movie, with the more serious aspects of the film proving significantly more compelling than the farcical elements; fortunately, the slapstick wanes the deeper we get into the plot, and the film ultimately emerges as a flawed but reasonably entertaining genre entry. Also, Edwige Fenech is here as Lo Bianco's long-suffering girlfriend; she's given almost nothing to do in the story, but she does hang around long enough to provide her contractually-obligated nude scene, so that's a plus. Grade: B-

Ninotchka (1939): Legendary director Ernst Lubitsch filmed this sparkling culture-clash romantic comedy while riding out a delay in the start of production on The Shop Around the Corner. That means that he tossed off one masterpiece while waiting to make another. Did this guy just will masterpieces into being or something? Would that all romantic comedies could feature chemistry as electric as that between Melvyn Douglas and Greta Garbo or comic relief as consistently amusing as the three stoogeniks who set the plot in motion when they become seduced by the allure of Western decadence. A fleet and nimble film, hugely enjoyable; the scene where the film earns its famed tagline ("Garbo Laughs!") trumps the entirety of most other films all on its own. Grade: A

Pineapple Express (2008): Slight, intermittently amusing stoner action flick is probably more valuable for its position in its creators' respective canons than it is as a standalone object. It's a melding of two kinds of humanism -- Judd Apatow's shaggy lovable-loser humanism and David Gordon Green's intentionally awkward poetic emo-humanism -- and the intersections and richochets between the two parallel yet different viewpoints is more interesting than the shrug of a plot. For Green watchers, this is valuable (more valuable than Undertow, anyway) as a demonstration that he can work within Hollywood constraints and genre frameworks without losing his very particular sense of the world. (The brief bit with Seth Rogen and James Franco blazed out of their skulls and playing leapfrog in the woods is as lovely and charming as anything in any studio offering this decade.) And for Apatow auteurists, this is twofold: It's proof that his way of thinking can come on strong and even exist symbiotically with another's distinctive outlook, meaning he doesn't necessarily have to hire the bland TV hacks with whom he's surrrounded himself, and it shows that his cockeyed idea of shlubby semi-realism, his can ground even the most ridiculous of premises. Now if only this thing were funnier, we might have something spectacular. Seth Rogen's screenplay, though, crosses the line at some point from being about slackers to merely being slack, leading to scenes that should work better than they do (i.e. the faux-gay escape attempt). Franco and Craig Robinson are the most consistently funny elements of the film; also, the car chase is some kind of loopy genius. Grade: B-

The Signal (2008): Low-budget triptych of linked tales centered around a mysterious frequency that drives people murderously nutty is passable in its begining and ending thirds, which tell the tale of an adulterous couple's dangerous attempt at a flight to safety from the vantage point of each of the involved parties, with the third segment holding together better than the first if only because Dan Bush seems a stronger director than David Bruckner and Justin Welborn's strong-jawed suitor makes for a more interesting protagonist than Anessa Ramsey's drippy adulteress. The second segment, though, is another beast. Directed by Jacob Gentry, it features Ramsey's cuckolded husband falling in with two neighbors trying to keep up appearances as they incongruousy prepare for a New Year's party, and it's marvelous -- a nervy high-wire black comedy that sees the imminent collapse of everything not as an excuse for angst but as a ghoulish chuckle of nihilism. It's a really rather bracing blast of quién-es-más-loco gallows humor, and it makes the film worth seeing all by itself while simultaneously pointing out how uninspired the other two segments are in comparison. This Gentry kid could really go places. Grade: B

2008-08-27T00:42:00.002-04:00

Week of July 28th:

Frenzy (1972): Everywhere I look, there's a darkness... Alfred Hitchcock's darkest joke is also one of his grandest, an iconic wrong-man thriller given a contemporary viciousness and pumped up to Kafkaesque levels of persecution, and Jon Finch is in his own way the perfect protagonist, so beaten down by life that a murder rap is just another thing for him to impotently defy. But here's the thing: While a good deal of the film (especially the ride in the potato truck) is sick squirmy fun, there's something that most people miss or at least don't feel like discussing. Hitchcock beats Michael Haneke to the punch a good 25 years prior to the latter's ascendancy in indicting his audience for what they're not walking out on. Pay attention to the structure: The opening half-hour shows us a callous society obsessed with bloodlust, lacking any basic concern for the downtrodden and joking through in that black, head-down British way ("In one way I rather hope he doesn't [get caught]. We haven't had a good juicy series of sex murders since Christie. And they're so good for the tourist trade."), and we figure yeah, it's all a nasty larf, innit though? Then comes the uncomfortable rape and murder of Barbara Leigh-Hunt, shown to us unsparingly and unedited so that we're smacked full in the face with the ugly atrocity of it all. For a minute, you can see Hitchcock disgusted with the society he sees around him and letting both birds fly. Lovely, lovely indeed. Grade: A-

Heartbeat Detector (2008): Starts off vague and barely connected to itself, with emphasis on atmosphere and intimation; what with the air of mystery and the obsession with music, the general feel one gets from the first half of this is that of an Olivier Assayas film but without Assayas's intimidating formal command. (There's a party scene that falls just short of being a direct lift from Cold Water.) Then the film stumbles into its answer-everything phase, and it goes from being irritatingly insubstantial to teeth-grindingly obvious. By the final monologue, my ability to care about the lessons director Nicolas Klotz was trying to impart had more or less atrophied to nothing. There's probably a fine film in this undisciplined mess, and that fine film is probably a lot shorter than the 130 minutes over which the film stretches. At least there's Mathieu Amalric, giving doing his usual solid work in the service of nothing much. Also: While I'm sympathetic to some of the film's political stance, isn't this essentially a cinematic representation of Godwin's Law? Grade: C

Horror of Dracula (1958): Robust re-interpretation of Bram Stoker's oft-filmed horror classic. Between Terence Fisher's nicely atmospheric direction, Peter Cushing's authoritative portrayal of Van Helsing and Christopher Lee's justly-famed turn as the Count, there's a lot to like here. It's easy to see why this was a starmaker for Lee -- he has the dapper countenance and charisma of Lugosi, yet his version of the Count is far more feral and savage. Simply put, he makes the vamp feel dangerous again. Good job, everyone. Grade: B

The Lovers (1958): Here's your incandescent Jeanne Moreau. Here's your young, vibrant Louis Malle giving his all in deconstructing another genre after the triumph of Elevator to the Gallows. Here's your fashionable emptiness wielded like a straight razor three years before L'Avventura. Here's your rich-man/working-class dichotomy as a social-commentary structure without feeling cliched or obnoxious. Here's your slow-burn ground-floor plot leading into an unexpected explosion of deliberate fairy-tale magic realism. Here's your still-potent black-and-white eroticism (the scandal is understandable). Here's your surprising glimpse at Jeanne Moreau's titties. Here's me feeling pretty satisfied. Here's me kinda falling in love with Louis Malle. Grade: B

The Naked Venus: (1959): About as good as a nudist-camp film could ever be, really. For one thing, it's got a real director behind the helm -- Edgar G. Ulmer, the poverty-row auteur best known for Detour. The clean black & white photography helps as well. The film's best innovation, though, is exceedingly simple: The nudie-camp scenes (which are surprisingly scant) serve the plot and not the other way around. That said, this is really no more than a trashy divorce-court TV-movie potboiler that, on occasion, shows us some titty. It's a friggin' masterpiece next to Diary of a Nudist, but it's still just a nudie-camp movie. Grade: C+

No Telling (1991): Ground-level modern-dress mutation of the Frankenstein story gains a lot of force from the simple act of being a character piece first and a horror movie second. Director Larry Fessenden, also responsible for Habit and Wendigo, has a special talent for using horror elements as an expression of emotional distress, and here the standard toying-in-God's-domain megalomania experienced by government scientist Geoffrey Gaines is an illustrative flipside to his relationship with his ever-more estranged wife Lilian. His attempts to create new life bump up against his inability to keep any life within his marriage. (There's also metaphorical import in the couple's stumbling, unsuccessful attempts to conceive a child.) Earnest, well-acted and very placid, this nonetheless rewards the patient with a genuinely pathetic nightmare figure at the end, where Geoffrey's attempts to control Nature literally fall apart before him. It's a little bit horror, a little bit social commentary and a little bit tragedy. Grade: B

Storm Troopers U.S.A. (1969): What the fuck is this? Really, I can't describe the delirium that wafts off this strange, ill-advised Florida-lensed motherfuckery. There's a prologue that compresses Nazism into a five-minute history lesson, then there's some manner of plot that involves a modern-day Nazi splinter sect in America trying to rain terror down upon the populace by storming into a hotel and taking everyone hostage, then they're all undone by their libidos and there's some fight/chase scenes that are unexpectedly enjoyable if only for their convincing savagery. And that's just the bare outline. I haven't even gotten into the daffiness on the side, like the mind-blowingly awful choreography in the sequence where a mole in the Nazi organization is murdered or the cheesy charms of the three sailors on leave who float through this film like walking adverts for America awesomeness. Apparently, this never received a theatrical release, which doesn't surprise me, as people's brains might have melted on contact. Really rather amazing, this one. I'd go on, but you should really just see it for yourselves. Best ten bucks you'll ever spend. Grade: B+

Trigger Man (2007): Minimalist spin on the Deliverance genre is, if anything, way too minimalist -- there's a fine line between "nothing" happening and nothing happening, and Ti West's screenplay lands firmly on the wrong side of the line. Furthermore, West's technique stymies his intent; while something like this really calls for rigorous discipline a la Gus Van Sant's Gerry, West instead belongs to the handheld shake-n-zoom school of filmmaking. The general paucity of incident and the unsteady camera cancel out any potential positive effects that might have arisen from each technique individually, so what we're left with is in essence a really bad home movie. The bit with the female jogger: time-padding at its lamest. Grade: D

2008-08-19T11:50:00.004-04:00

Quick announcement: Because I apparently feel I don't have enough to do, I'm now penning weekly reviews for a relatively new culture-centric site, Halo-17. My inagural review last week was of Larry Bishop's dreadful Hell Ride. This week it's Claude Chabrol's A Girl Cut in Two. I'll put up a link whenever a new review goes live.

2008-08-18T14:34:00.002-04:00

Week of July 21st:

Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958): I'm not sure this film is actually intended as a comedy. I guess the situations conceived by director Mario Monicelli are buffoonish enough to qualify as intended amusement, but a pallor of failure coats the characters, so that most of the jokes land with a wet thump and the actors are reduced to a lot of flailing and shouting in order to make the film seem livelier than it is. Didn't make me laugh, at any rate. What a sad bastard of a movie. Grade: C

Diary of a Nudist (1961): Congratulations Doris Wishman! You achieved something with this nudist-camp-expose that I didn't think possible: You made tits seem boring. I mean, Nude on the Moon was no great shakes, but it comes off like goddamn 2001 compared to this dispiriting jigglefest. Also: Having naked kids running around in addition to the acres of nude femme flesh may have helped your "just education" case if Johnny Bluenose decided to sue on grounds of indecency, but that doesn't stop it from feeling really creepy. No wonder this genre died an unlamented death. Grade: D+

A Night to Remember (1958): Archetypal British prestige project, for better and for worse: This detailed tapestry about the sinking of the Titanic is meticulous, sober and respectful, festooned with dignified professionalism in front of/behind the camera and mostly free of histrionics. It's also as dead and bloodless a film as you're ever likely to see. Sometimes keeping a stiff upper lip means that you're just stiff. Given a choice between this and James Cameron's cheeseball melodramatics, I'll take the latter every time. Grade: C

A Song Is Born (1948): Seven years seems like an awfully small turnaround window for a director to be remaking his own film. But even Howard Hawks needed to get paid, so here's a jazz-age redux of Ball of Fire. The main surprise: Despite the legendary director's extreme distaste for the film, it ain't bad. The structure of Ball of Fire is left more or less intact, yet enough room is left for some terrific musical numbers featuring the likes of Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and a number of other musical greats. Also, the charming Danny Kaye is a marked improvement over Gary Cooper, if for no other reason than Kaye doesn't come off like he's made of oak. Hawks's direction, unsurprisingly, is pretty perfunctory (the climactic musical-number-as-ambush is as lazy and slack as anything in any great director's oeuvre); meanwhile, Virginia Mayo tries her best, so I guess I can't fault her for not being Barbara Stanwyck, but the difference is noticeable. Still, if it's not on the level of a classic, it's still a pleasant diversion jam-packed with great tunes. Nothing wrong with that. Grade: B

Tell No One (2008): And now, a thought experiment for those of you who've seen this film. Close your eyes and imagine the no-doubt-in-the-works English-language remake. Let's just say that, as an example, hack extraordinaire Gary Fleder was at the helm of this remake. As for a screenwriter for the adaptation... oh, I don't know, let's assume Wesley Strick. Just let your mind spool through the plot and see how it might appear. Got that image? Hey, isn't that funny? It'd be exactly the same moronic, contrived film, wouldn't it? Some things, it seems, transcend translation. Grade: D+

The Violent Professionals (1973): Awesome, over-the-top Italian police drama about a loose cannon cop who decides to avenge the death of a uniformed friend by going undercover and single-handedly destroying an entire crime syndicate. This meathead is pretty merciless, but then he is going up against guys who shoot pregnant women for no reason during the course of a bank robbery, so I guess you gotta be hard. Absolutely no good for anyone at all, but pretty deliciously entertaining in a one-damn-thing-after-another way; between the shoot-outs and the car chases and the beatings and all the silly '70s posturing and the occasional bit of inexplicable business (i.e. the bit where some low-level thugs have the cop strip jaybird-naked), I was never bored. Turns dark and cynical at the climax, as these things are wont to do. Grade: B

What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966): Woody Allen's "debut" film, a comically redubbed Japanese spy flick, is really kind of inexcusable. Irrepressibly sophomoric and silly, overflowing with bad puns, cheesy vaudeville gags and leering sex humor, this film should be an embarrassment... but goddamn, is it ever funny. I'd like to say I'm bigger than this, that I didn't giggle at a villain named Wing Fat, the idea of "a non-existent but real-sounding country," and a man threatening to have his mustache eat another guy's beard, but I'm not -- this made me laugh a lot. If only everyone's juvenilia could be this much fun. Grade: B+

2008-08-07T21:17:00.001-04:00

Week of July 14th:

Antibodies (2007): At this point, I'd say that the twin influences of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en have arguably been even more damaging to world cinema than that of Pulp Fiction. Truth be told, this German genre entry isn't as bad as most -- André Hennicke cuts a menacing figure as the perverted antagonist (give the guy a couple choice roles and he could turn into the next Ulrich Mühe), and young director Christian Alvart demonstrates a striking eye for composition, especially in regard to his city/country dichotomy (country mostly darker earth tones, city filled with swaths of red and sickly greens amid high-contrast light). Unlike many of his ilk, Alvart might have the chops to someday stop stealing from David Fincher and actually become the next David Fincher... but first, he's going to have to do something about that thick streak of thundering pretentiousness that would embarrass even the guy who tried to make an AIDS allegory out of the third Alien movie. It's one thing to try and turn your garden-variety serial-killer movie into a treatise on the nature of evil; it's quite another to make it all a grand, galumphing Biblical allegory featuring a killer named Gabriel Engel and a climactic half-hour that references the story of Abraham and Isaac three times just to ensure that everyone in the audience gets a good whack in the temple by the symbolism shillelagh. I'll be keeping tabs on this Alvart guy, but he needs to calm the fuck down a bit in my opinion. Grade: C

Cloverfield (2008): I'm glad to see I'm not the only one whose major reference point when viewing this first-person disaster flick was Miracle Mile rather than The Blair Witch Project. Beyond that, this movie is surprisingly good in my opinion. The first-person gimmick is well-utilized, revealing and withholding information (narrative and visual) as needed without feeling cheap; neither does it make a big deal out of it and drown itself in ouroborian self-referential douchery a la Diary of the Dead. The acting isn't Oscar-caliber, but it's as good as it needs to be to get across the character types. There's also a solid sense of place, which gets into what the film does best: By giving us believable group dynamics coupled with a sharply-detailed sense of panic and fear and parceling out information on a need-to-know basis, the filmmakers have (purposefully, I'd wager) crafted the potentially best metaphor-for-9/11 horror movie one could hope for. Grade: B+

The Dark Knight (2008): Why should I write anything about this when so much is already available on the great big World Wide Internets. Especially when one of those things is Kent Beeson's Watchman article, which is stellar to the point of being definitive. I should add that the emphasis is indeed on the human need for belief, much as it was with Christopher Nolan's previous film The Prestige, which opens the window towards a more spiritual-minded inquiry. Someone else more intelligent than I should unpack that thread some day, as I really need to see both this and The Prestige more than once before I attempt that. Short version: Awesome stuff, exciting and thought-provoking in equal measure. Losing David Goyer's phone number was the smartest thing Nolan ever did. Grade: A-

Earthquake 7.9 (1980): It's like Japan looked at Earthquake and said, "Like all American products, we can make that cheaper!" The problem is that films are not cars, and when you try to do Irwin Allen on a John Cassavetes budget, all you end up with is a shoddy, cruddy embarrassment. For those keeping tabs, there's about forty minutes of soap-opera plotting, then there's about ten to fifteen minutes of quake destruction, and then there's another forty minutes of melodrama and emoting and tears except now everyone's either wet or on fire. The quake effects are actually pretty cool and more savage than expected (a dude gets eaten by the earth!); everything else in the film stinks of sadness, shit and failure. Most dispiriting aspect: The screenplay was written by Kaneto Shindô, who in better times wrote Fighting Elegy and both wrote and directed Onibaba. How far the mighty have fallen, etc. Grade: D

Five (1951): Sometimes obscure films are obscure for a reason. Case in point: Arch Oboler's high-concept post-apocalypse allegory, in which the whole of humanity is reduced to five individuals living together in a mountain cabin and trying to restart humanity. The terrific opening five minutes promise a dynamic, chilling what-if narrative that never shows up; what we get instead is a flat, logy film that talks its ideas into concentric circles and makes its characters serve the lockstep narrative rather than letting a story arise from believable conflicts. Ending unexpectedly nasty, at least until it jumps at the first glimmer of false hope. (Not that I'm endorsing blind nihilism, but the sudden turnaround after the third act's hell descent rings hollow.) Oboler later gave the world a notoriously awful pair of stinkers in Bwana Devil and The Twonky, and somehow I'm not surprised. Grade: C

He Ran All the Way (1951): Sweaty, paranoid film noir, a potential precursor to The Desperate Hours, about a high-strung young man who commits a payroll robbery, watches it all go bad and holes up in the apartment of a young woman he meets at a public pool. John Garfield, in the lead, strikes a rather impressive balance between charming and frightening -- his mercurial squirminess captures the idea of a nice guy trying to act the big shot, his toughness a facade for loneliness and panic. Shelley Winters is also good. What with the film being crafted by several persons caught in the blacklist fervor, it's easy to read metaphorical intentions into the film's depiction of a man helplessly struggling against a situation until it seems all the world is united against him; even without that, though, it's solid stuff. Grade: B

The Horse's Mouth (1958): Alec Guinness is stellar in this British eccentric-artist flick, turning in a far better performance than the film really deserves. Not that there isn't the elements of a great film here -- oftentimes, it works quite memorably as a ruminative drama about creativity and self-destruction, a Portrait-of-the-Artist-as-Bastard work which nevertheless keeps a lighter touch that helps it from succumbing to the kind of wearying misanthropy that mars, say, Love Is the Devil. It's then a damn shame that director Ronald Neame confuses lightness and silliness, allowing the good parts of the film to be interrupted by a raft of far-too-broad comedy. Gets better as it goes, and thank God -- the first twenty minutes or so are enough to induce headaches. Grade: B-

The Lineup (1958): Tight, pulpy crime drama with an ace in its sleeve. Don Siegel starts the film as the kind of police procedural one would expect from a film based off a TV show that was created in the wake of "Dragnet," but the focus shifts for good once hired thugs Dancer and Julian get off a plane from Florida. The odd-couple contrast between the two (Dancer is a violent trigger man; Julian is a suave brains-type who likes to record people's dying words in a little notebook) seems straight from stock, but Eli Wallach and Robert Keith sell it uncommonly well. Wallach is the real MVP as the unhinged Dancer, and the film tends to follow his lead -- he starts as composed as his partner in crime, but as things get grittier his psychotic side becomes more prevalent, and as he gets more violent, so The Lineup gets tougher and more lurid. Siegel's talent for hard-hitting, punchy action is in full flower even at this early stage in his career, and like his adaptation of The Killers, he gets a lot of mileage out of the simple shock of carrying the violence a step further than expected. Were that all television adaptations this neat. Grade: B+

Rolling Thunder (1977): This movie would be terrific if it didn't want to be Death Wish. Like Bob Clark's Deathdream, this deals with the discussion about Vietnam-era post-traumatic stress disorder by framing it inside a genre film; unlike Clark's film, director John Flynn isn't much interested in using it beyond plot reasons. One wonders what the original screenplay by then-neophyte Paul Schrader looked like -- I imagine it would have borne closer resemblance to the excellent opening half hour, in which William Devane struggles to adapt to a home life he no longer fits into after returning from seven years in a POW camp. This section of the film is so compelling, with Devane turning in a lovely, quiet performance, that it's a major disappointment that the plot decides it would rather be about a merciless vigilante. What was a fine character study subsequently devolves into a mean, dumb and violent road-trip/revenge movie, with the added bonus of a completely useless shaggy-dog subplot involving policeman Lawrason Driscoll. To watch Devane and Tommy Lee Jones, fantastic as a fellow soldier for whom awkward, haunted silence has since become a way of life, is to pine for the movie that could have been. Grade: C+

Toys Are Not for Children (1972): In what dank, slimy fucking hole did Something Weird find this? And is tehre anything else in there? Stanley H. Brassloff's glorious grindhouse fable is several degrees more ambitiously crafted than the average sleazoid platter-burner. It's also several degrees more ill. The narrative is textbook Electra-complex stuff -- young Jamie Godard (Marcia Forbes, creepily convincing) gets stuck in arrested development after her parents split, eventually developing an unhealthy attachment to the dolls and stuffed animals her absentee father would send her as gifts. This bodes not well for Charlie (Harlan Cary Poe), the man she marries at film's outset, since our Jamie at this point knows nothing of the sex act; it bodes even worse for him (and everyone else) after she slides into a life of prostitution via Pearl (Evelyn Kingsley), a matriarchal friend and professional whore who might know where to find Jamie's daddy. The rest of the film should really be experienced as cold as possible; suffice to say, everyone's ugly, venal and out for their own gain, none more so than Jamie, who despite her naivete and lack of guile has a plan in mind the whole time. The depths this plumbs are really rather icky, yet there's a fascination about it all, not only from a how-low curiosity stance but from the fact that there's real technical and narrative accomplishment here. Especially surprising is Brasshoff's occasional use of achronology, skipping across time to show how events and mindsets connect to form Jamie's warped world (most effective instance: careful editing used to suggest both young Jamie and current Jamie watching a pivotal argument between Mom and Dad). We're given, in essence, a life refracted right before it shatters for good. Queasy, voyeuristic and wrong on every possible level, but unlike most skinflick fodder its trangressions pack a real gutter kick. Grade: B

The Tracey Fragments (2008): Bruce McDonald's quasi-experimental teenpocalypse is pretty fabulous from a technical standpoint, with the screen fragmentation providing both a sharp approximation of the average flighty teenage mindset and a better commentary on modern information overload than Southland Tales. I could watch this on mute all day if I had to. But the story... oh dear, the story. I'm not annoyed that this tale of a wayward girl named Tracey (the ubiquitous Ellen Page) indulges in cliches aplenty; no, the film truly falters when it strikes out for unexplored territory. With restless, compelling image splintering like we get here and imaginative detours like Tracey's tabloid reverie, I'd forgive this being just a film about the kind of volcanic teenage angst we get in films like thirteen. But when the narrative hinges on a young boy being hypnotized into believing he's a dog, or when the retarded rising action of the film climaxes with a conveniently-placed aluminum can lid, my generosity dries up pretty fucking quickly. Still worth watching in the literal sense anyway, and there's also Ms. Page, proving that her sardonicism remains appealing even stripped of wit and tilted towards toxic. Grade: B-

2008-08-03T15:22:00.003-04:00

Week of July 7th:

Breakfast of Champions (1999): Kurt Vonnegut's great, grumpy midlife-crisis novel is about as close to unadaptable into cinema as a novel can get because it's propelled almost entirely by Vonnegut's omniscent narration. Any director brave enough to attempt such an endeavor would need to recognize that the plot of the work is secondary to the tone (the book continues for some fifty to sixty pages after the climax of its ostensible plot); as such, capturing a mood and a point of view would be more important than moving the characters from Point A to Point B. Alan Rudolph's unfairly reviled run at the novel, then, can despite its faults (of which there are many) be seen as a interesting interpretation. The tone vacillates from mugging chaos to quiet despair, and while the more outsized portions of the film don't really work, the contemplative and downcast scenes work about as perfectly as they could be hoped to work. Acting is erratic as well (Omar Epps turns in a puzzling man-child performance that might be the worst thing anyone's done in front of a camera in the last ten years), but Rudolph gets a marvel of a performance out of Bruce Willis. As faltering car salesman Dwayne Hoover, Willis tilts his natural tendencies towards wiseassery and smirkiness just enough so that it feels desperate, the behavior of a man who's losing the battle to paper over the cracks in his carefully-controlled facade. Willis and Albert Finney, as misanthropic sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, represent the true soul of the narrative, and everything surrounding them is mere noise; their ultimate meeting propels both men towards epiphanies that preserve the ideas of Vonnegut's narrative while remaining a bit more hopeful. (If "Make me young" in the novel is a cry of helplessness in the face of the feeling that your life has been wasted, the film frames it as a serene striving towards a paradise that exists beyond the edges of a human's fragile mental stability.) Rudolph's film is imperfect, but to say he doesn't at root get at and communicate what the story's about is to be obtuse. Grade: B-

The Edge of Heaven (2008): Hermetic and didactic in equal measure, Fatih Akin's contribution to the irksomely popular everyone's-connected genre brings nothing to the party that wasn't already covered as badly as possible by Babel and Crash except a different set of languages. Clumsy screenwriting rife with enough contrivance and coincidence to gag a goat sink this one with a quickness. Just the "Temple of Love" scene in Head-On is superior to the entirety of this. Grade: C-

Funny Games (2008): Even more so than Gus Van Sant's Psycho, Michael Haneke's English-language Xerox of his notorious audience-baiting anti-thriller proves that shooting the exact same movie twice won't result in the exact same movie twice. It could be a consequence of the act of meticulous, fussy recreation or it could be a mere quirk of translation, but what felt mean and unexpected in Austria comes off as studied in the United States. Furthermore, Michael Pitt is a poor substitute for Arno Frisch -- his particular brand of smarm comes off as foppish, not menacing, with his condescension borne out of haughtiness instead of cruelty. That said, the material is still hideously effective, and if Pitt falls asleep on the job, the remainder of the cast more than ably picks up his slack. Especially Brady Corbet. An intellectual curiosity, to be sure, but it's still Funny Games. Grade: B

Hancock (2008): This movie would probably be a lot more interesting if it knew what exactly it wanted to do. Some of the comedy works (when it's not being blunted by the editing) and some of the ruminatory responsibility-of-heroism drama works (when it's not being subsumed in treacle), but the tones manage to mesh exactly once ("Oh, no you didn't!"); most of the time, it's like watching two films that keep interrupting each other. Acting is uneven as well: Will Smith once again subverts his image to great effect, but Jason Bateman's coasting and Charlize Theron turns in the single worst performance of her career. Then there's Peter Berg's horrid direction. Everyone's on Christopher Nolan's stick for his visually confused action scenes, but he looks like Don fucking Siegel when compared to the butchery Berg's whipped up for this film. His whip-blur action direction looks like he's trying to get his Greengrass on, but all it tells me is that he couldn't direct a bullet out of a gun. Despite all the negativity, I think this film does have moments (the bank robbery centerpiece is pretty great). But it could have been way better. Grade: C+

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008): Superior in pretty much every way to the first Hellboy for one reason -- Guillermo Del Toro has stopped pretending he cares about the human characters in this universe. Everything that works about this film (the cleaner, less splayed-about plotting; the mind-melting visuals; the villain who is actually given enough screen time to be a presence) stems from Del Toro concentrating almost solely on the freakier aspects of the world with which he's playing. Still not perfect -- Abe's lovelorn subplot seems ill-advised, for one -- but at least this second installment delivers on the rip-snorting entertainment/eye-candy gluttony promised by its offbeat premise. Grade: B

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952): Michael Redgrave was the shit. Oscar Wilde was the shit. Anthony Asquith was, if not the shit, a perfectly solid British director who could be counted on to class up the projects he took. Thus, this movie is mostly the shit: a well-timed, expertly acted and sharply funny filmic adaptation of a theatrical perennial. Rupert Everett and everyone else involved with that asinine redux that came out a few years back should be bloody well ashamed. Grade: B+

Lifeboat (1944): Now this is how you do propaganda, folks. Taut, skillfully crafted close-quarters thriller never lets its ideological concerns get in the way of Alfred Hitchcock's intent to provide grand, exciting entertainment. Hitchcock's direction is typically masterful, making the most of the setting's claustrophobia and using physical crowding as a metaphor for mental/ideological friction; John Steinbeck's screenplay, meanwhile, works with subtlety in unexpected ways (even the German villain is not shown in mere black-and-white terms) while parceling out its plant-and-payoffs in expert fashion. Surprisingly gritty and violent for the era, as well -- the impromptu amputation must have been a real jolt in the '40s. Terrific stuff, really; I think I'm gonna go buy some war bonds now... Grade: A-

Shine a Light (2008): Part concert documentary, part meditation on aging. Martin Scorsese's filmed record of a two-night stand by the Rolling Stones is foremost just that -- recorded concert footage. As such, it's a pretty good entry in the genre; the Stones aren't in their heyday anymore, but they can still blow the hat off the house when they get rolling ("Sympathy for the Devil," "Brown Sugar," an awesome version of "Champagne and Reefer" with Buddy Guy) and I wish I had could muster up the kind of energy that Mick Jagger, a man nearly forty years my senior, can apparently summon at will. But there's no getting around the fact that he is old enough to collect Social Security, and there's also no denying that the first couple of songs ("Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Shattered") find the band struggling to find their groove. Scorsese deals with this gap between what the band was and what they are now by splicing in interview footage from various points in their history, so that their progress from rock-n-roll bad boys to icons/traveling nostalgia act is always in the back of the mind. Considering how often the Stones' music pops up in Scorsese's films, there's a certain level where one could infer that Scorsese is thinking not just of their march away from youth but his own as well. Shine a Light is a blast, yet there's something slightly melancholic about it. Not for Jack White, though -- he looks like the happiest boy in the universe when he shows up for his onstage guest shot. Grade: B+

2008-07-25T22:08:00.002-04:00

Week of June 30th:

The Toy Box (1971): A whacked-out mindbender of a sexploitation flick. This bizarre beaut involves a bunch of hedonists at a house where they put on sex shows for the notorious Uncle as part of a give-and-take game. The shows provide the softcore skin expected of the genre, but they also provide much of the entertaining derangement that makes director Ronald Victor Garcia's loopy opus stand apart from its ostensible bretheren. Whether the scenario involves a pastoral interlude gone horribly wrong (via fright mask and pitchfork), a butcher getting up close and personal with his human charnal or Uschi Digard being molested by a sentient bedsheet, the imaginative sex in this is far removed from your average '70s pasty-assed grind-n-moan. There's also some surprisingly competent acting (at times marred by the worst dub job ever -- in particular, the opening twenty minutes smell like Doris Wishman), a sci-fi/horror twist that anticipates Peter Jackson's Bad Taste and some quotably abysmal bedroom chatter. ("I feel like there's a tree trunk between my legs!") Halfway between hallucinatory and hilarious, terrific and terrible, The Toy Box is ultimately the kind of film that makes such distinctions meaningless. Grade: B-

Wanted (2008): I grow ever more weary of video-game aesthetics being applied to action films. The nadir of this was the loathsome-on-purpose Crank; while this film, apparently based off some terrible graphic novel, doesn't quite plumb that film's depths, its marriage of hyperactive flash and fire to art-film solemnity isn't effective in the slightest. I don't necessarily mind a lack of aspiration towards anything other than making fratboys yell, "DUDE! AWESOME!" but the success of such a venture is contingent on its Cool Moments coming off as cool and not desperate. There are two Cool Moments I liked here: the literal over-the-top culmination of the drive-by assassination and Angelina Jolie, at the story's climax, demonstrating just how well she can curve a bullet. The latter, with its perfect cut and slow-motion body falling out of focus in the background, is as close as director Timur Bekmambetov gets to gutter poetry; the rest of the time, he's too busy trying to demonstrate how many times he's seen The Matrix to be bothered with making his images mean something. Jolie continues to have the worst taste in scripts this side of Jeanne Tripplehorn. Grade: D+

West Side Story (1961): I don't have much to say about this one other than holy crap is it ever great. The music is terrific and gets complemented by some unusual, muscular choreography that makes grace look difficult and brutality look easy. Leads are a bit soft, but the rest of the ensemble reels in the slack nicely. Ridiculously entertaining, what with the singing and the fighting and the hostility and the love and the dancing, always dancing. Good job of adapting the eternally flexible Romeo and Juliet, too. Grade: A-

2008-07-13T17:55:00.001-04:00

Week of June 23rd:

Buchanan Rides Alone (1958): At first, I thought this would be leading into another thorny moral allegory on the level of Decision at Sundown, maybe something about the nature of mob justice. Certainly, Randolph Scott's unflappable affability seemed to be hiding something more sinister. So I can say I was blindsided when the film started taking cues from that sneaky bemusement and twisted itself into a sharp comedy of venality, as Scott attempts to keep a young Mexican from getting his neck stretched while letting a greedy clan of brothers and cousins lay each other out. The darker aspects of human nature so favored by the Boetticher/Scott Westerns gets a thorough siring-out while the tone gets lightened considerably; what emerges is a delectable black amusement with Scott as the steel-eyed jester in the center of the hurricane. The rare Western that could conceivably be called droll. Grade: B+

The Goddess (1934): Chinese silent feature moves through prostitute-based melodramatics that must have been creaky even back in 1934, but does so with a sense of genuine heartbreak and an unexpected level of bluntness that keep the film watchable. Ruan Lingyu does well by the title role; director Wu Yonggang mostly keeps the film moving but every now and then throws in a nice directorial flourish. More valuable for its peek into social mores of the time than as entertainment, but not bad really. Grade: B-

The Hottie and the Nottie (2008): While watching this reviled romcom, I had something of a revelation: Paris Hilton isn't bereft of talent. I'm not going to say that she's ready for Merchant-Ivory or anything, but she can do light fizzy entertainments -- she exhibits a fine sense of self-possession and demonstrates that she can sell a decent line of dialogue. (I'll admit to chuckling at a sweetness-and-light warning she hollers at a stalker.) She wouldn't even appear atop a list entitled Worst Young Blond Blue-Eyed Actresses Who Starred in the Remake of House of Wax, and in an alternate world (i.e. one where she wasn't Paris Bloody Hilton), she could easily slide into a career as a third-tier ingenue a la Emmanuelle Chriqui. Her problem, then, isn't one of acting but of interacting; Ms. Hilton generally seems to be emoting in a vacuum, playing to her costars instead of with them. This isn't something that really works for The Hottie and the Nottie -- the film is of course not a monologue piece, and the air of unattainability she projects at all times rubs against her character's accessible-goddess characterization -- but I fail to see what differentiates her turn as "hottie" Cristabel from, say, the average Parker Posey performance. The problem, at root, is that her baggage as America's foremost spoiled rich twat keeps people from looking at her without daggers, and as it goes for her performance so it goes for the film that contains it: To see so much hatred and venom slung at a harmless, silly '80s throwback seems like wasted energy. It's not a good film, but neither is it really distinct from any number of recent teen-oriented films currently rotting in the depths of HBO's library, and it's certainly not The End of Cinema. The gross-out factor is needlessly higher than the average genre entry, owing to the times in which it's made, and the filmmaking craft is... well, I'll say sloppy. But it's still pretty generic, worthy of a shrug and not much else. Calm the fuck down world. Grade: C

Lancelot of the Lake (1974): Robert Bresson takes on the Arthurian myth and comes up with the anti-Camelot, a film without Romantic heromaking or gallantry. Bresson picks up at the end of the quest for the Holy Grail when everything in the legend is crumbling to nothing, metaphorically expressing the increasing pessimism about modern life exhibited in the rest of his latter-day work. He also signifies an atrophied spiritual presence by concentrating on the bodily realities of everyday existence; blood runs freely, armor clanks, swords clang and people spend their time politicking, but there's no evidence of a guiding hand. There's some hinting that Lancelot may be a Jesus figure, but his resurrection and return offers no spiritual salvation, merely a dirty muddy end. An exhausted film of physical brutality and cosmic silence; some dry stretches, tough to take, but overall worthwhile. Grade: B

Mon Oncle (1958): Good-natured and wistful, Jacques Tati's hilarious comedy captures a moment in time where everything is irrevocably changing. Monsieur Hulot, Tati's befuddled Everyman, and Hulot's peripatetic young nephew stand on one side of a generational divide, with his pipe and overcoat and insistence on taking the stairs; on the other side is his sister and her husband, forever fascinated with the newest and shiniest electronic things. (Never mind that they get trapped in their garage from time to time.) Appropriately enough, the big, broad comedic setpieces see Tati hearkening back towards another old-fashioned format (silent slapstick) to take the piss out of modernity, yet the rhythms are gentle instead of frenetic, owing a lot to Tati's incredible formal dexterity and his willingness to sit and watch a situation unfold rather than prod it into unfolding. One only has to watch the delirious controlled chaos of the punctured fountain gag or the dazzling use of set construction and light in the bit where Hulot makes a nighttime excursion to fix a bit of wounded plant life to feel the puckish joy that beams from the film; one imagines Tati directing this with a lopsided grin on his face. Yet there's still a melancholy at its heart, an elegy for things lost and forgotten in the rampage towards modernity. There's a lot of laughs, yet the essential sadness in the message comes through: We will spend the rest of our lives running into poles and calling it convenience. Grade: A-

Story of a Prostitute (1965): Relatively straightforward for a Seijun Suzuki joint, which is to say it's still three measures more delirious than the average war flick. Suzuki keeps his more outré impulses in check for this tale of a woman who escapes a bad romantic situation by volunteering to be a whore to a company of soldiers during WWII, but he still lets his cynicism run wild and keeps the pace at a rolling boil. Anti-war message comes through pretty vituperatively even as the battle scenes are exquisitely crafted; that the ending comes off as both tragic and ironically triumphant is pretty keen. Grade: B+

WALL·E (2008): First off: Holy shit, is this ever gorgeous-looking. Even at its ugliest (i.e. the opening act on a garbage-choked Earth), there's a visual poetry in this that simply sings. By the time we get to something like the mid-space ballet for robot and fire extinguisher, enrapturement is nigh well impossible to avoid. The beauty coexists with the ugly, which is proper given the way the plot eventually develops. Even though this is ostensibly a kid's film from Pixar, the best kidfilm company in the business, there's an element of caustic social satire that mushrooms when WALL·E arrives at the Axiom and finds a human population fattened and made inactive by dozens of robots designed to cater to every function and need one could have. Cute though the film is, there's still something distressing about a future where humanity is depicted as inessential to its own survival, and it's not coincidental that the rising action and climax of the film sees one man casting aside the easy way and finally learning a measure of self-reliance. In that vein, the ending, which at first glance seems inappropriately rosy, speaks to the capability and ingenuity of man when working in tandem with machines as opposed to letting the machines do all the work. (This is summed up in a lovely credit coda showing the evolution of the new world through the evolution of art from primitive days to modernity.) Final note: The 2001 influence is obvious, but I see a lot of Tati in here too. Grade: A-

2008-07-04T12:53:00.002-04:00

Week of June 16th:

Gate of Flesh (1964): Garish post-WWII madness from crazed auteur Seijun Suzuki. The reigning idea is that of the society of whores standing in for late-'40s Japan as an ugly expression of the free market, with everything and everyone for sale; yet, however predatory, it still functions as a society with carefully coded rules until true anarchic lawlessness shows up in the form of Jo Shishido. Film gets the full force of Suzuki's visual imagination, yet unlike a lot of the '60s-era color films I've seen of his, it never loses sight of the story. The sweaty ambiance and seedy fluorescence on display here hearken forward to the golden age of Japanese artsploitation -- films like Sex and Fury and Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 clearly owe Suzuki a debt of gratitude. Pair with The Marriage of Maria Braun for a joyfully decadent evening. Grade: B+

The Machine Girl (2008): Manufactured by the Asian-extreme fanboy crowd for the Asian-extreme fanboy crowd, which isn't as surefire an idea as you might think. I would have thought that a film with geysers of blood, ninjas, chainsaws, a killer brassiere and a psychotic Japanese schoolgirl with a Gatling gun for an arm as its heroine could at the very least exude a sense of fun. Instead, this would-be cult readymade exhibits all the wit and charm of a steel-gray Toledo office building. I envision the filmmakers as grim-faced types, ruefully checking off items on a list entitled "Things That Tokyo Shock DVD Buyers Seem to Like" as they stand ankle-deep in rubber limbs and crimson Karo syrup. Takashi Miike or the much-maligned Lloyd Kaufman might have made something of this, since they tend to work in thematic resonance and emotion with their cult-approved frameworks; the people responsible for this, on the other hand, don't appear to have any artistic purpose beyond filling a mythical audience niche that even they don't believe in. Grade: C-

Mamma Roma (1962): Heavy metaphor abound in this early feature from Pier Paolo Pasolini, which finds him splitting the difference between the neorealism that got him noticed and the allegorical narratives that he would explore further to great effect later in his career. Anna Magnani IS Mother Rome, both as a character and as a stand-in for the city, trying desperately to care for her offspring and adapt to a mercantile society after years and years of getting fucked (by johns, by Fascists, it's all the same). Unfortunately, while Anna's volcanic performance is a striking asset, Pasolini isn't so lucky with the younger members of his cast, most of whom slouch and mumble to little use. Furthermore, the craft of the film itself is ragged; while such looseness feels appropriate for, say, The Canterbury Tales, here it just feels sloppy. Uneven, full of great moments (Magnani and son quasi-incestuously dancing to a jazz record; Magnani and son ripping around on a motorcycle) without ever really cohering, yet possessed with enough vitality and thought to mark it as a promising move from a man who would later make better films than this. Also: Christ symbolism! Grade: B-

The Orphanage (2007): Lovely, lyrical opening shot, which promises something along the lines of Lucille Hadzihalilovic's gorgeous poison pellet Innocence. Shame about the rest of the film then. J.A. Bayona is a talented man with a solid visual sense and a way with mood. But if there's a point to this film beyond his need to show everyone just how much J-horror he's been watching lately, I must have missed it. Guess being a friend of Guillermo Del Toro helps get your half-assed horror project some respect from people who wouldn't give Infection or A Tale of Two Sisters the time of day. Grade: C

Regular Lovers (2007): Clearly a response film to The Dreamers, not only in the dig at that film's director but in intent. The Bertolucci film is a film about idealism, and if Michael Pitt eventually departs from Eva Green and Louis Garrel at film's end, it still ends on a tide of revolutionary fervor. Phillipe Garrel's film reads more like idealism curdled; it starts with the '68 riots and follows past that to a sense of aimlessness, the confusion that comes once you've revolted. When you've positioned yourself in opposition, where do you go from there? In particular, Garrel the director (as opposed to Louis, Phillipe's son, who stars here as the flipside to his character in The Dreamers) draws a clear contrast between the one or two genuine revolutionaries in the loose artistic collective that provides the film's central focus and the pretenders who bitch, smoke hash and generally use the revolt as a pretext to do nothing. When one disillusioned fellow splits, he leaves a note calling out the others on their inability to affect change; "They're losing the revolution indoors" is the key line in this note, and it catches the spirit of the film quite well. Rich black-and-white cinematography, convincing performances, stellar sense of time and atmosphere; a long sit but worth the numb cheeks. Grade: B

2008-06-20T00:24:00.003-04:00

Finnegan! Begin again!

So it seems we've come full circle here. After much deliberation (including thoughts of shutting down altogether), I've decided to go back to the digest format that worked so well for the first couple years of this site's existence. Short & sweet's what we're aiming for. Let's see how long this lasts.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971): Stunning opening sequence aside, this is pro forma giallo all the way. Even the stray moments of style seem forced or borne of necessity (example: the scene where Barbara Bach is killed is blocked inventively not because the director was inspired but because Bach apparently didn't want to do a nude scene). The method of murder is notably vicious: the killer paralyzes his victims with a poison-coated acupuncture needle to the neck, so that they will be conscious while he guts them. So there's that, but there's also a stretch of roughly forty-five very dull minutes in the middle (half the fucking film, in other words) where the filmmakers seem to forget that there's a murderer in the story. Giancarlo Giannini brings a world-weariness and a professionalism to his role that it doesn't really deserve, but I'm grateful all the same. Last note of interest: I saw this a day after seeing Divorce Italian Style, so it was a bit unexpected (pleasurably so) to catch that film's obscure object of desire Stefania Sandrelli here, all grown up and starring in a sex scene. Grade: C

Cruel Story of Youth (1960): Title can be read as both a cruel story about youthful persons and a story of the cruelty of youthful persons; either interpretation fits Nagisa Oshima's breakthrough film. Certain aspects reads very specifically to the post-war Japan in which it's set, yet the youthquake malaise it outlines is ultimately universal: parents and authority figures are ineffectual, teenagers are short-sighted vicious fuckers and everything's basically going to Hell. What saves it from being as jejune as all that is twofold: its acknowledgement of the exhilaration of youth as well as the angst and its use of the older sister & country doctor as a mirror of the teenaged protagonists. The former relieves the oppressive squalor, while the latter adds a touch of rueful melancholy in the form of defeated idealism/political activism. Oshima counters his ugly material with sharp, oft-lovely filmmaking, and his divided sympathies for his protagonists result in things like the most defiant apple-eating scene ever put on celluloid. Grade: B

The Fat Black Pussycat (1963): Holy christ is this film ever terrible. It started as a low-grade police thriller, but somewhere down the line somebody (the director? the distributor?) filmed a whole bunch of new material and cut it into the film, creating some sort of slasher/beatniksploitation hybrid. The thing is, the new footage appears to have been beamed in from some other planet. Thus, what could have been merely an acceptable time-waster was transformed into a painful, incompetent and damn near unendurable mishmash. One funny moment at a poetry reading and a hilariously brutal machine-gunning during the film's false climax provide slight entertainment, but mostly this is agony. Fucking A, do I ever hate beatnik movies. Grade: D

The Happening (2008): Not content with filming bedtime stories invented on the fly for his kids, M. Night Shyamalan has now filmed an idea that he had this one time. It's like he figured his work was done once he came up with the inciting incident. I can understand that it's gotta be tough for this guy trying to wriggle free of his reputation as Twistmaster Extraordinaire, but now he's gone from telling complex and obfuscatory stories to not telling one at all. I should be angry with this film and with Shyamalan -- this film is really awful, chock full of forced dramatics and bad acting yet minus any of the tension, dread or visual brio that the writer/director has previously been able to summon at will in even his worst works. Rarely have I witnessed such little return on my ten-dollar investment. But I can't get angry at it. I can't feel anything about The Happening, because directing some manner of emotion towards it would exert more effort on my part than went into making the damn thing. Grade: C

The Incredible Hulk (2008): Louis Leterrier was the right man for the job here. I say this because, in a way, he'd already made this movie. Maybe you saw it. It's called Unleashed, and it came out to little fanfare a couple of years ago. I didn't like it enough to recommend, but I thought there was something to it -- Leterrier's desire to mate morose melodrama with rock-em-sock-em pyrotechnics was an unusual approach, and under the right circumstances it could bear fruit. The Incredible Hulk bears that assessment out. Helped along by a typically unassuming Edward Norton performance, Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn have fashioned a film that walks a careful wire between emotion and motion, heart and muscle. It's a self-actualization tale masquerading as a comic-book feature, with Norton struggling to control/deny his inner demons (metaphorically represented by a physical symptom -- a racing pulse) before they destroy all he holds dear. It's that denial, though, that causes the bulk of Norton's problems, and only when he embraces his demons as an intrinsic part of himself can he emerge triumphant. (The last shot, with Norton finally making peace with himself and his solitude, is intensely satisfying in this regard.) What I'm trying to say, basically, is that this film is not dumb, merely direct. Also, the third act, starting with Tim Blake Nelson's entrance and climaxing in the slugfest between Norton's Hulk and the thing that, at one point in the film, is Tim Roth is glorious, goofy and entertaining as fuck. Liv Tyler, though, will hopefully be ditched for the sequel a la Katie Holmes. Grade: B

Standard Operating Procedure (2008): Leave it to Errol Morris to make an Iraq doc that moves beyond mere recap. While there's a fair share of this-is-how-it-went-down in relation to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Morris is more interested in why things happened as they did -- not just the decisions and actions but the mindset. He has his subjects review every single detail, every thought they had, every moment of rashness, every photo they took, until what emerges is a portrait of exactly how things generally considered beyond the pale become standard operating procedure under extraordinary circumstances. There's also some fascinating material about the meaning, intention and second life of photography, the most painful example of which is the gulf between Sabrina Harman's stated goal in taking her photos (to alert the world to the ugly stuff being done in the name of freedom) and her grinning visage as captured in these photos. (The summation is: A photo can capture a moment in time, but it can't explain it or give it context.) Shame about the Danny Elfman score, which is all wrong for this. Grade: B+

12 Angry Men (1957): Razor-sharp dialogue, keen performances carry the day in this classic, which pretty much set the gold standard for the courtroom thriller. Sidney Lumet overcomes the material's inherent staginess through stellar use of closeups and cross-cutting, creating an undeniable cinematic thrum for a script that takes place entirely within one room. To examine it is to realize that it's a bit contrived; to watch it is to not give a shit. There's not a weak link in the cast, but Henry Fonda is the clear MVP, showcasing a spine of steel and a forcefulness that generally gets belied by his folksy image. Grade: A-

Underworld U.S.A. (1961): Terrific opening half hour -- in painting the character of Tolly Devlin (Cliff Robertson, memorably brusque), the night that changes his life and his subsequent driving lust for vengeance, Samuel Fuller uses all his filmmaking skills as a blunt object. Hatchet-force editing compresses the timeline accordion-style, and Fuller expects you to be smart enough to keep track with the jumps in time; additionally, his camera setups, restless and tight, give the revenge narrative a propulsive energy. Then Fuller unaccountably herds this lean framework into a aimless, bloated overview of crime-syndicate politics and loses much of what was working. Still has a lot of striking moments, what with Fuller's tough-guy aesthetics -- particularly memorable is the staging of a suicide, cut so hard that it drifts into the realm of the avant-garde -- but this could have been so much more interesting. Dolores Dorn's performance is indefensibly bizarre even by the wide-eyed standards set by other films by this director. Grade: B-

2008-05-06T15:20:00.000-04:00

So obviously, the bullet points ain't helping.

I really only need two things to keep this site going: time and inspiration. Both, unfortunately, have been running in short supply lately. Thus, I'm tabling the OCE. We're on indefinite hiatus here until further notice. Until the next...

2008-04-01T10:05:00.001-04:00

Wish Upon a Star (1996)

(Viewed for The 2nd Annual White Elephant Blogathon.)

* PT: Alexia & Hayley Wheaton. Wadpaw: To get back to their own lives.

* Film involves two sisters, shallow & pretty popular girl Alexia (Katherine Heigl) and introverted science geek Hayley (Danielle Harris), who each learn what the other has to deal with when a spur-of-the-moment wish on a falling star by Hayley results in the two switching bodies. Perfectly innocuous, perfectly dull Disney kidflick mostly marks time until the credits, hitting every obvious point that the sibling-rivalry bodyswitch premise would offer. Gets a little drippy at the end with the hugging and the learning and the sisterly bonding, but such is the genre.

* What it's most valuable for is its indications towards a shift in in-house style for Disney. Every now and then, the plodding predictability of the narrative will be interrupted by some brow-furrowing bit of quirk or an unexpected sideline joke. (I'm thinking in particular of the everlasting evidence of Alexia's science project.) This digressive streak would later get explored further to fine effect by such Disney TV projects as Lizzie McGuire and Kim Possible, though its fullest and most satisfying expression would come with the anarchic, delightfully whacked-out Even Stevens. (That last show is ripe for rediscovery by snarky hipster types. I'm not joking. Can we get an Even Stevens DVD set? Shia's hot right now.)

* There's one scene that makes the whole film worth watching, simply because it's so incredibly bizarre and out-of-place: Alexia-as-Hayley, in an attempt to embarrass her sister, goes to school dressed like a Goth slut and does a lunchtime table dance to some would-be Madonna pop orgasm, while Hayley-as-Alexia, in response, attempts to suck the face off a guy with whom Alexia had broken up with the night of the switch. It's like the film turns into a teenage Dave Friedman film for five minutes. Thus, it's ridiculously misguided and kinda fuckin' awesome.

* I swear to God, there's a Persona shout-out near the end of the film. More young-adult entertainment should reference Bergman in my opinion.

* Katherine Heigl: way cuter here than in anything she's done this decade. I know she's only seventeen in the film, but I gotta calls 'em like I sees 'em.

* Film occasionally loses sight of what its characters are supposed to be. For example, what on Earth would a dim-bulb clotheshorse like Alexia be doing with a Roy Lichtenstein print in her room? For that matter, why would a sensitive, sweet guy like Kyle be doing dating rude bitch Alexia anyway? I know he's a jock, but still -- it don't ring true.

* Leads give serviceable performances -- they're as cute as they need to be. Rest of the cast is basically there to react to the leads, and that's about all they do. Yeah, it's a TV movie.

* Bottom line: Painless timewaster with some unexpected moments of inspiration/amusement. You've seen worse, so have I. In other words, I lucked the fuck out after last year's heinous offering. I can't complain, really.

Grade: C

2008-03-20T22:56:00.000-04:00

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

* PT: The whole Ocean crew. Wadpaw: To punish Willie Bank for his uncharitable nature.

* Not as loathsome and self-satisfied as Ocean's Twelve, but if anything this third installment feels like even more of a cash grab. As grateful as I am that we're not stuck with another version of George and Brad's Vacation Snaps by Steven S., I'd much prefer something other than this lazy, weightless confection. It's slick and frictionless, designed to entertain in the moment yet evaporate on contact.

* One's disbelief had to be suspended during Ocean's Eleven. It had to be held in place with pulleys and winches during Twelve. Here, suspending one's disbelief is pretty much impossible because the series isn't pretending to shoot for believability any longer. No problem is insurmountable, no solution is too ludicrous or expensive. With all the money thrown at The Destruction of Willie Banks by Our Men in Vegas, they could just as easily have purchased the entire state of Nevada and have Banks thrown out of town on a racketeering charge or a kiddie-porn rap or whatever.

* As the elaborate plotting grows tiresome due to the lack of stakes, so does the endless cast parade and nods to the previous entries grow tiresome because doing so just dices the film up that much further and leaves little room for much of the cast to do anything besides fill a role in a Rube Goldberg machine. Eddie Izzard gets a good semi-monologue at the film's beginning then vanishes for pretty much the entire rest of it; meanwhile, there's a killer irony in Shaobo Qin finally rating trailer-cast status for the series entry in which he's most superfluous (he literally does absolutely nothing for the first hour of Thirteen).

* The lone bright spot is Casey Affleck in Mexico. His misadventures in infiltrating a dice factory carry the genuine surprise and amusement that have gone missing from the rest of the film. Even his fake mustache is funny. Guess it's a shame then that it caps off with a punchline that gets uglier the more you think about it.

* The closing fireworks consciously evoke the stirring go-team triumph that ends Eleven. Doing so only reminded me of how the sharp elegance of that first film has been swallowed by shagginess and in-jokery. Bleah in my opinion.

* Can we start a petition to get Vincent Cassel out of Hollywood, seeing as how it obviously has no idea what to do with him?

Grade: C

2008-03-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

Andrei Rublev (1969)

* PT: Andrei Rublev. Wadpaw: To serve God as best he can.

* The opening scene shows a man briefly flying in a large balloon only to have the contraption collapse, descend into a river and sink into a quagmire of mud and water. Pretty pointed metaphor for the Russian state, that one.

* An absolute feast for the eyes; Andrei Tarkovsky uses crisp black-and-white cinematography and an unerring eye for composition to make this epic tale of the title character's journey through Russian history as he paints icons and wrestles to maintain his faith in a world which would conspire to do him harm never less than a sensory joy. Rublev swings from the shadowy, sinister timbre of the scene with the pagans to the brutal extravagance of the Tartan siege to the simple, chattering patience of the penultimate scenes involving the bellmaker's son without breaking a sweat. Even in a simple scene like the one where Kirill stalks off from the monastery, comparing the monks to moneychangers, there's an enormous wall of logs used as a backdrop that simply astonishes. Yet even at its most visually active, it never feels excessive; an early scene between Kirill and Theophanes the Greek establishes the sacred as being, "simplicity without gaudiness," and if this is a usable barometer, then the lack of gaudiness in Rublev mark it as sacred.

* Quite effectively paced, with contemplative scenes balanced out nicely by sequences of great activity and boisterous energy. What's more, the reflective tone maintains an unusual level of patience without ever tipping over into ponderousness. Worth every one of its 205 minutes.

* The central siege scene, with its cow on fire and falling horse is a thunderous example of cinematic brilliance, but it's also shattering in a way that few battle scenes are because of Andrei's eventual involvement in it. Tarkovsky lays out Rublev's faith and devotion, his need to live by the tenets of Christ, then shows him in a situation where he's forced to kill and thus violate those tenets. Rublev does it in the act of saving an idiot girl (read: innocence), but Tarkovsky doesn't gloss over the spiritual toll this takes -- the next section finds Rublev having taken a vow of silence and given up iconography in despair for a world that very well might have no use for the God in which he believes. Among other things, it's a cutting rebuke to that action-movie staple scene where the milquetoast peacenik finds his hidden savagery in the refuge of self-defense.

* Said toll seems even harsher in the wake of the idiot girl's ultimate fate, which she chooses (as much as an "idiot" can choose) while Rublev looks on. At first glance, this seems like a cold and cynical thing, a repudiation of the notion of useful sacrifice, yet I think it's something other than that. What Tarkovsky seems to be striving towards is a comment on the nature of sacrifice and faith, that living in imitation of Christ means doing what you can even in recognition that Christ's own sacrifices were at the time/still are unappreciated.

* The last segment of the film features a bellmaker's son who says that only he has the secret knowledge of perfect bellmaking, as this information was passed to him by his father while the latter was on his deathbed. In a lengthy, extraordinary examination of process, he defies conventional wisdom and crafts the bell his way, fighting naysayers all the time. This whole sequence makes a nifty simile for the faith of the truly devout, which makes its resolution impossibly moving.

* At point, a character says, "You're always lying, Foma." Think Kurt Vonnegut saw this film a couple of times?

Grade: A-

2008-03-20T21:05:00.002-04:00

Raw Force (1982)

* PT: John Taylor. Wadpaw: To kick a whole mess of ass and keep his party from suffering casualties.

* The title makes Raw Force sound like just another red-meat '80s action flick. But here's what you get in the first five minutes alone: A German guy with a Hitler 'stache and bad combover. A bunch of naked chicks in a bamboo cage. A group of evil Filipino monks in medieval garb who laugh a lot. Gratuitous bush shots. Zombie samurai. I'll repeat that last one: ZOMBIE FUCKING SAMURAI. Does the rest of the film live up to this insane moodsetter? Oh yeah you betcha.

* Calms down a bit after the opening to introduce its characters (who might as well be interchangeable) and provide us with a soupcon of exposition via wonderfully awful dialogue. (Best line, bar none: "Go ahead, Cookie -- you don't have to tell him you're a member of the L.A. SWAT team." Which, besides being hilariously awkward, means that there's a SWAT cop named Cookie.) Once those pleasantries are handled, Raw Force settles into a comfortable groove where there is either asskicking or tits on screen at all times. Occasionally the film will find a way to get both in a once, as in the scene where two guys duke it out in a ship's cabin while a chick who's on the run after killing her Mafia boyfriend is tied to a bed naked and ass up. (It's even better if you reflect on the fact that the chick was tied up by the bad guy after attempting to beat him over the head with an empty gas can.) If only every B-movie brought the goods like this one.

* Three of the main characters identify themselves at the start as members of the Burbank Karate Club. I'll bet that's a real thriving organization there.

* At one point, director Edward D. Murphy splices in footage from Joe Dante's Piranha. I wouldn't dream of revealing the gut-busting circumstances under which that footage appears -- it's really just something you should experience for yourself.

* Obviously filmed on the cheap using actors who didn't really know much kung fu (aside from Rey King, channeling his inner Bruce Le); somehow, this just makes it more endearing as it blows past its own limitations to provide all sorts of trashy entertainment. It may be crap, but it's fast, loose and incredibly silly crap, unashamed of its own crapitude and dedicated to bringing the drive-in delight. I kinda think I love this movie.

* I wonder how drunk Cameron Mitchell was during the production. A whole lotta buncha drunk, I'd bet.

* The whole movie in a nutshell: The first major fight scene is set in a strip bar, and in between fisticuffs, Murphy will periodically cut to a glassy-eyed stripper half-heartedly shaking her tits and seemingly unaware of the chaos around her. It's so blinkered yet so unabashedly open about its desire to titillate its audience's every possible desire all at the same time that I can't help but be impressed. I really think I love this movie.

* Film fades out on a "To Be Continued" title card; sadly, that continuation never arrived. Damn.

Grade: B

2008-03-20T20:33:00.001-04:00

Olga's Dance Hall Girls (1969)

* PT: Whichever housewife bimbo is doing the narration. Wadpaw: To shake off her housewife boredom and make some extra cash.

* The triple-feature curse of Something Weird strikes again: On their special-edition triple-feature DVDs, the third film will almost always be worthless. (Other examples of this phenomenon include The Brick Dollhouse and Zero in and Scream.)

* Um, hey, what the fuck? Where's Aubrey Campbell? Where's Joseph P. Mawra? How is this in any way a proper Olga film? I call shenanigans, goddammit.

* This seems to have been made by people with only a vague understanding of the Olga series. Olga and her brother Nick are in the film, but they're played by different actors and have different personalities. There's a voiceover, but it's generic rather than the half-cracked purplish insanity of previous entries, and there's far too many synch-sound scenes. Naked girls show up, but instead of being whipped, whored out and force-fed drugs, they're dancing spastically. The people who made this know the notes but not the music.

* Not only has Nick's personality changed from malevolently fey to unctuous, but his name might have changed too -- though the narration refers to him as Nick, dialogue scenes have him called Vince. What the fuck.

* There's a last-minute jump into Satanism (foreshadowed by the opening voiceover's promise of "a journey through modern supersitions"), which should be at least goofily entertaining but instead smells like a desperate attempt to salvage a story that had nothing going on in it save for lots of bad dancing.

* One bright side: It's short. Real short. Thank Christ.

Grade: D-

2008-03-20T20:02:00.000-04:00

Cheerleader Autopsy (2003)

* PT: Blake. Wadpaw: To learn the family business, I guess.

* That title's supposed to be a warning, right? So why did I feel compelled to watch it? Maybe for the same reason I watched Hookers in a Haunted House: Because I'm stupid.

* What the hell is the film even about? There isn't a plot to speak of; instead, things happen until they stop happening. The things in question are loosely organized around a bus crash that kills a group of cheerleaders, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't rearrange all the scenes before the crash and all the scenes after the crash without losing coherence.

* One gets the impression watching the lowbrow yuks on display here that the people who made this fancy themselves clever and daring and dangerous or something. We get jokes about necrophilia, castration, abortion, cannibalism, fetus-eating, testicle-eating and so on and so on as director Stu Dodge tries his hardest to convince us that he'll go to any length to shock and entertain. But there's no panache or tonal control -- it's mere juvenile sniggering at an atrocity exhibition, a gross-out gag that rolls on with no end in sight. John Waters, this dude ain't.

* The first fart joke comes two minutes after the credits, if that gives you any idea of the level of wit on display.

* Makeup FX are atrocious, which is often true of no-budget productions. The problem is that we're allowed to stare at the rubber and paper-mache at length, so that the film stops being a gross-out horror comedy and starts being a study on bad actors manhandling latex. At least when Lloyd Kaufman uses a cranberry-sauce-filled melon to simulate a crushed head, he knows enough to cut away after the gag is done instead of letting us linger on it.

* There's precious little nudity for a cheerleader film, and most of what we get is male nudity. (Cocks are a preoccupation.) What bloody audience was this made for, anyway?

* So yeah, it's abysmal, but it's not even abysmal in a fun way or a way that allows a viewer to mock it. It's sad and pathetic in about equal measure, with great heaping dollops of misogyny to add flavor. If this accurately represents the sensibilities of Dodge & company, I'm pretty glad I don't know them.

* I admit I laughed once at a faux magazine headline that linked fetus consumption to a cure for Alzheimer's. I thought the wording was amusing, though I don't remember it anymore. I'm not proud of that laugh.

* The bottom line is, asking an audience to pay any amount of money to see this is the height of hubris. If I had somehow created this hopeless piece of shit, I wouldn't expect (or even really want) anyone who didn't know me to bother watching it. The fact that someone thought this was worth releasing into the public is more disturbing than anything actually in the film.

Grade: F

2008-03-16T19:42:00.003-04:00

Definitely, Maybe (2008)

* PT: Will. Wadpaw: To sort his shit.

* When Scott Tobias says that Definitely, Maybe "excels most at not being awful," he strikes at the heart of what makes it such undemanding entertainment yet so forgettable and annoying. Faced with an unconventional structure, a possibility to do something different within the confines of a shopworn drama (the rom-com) and a solid cast, writer/director Adam Brooks decides instead to aim for the middle. His film isn't bad enough to hate nor good enough to like. Despite some promise, it's coasting the whole way.

* The narrative structure could be challenging, but it's not. Brooks tries to muddy the waters, but it becomes patently obvious after about twenty minutes which of the three ladies in Ryan Reynolds' life is going to end up bearing his kids and which one is going to be his true love that he's going to spar with while never quite connecting on the same wavelength until the end of the film, because delaying gratification is dramatic and shit, yo. Also, if you want to be nitpicky, one of the actresses was clearly cast on her resemblance to Abigail Breslin, so there's that as well. But now I'm being whiny.

* Ryan Reynolds continues to surprise me. While what he does here isn't quite on the level of his rock-solid, deeply unappreciated work in the midst of the maelstrom that was Smokin' Aces, it's impressive enough that he can convincingly portray a romantic lead, given that about five years ago I wouldn't have thought him capable of exhibiting any human emotions other than overwhelming smugness. I think I'm really starting to like this guy.

* Isla Fisher, once again, proves she is incapable of any wrong. The film bolts to life whenever she's around, and I found myself wishing quite often that Brooks had forgone the labored, unsuccessful mystery-mom device and just made a movie about these two people finding out that they, y'know, love each other. More conventional, true, but probably also more interesting. But then, maybe not.

* Abigail Breslin is gonna grow up to be kinda hot, isn't she? Jesus, that's just going to make Little Miss Sunshine all the more awkward.

Grade: C+

2008-03-16T19:05:00.000-04:00

Ikiru (1952)

* PT: Watanabe. Wadpaw: To do something meaningful before he dies.

* Akira Kurosawa's depiction of the unexamined life brims with patience and visual poetry, but what's really fascinating is how he uses the latter to cut through the former and keep the film moving even when nothing is happening. There's a lengthy party scene that stands out in that regard -- Kurosawa keeps foregrounding objects between us and Watanabe (trumpets, beads and whatnot) until we cut suddenly to an extreme closeup of the man's morose face. The visual strategy reflects the whirlwind evening's attempts to blot out and obscure the pain of the situation, and the closeup reveals that it's all for naught.

* Takashi Shimura's performance as Watanabe the dying bureaucrat is economical and physical in all the right ways. In particular, he uses his eyes as big liquid pools of expression, with dejection and determination swimming around chasing each other. He also gets some choice lines of dialogue, my favorite coming after yet another setback in his attempts to have a park built on a landfill: "I can't afford to hate people. I haven't got that kind of time."

* The opening sequence depicting the runaround a group of ladies get through the various departments of the government is a wonderfully exasperated and succinct depiction of government in inaction.

* Wasn't quite prepared for the shift in perspective that occurs at the ninety-minute mark -- right at the moment where Watanabe figures out what to do with his remaining days, the film suddenly careens from linear storytelling to Rashomon-style flashback pastiche, and the story similarly shifts from one about a man trying to cope with the news that he's going to die to one about a man who fights to leave a mark on the world before he dies.

* The whole of the film can be summed up in its final two images: an office worker who tried to stand up to the bureaucracy swallowed by paper as he dejectedly takes a seat, followed by the glorious shot of a joyful Watanabe sitting on a swing in the rain. The penultimate shot gets to the heart of the cynicism Kurosawa feels about postwar Japan, but that's washed away by the serene triumph of the closing shot. The legacy has been left.

* Sole demerit: The voiceover narration struck me as overly explanatory and superfluous. "He is passing time instead of living his life." Yeah, I got that, thanks anyway.

Grade: A-

2008-03-04T11:59:00.002-05:00

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)

* PT: Steve Wiebe. Wadpaw: For his best to be good enough.

* More proof that no sport or pastime is too esoteric for a documentary, Seth Gordon's account of the war for a Donkey Kong world record transcends its who-cares subject matter through crack pacing and a showman's sense of entertainment. Structured like a underdog-sportsman narrative -- it draws as much inspiration from, say, Major League as much as it does Spellbound. I admit I'm a sucker for underdog-sportsman movies, so I found this all pretty thrilling.

* Entertainment value is pretty close to unbeatable; however, worth as a documentary is suspect. Gordon never pretends to be objective. It's clear from the outset that he's siding with Steve Wiebe, which is understandable considering underdogs make for better drama. However, Gordon takes every opportunity to further force our identification with Wiebe by emphasizing his gumption, his hard luck in life, the odds against him and so forth. Furthermore, while I think Billy Mitchell is a slickster and a bit of a tool, that's not enough for Gordon -- he pushes and pushes until Mitchell comes off like a video-game Mephistopheles and a coward besides.

* One wonders what was left out to craft the narrative throughline Gordon sculpts from his footage. In particular, there's the question of Mitchell's magic videotape; as it's being viewed, Gordon cuts in a clip of Twin Galaxies chief judge Robert Mruczek saying something to the effect of videotapes being declared useless if there's so much of a hint of a question of their veracity, and it's later revealed that his left his post shortly after the incident. Thus, it's implied pretty heavily that Mruczek may have had an issue with the tape, yet we see no objections raised. Maybe he didn't raise them at the time, I dunno. But part of me can't help but shake the feeling that Gordon needs us to believe that Twin Galaxies is united for Billy Mitchell and against Steve Wiebe.

* Interesting counterpoint: While the obvious structuring makes the documentary's veracity questionable, it does bring out something basic about our perception of success and what it takes to succeed in American life. Wiebe is your basic nice-guy screwup, forever an outsider banging at the doors, while Mitchell is the prototypical confident go-getter who seemingly conquers everything he attempts without breaking a sweat. It's then natural that someone as charismatic and successful as Mitchell would attract an entourage, and it's just as natural that said entourage would circle the wagons whenever a stranger would try to challenge their de facto leader. We in the audience want to see Wiebe win, but what does that say about us and our desire to see the golden boy torn down? We value humility, but humility isn't what gets one ahead in the business world. The inadvertent message seems to be: Be successful but not TOO successful. Something to chew on, at any rate.

* Brian Kuh: saddest little remora in the world.

Grade: B

2008-03-03T16:05:00.000-05:00

In Bruges (2008)

* PT: Ray. Wadpaw: To exorcise his guilt.

* Hitmen on holiday: What could have been a Guy Ritchie rip is instead a melancholic riff on guilt and flexible morality ("Insulting my fucking kids? That's going overboard!"). There are laughs, especially in the first half of the film, but I didn't leave the theater grinning. The kind of film that will probably improve on multiple viewings once it's understood how the two halfs (the lighter, funnier first half and the dark, grim second half) flow into each other.

* Acting pretty spectacular, which is a given from Ralph Fiennes, clearly enjoying his splenetic role, and Brendan Gleeson. (Has anyone in the last twenty years gotten more mileage out of the gentle-giant archetype than Gleeson?) The real surprise here is Colin Farrell; freed from the constrains of Hollywood emoting, he loosens up, lets the words flow naturally and gives a small reminder of why he was considered such a big screaming deal in the first place.

* The humor on display is far ruder than the advertisements would have you believe. Writer/director Martin McDonagh is nothing if not an equal-opportunity offender -- at one point, Farrell tells a disparaging joke about Belgians. I spent the better part of two days retelling this joke to anyone who would listen.

* Film is also quite a bit more violent than the trailer lets on, which should be no surprise to anyone familiar with McDonaugh's theater work, but the trick is that he doesn't use his violence merely as window-dressing or punchline fodder; when Farrell blinds a guy with a blank, it gets a laugh, but the point is that he's doing it in self-defense and it comes back to haunt him later in the film. Just because Gleeson and Farrell are doing the odd-couple thing in a scenic Belgian town doesn't mean they don't take their jobs as death-dealers seriously. The bell-tower death: early entry on my shortlist for Scenes of the Year.

* Films builds to an epiphany on the part of Farrell then wisely cuts off right at the moment of that epiphany. Good job Martin McDonagh.

Grade: B

2008-02-25T14:10:00.002-05:00

The Dirty Dozen (1967)

* The guy movie to end all guy movies: A bunch of misfit, mean-eyed macho motherfuckers band together to blow the fuck out of the Nazis... THEIR way. As the soldiers grunt and sweat and bond under the sternly watchful eye of their maverick leader (a template that would fuel many films in the wake of this box-office smash), the testosterone practically oozes through the screen. I think my otherwise smooth-n-clammy self sprouted some chest hair while watching this.

* Manliness extends to the accidentally-iconic casting. A cast that includes Telly Savalas, Charles Bronson, John Casavettes, Jim Brown and Lee fucking Marvin is bound to have a certain red-meat contingent to it, but it's kind of stunning to realize that this wasn't on purpose -- aside from Marvin, none of these guys had hit stardom. Live-wire Casavettes the clear frosh standout here (no wonder he was the only cast member nominated for an Oscar), though Donald Sutherland also gets a great starmaker of a scene ("Neeeever heard of it.") and Bronson shows off to great effect the steel-eyed minimalism that would define his career.

* Robert Aldrich was the right guy for the job here. His tough, gritty sensibilities serve well in both the training scenes and the action scenes, and he knows the specifics of male camaraderie in and out (as evidenced not only here but in some of his other works, e.g. Big Leaguer). He's jaundiced enough, though, to keep this from becoming a hawkfest. Pro-war feel is inevitable, but Aldrich doesn't lose sight of the irony in that these army rejects, these rapists and murderers, are the most competent soldiers in the film.

* There's a certain amount of narrative choppiness, especially during the war-game sequence, that could either be an unusual amount of trust in the audience's ability to fill in blanks or just lax storytelling. I'd like to think it's the former while suspecting it's the latter.

* Submission of the individual to the collective gets an elegant literal representation in the assignation of numbers to the Dozen and their subsequent identification by those numbers alone, only getting their true names back after the mission is completed. Because of the nature of the mission, this results in a few people being re-named posthumously. Such is war.

Grade: B

2008-02-19T13:02:00.000-05:00

Contempt (1963)

* Spoken opening credits mark this right off as a big-budget film without the feel of a big-budget film; the Andre Bazin quote (wrongly attributed, according to Rosenbaum) clinches it. Jean-Luc Godard got the money and the producer interference that comes with major-market filmmaking, but he still held fast to his sense of pranksterism and his talent for subversion. Thus, we have a film that trips itself up whenever it can.

* Godard famously has Fritz Lang say that CinemaScope is not useful for people, only for "snakes and funerals." He then throws that out the window by giving us one stunning 'Scope composition after another. The central setpiece, with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli arguing in their apartment, is particularly stunning -- a rapturous study of spatial relations, with the movements of the actors and the constant panning of the camera across rooms and through walls literalizing the affection/rejection verbal dance that is happening in front of us.

* If Godard's subversive nature works on a visual level, though, it doesn't work at all on a storytelling level. We're deliberately not given an identification figure, just a bunch of types who range from morally compromised (Piccoli) to out-and-out rotten (Jack Palance as a dumb, venal producer). Furthermore, there's nothing that can be done with Bardot -- she's not an actress, she's a clothes hanger with eyes. The only character even remotely sympathetic/interesting is Lang, and he's here solely for his status as Fritz Lang. So a man's marriage falls apart, his career fizzles, his ideals get sold out and there's no reason to feel any way about it beyond a shrug. You can lead a man to cinema, but you can't force him to give a crap.

* I admit part of my antipathy towards this is driven by my dislike of films centered around squabbling married couples. Even Scenes from a Marriage, which I like overall, lost my interest when the hostility between Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman went from unspoken to overt.

* Maybe in a way, this film was always destined to destroy itself. I mean, it's right there in the title: Contempt made this film, drove it, formed it into the interesting but unsatisfying work-of-many-colors that it is. It's said in the film, "We must rebel when trapped by circumstances," and that seems to be what Godard did here.

Grade: C+

2008-02-19T12:28:00.000-05:00

Olga's House of Shame (1964)

* Pretty much more of the same as White Slaves of Chinatown, the first entry in the Olga series, except even more ridonkulously fun. Tonally matter-of-fact yet overwrought narration and general seediness make this feel less like a typical exploitation film and more like some maniacal off-world mondo flick. (Example: The narrator refers to narcotics as "this human misery!")

* Unlike White Slaves, this has a couple of synch-sound dialogue scenes. These scenes really don't mesh with the rest of the film at all, mainly because the involved actors are better at projecting menace and/or fear than forming words. Still, it does allow us to bask in the awesomeness of W.B. Parker, who plays Olga's brother/henchman Nick; he's like the Joker mated with Paul Lynde and squeezed into corduroy pants.

* Starts with the barest of plots, something about Olga consolidating her underworld power in the prostitution/narcotics world by punishing the disobedient and crushing the competition but kicks into overdrive when it stops caring about telling a story and starts tossing the early-roughie action at the audience in great sticky gobs of sick. There's a 15-minute section in this film right past the half-hour mark where the only thing on screen is one in a procession of naked girls getting manhandled in some manner by Olga (electrocution, whipping, slapping, bondage, etc.). Director Joseph P. Mawra knows what you came here for, and he's more than happy to give it to you; quite a fair change of pace from the average grindhouse feature which stingily parcels out its saleable elements in between long stretches of dull dialogue.

* Obviously shot quickly and cheaply, House of Shame still manages to demonstrate that Mawra, despite his station in the industry, might have been a born filmmaker. His compositions are generally pretty sharp, and every now and then he'll do something (like the dominant-position shot of chief torture subject Elaine as seen from between Olga's legs) that hint that he's not just a point-and-shoot nobody. The cut from Olga masturbating to the jiggling breasts of a belly dancer: Best cut ever.

* It's not often you get to say this about two-buck sleaze cinema, but Audrey Campbell cuts a genuinely iconic figure as Olga. She exudes a hateful glee at her naughty, brutal acts that says more than any mess of dialogue could. Also, she gives pretty good haughty voiceover.

* Despite it all, this is still a pretty bad movie. But it's bad in a wonderful, mesmerizing kind of way. There are times when I can't tell if the goofiness was meant to be intentional (the narration seems too ludicrous to be true at times). Most memorably, there's a big chase scene that seems to be taking place in amber -- everyone's moving just a little too slow, as if they didn't really want to exert themselves too much. It's really kinda great.

* Hope you like "Night on Bald Mountain," because it gets played during this film. A lot.

Grade: B-

2008-02-18T19:00:00.001-05:00

Crazed Fruit (1956)

* Japanese iteration of a youth/Beat film displays similar ideas about post-war aimlessness and malaise, with boredom being seen not as a condition but as a way of life. No surprise that said boredom and restlessness leads to delinquency, moral turpitude and other such shocking things (idle hands, ya know); what is surprising is the rich vein of humor that gets mined before the grim finale. (Great Moments in Dialogue: "Long hair doesn't go with Hawaiian shirts.")

* Plot centers around a love/lust triangle created when young, innocent Haruji (Masahiko Tsugawa) falls for sweet young thing Eri (Mie Kitahara), arousing the jealousy and competitive nature of his old brother Natsuhisa (Yujiro Ishihara). Before things go south, director Kô Nakahira demonstrates his perfect understanding of the ways of adolescent love -- that horrid sense of being young, awkward and attracted.

* There's a scene where Haruji goes looking for Natsuhita, instead finding an older lady-friend of his. After a short dialogue scene, Natsuhita shows up, Later, he tells Haruji that although this lady-friend has been with many men with no feeling attached, Haruji "made her heart go pitter-pat." That there's some cruel foreshadowing.

* Nakihara's framing is really tight in a bunch of scenes, just a little too tight so that visual information gets crowded out of the frame. Faces are cut in half, conversations are one-sided, people reach for things offscreen; the prevailing sense is one of exuberance, of so much being expressed that it can't all fit in the space allotted for storytelling. Pretty nifty, methinks.

* Dark ending has a character in a boat literally leaving a wake after committing a brutal act of violence, a nice visual reminder that our actions do not occur in a vacuum.

* Recurring motif: Things in this film are often said to be happening, "the day after tomorrow." Is this the present-weary characters looking to the future or an admission that tomorrow will be just as fucked as today?

* First thought upon seeing female lead Kitahara: DUDE SHE'S ROCKING A MULLET

Grade: B

2008-02-09T19:20:00.000-05:00

Rambo (2008)

* Not, to my surprise, the unintentionally funny fiasco expected from the adverts (especially the Interent red-band trailers); instead, Sylester Stallone's latest is mostly a decent, economically paced action film. Blood and thunder rule the day, but the hyperbolic violence meshes surprisingly well with the downcast, almost mournful tone that dominates the film's first two acts.

* Much in the vein of what I understand Rocky Balboa to be, this is in part an old man, maybe a bit past his prime, indulging himself in a bit of ambivalent nostalgia. Stallone is examining one of his iconic characters, trying to get down into him and find out what it means to be John Rambo, man of war without a country to call home. Coming from an actor who himself has to be feeling a bit displaced in the modern action-film landscape, I can't lie and say I wasn't a bit stirred by it all.

* Notable is the reconception of the lone-wolf Rambo. Here his solitude, his go-it-alone nature, has turned against him and made him an outcast from society. His isolation, in essence, strips him of his heroism. It's only through teaming up with the soldiers of fortune he escorts down the river that he can regain his place as American Crusader.

* Remember when the idea of Sylvester Stallone, director, conjured up shivers and frightening visions of Staying Alive? He's apparently improved a bit since then. Direction is tough, fast with just the right touch of chaos & shaky-cam. It's not awards-calibur, but it's pretty tight genre expertise. Every now and then, too, Stallone finds an unexpectedly poetic image, like the burning village reflected in the opaque glasses of the evil Burmese general.

* Major weakness is the depiction of the villainous Burmese armada. It's all well and proper to show their savagery; in particular, the gambit with the mines is pretty brilliant, establishing their loathsomeness without dialogue in the span of a couple of minutes. (It gets even better when Stallone shows it again and translates the dialogue this time, thus providing context to what's actually happening.) But true to his meat-and-potatoes origin in the good-evil dichotomy of the Reagan era, Stallone pushes too hard to make them less like humans and more like animals. The initmations of pederasty by the evil general are especially ill-advised, as they have no bearing on the plot and serve only to make the general more hissable and hateable. It's films like this that make me appreciate what Werner Herzog did in Rescue Dawn all the more.

* While Stallone shows a surprising facility for images, his dialogue is often clunky and forced. This is only exacerbated by the modestly talented cast of relative unknowns that populate the film. Some of these lines (I'm thinking in particular of anything that stumbles out of the mouth of Paul Schulze) come off as nigh well undeliverable.

* Action climax: holy shit. Pure vicious adrenaline, a stunning release of carnage after the slow boil of acts one and two. I was impressed the most by the way Rambo uses a long-dormant bomb, but the heralded jeep-gun massacre was also pretty jaw-dropping. Best of all, Stallone had the good sense to excise the instantly-notorious decapitation-by-fist that was featured in the red-band previews -- that would have tilted the film directly into camp.

Grade: B-

2008-02-06T22:19:00.000-05:00

The Naked City (1948)

* Some films don't age well. This is one of 'em. Despite its status as a crime-drama classic, Jules Dassin's procedural is pretty awful.

* Even cutting the screenplay a lot of slack for presumably inventing many of the cliches it flogs, it's hard to believe that this was nominated for an Oscar back in its day. The super-explanatory voiceover narration, unnecessary as it is, goes a long way towards sinking this all on its lonesome. Write a book while you're at it, fellas.

* Clumsy dialogue isn't helped by stilted acting. It's like an entire cast filled with summer-stock rejects. Worst offenders: The "Midwest" parents of the dead girl. The impression I get is that of a flat-footed play that someone decided to film without really trying to make a movie out of it.

* Authenticity of locations is a big selling point here (this was mostly filmed on location in New York City), which makes it a shame that much of the film is confined to a series of rooms. And the NYC-street scenes end up looking like backlot photography anyway. So, ya know, big fucking whoop.

* Chase climax at the Williamsburg Bridge is pretty keen, pointing towards a confluence of location and action that the rest of the film wishes it was. It's about 80 minutes too late to save the film from itself, though.

* The same guy who made this made Rififi? Really? Damn.

Grade: D+

2008-02-06T22:01:00.000-05:00

Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)

* Slow to get rolling, but once it does, damn. Debt to The Birds is pretty obvious, but there's something uniquely disquieting about a semi-redux that replaces the avian attackers with murderous children. Doesn't wimp out or shy away from the uglier aspects of its premise, either. This is one fucked-up film.

* The "slow to get rolling" part nearly lost me, though. The setup, with its husband/wife leads taking their sweet time getting to the island and then even more sweet time figuring out their predicament, is painfully dull. Major doses of pedohysteria, too. Won't SOMEBODY think of the children???

* Opening your horror film with seven minutes of genuine atrocity footage is a really, really concrete way to make the subsequent film feel frivolous.

* Turning point is the creepy piñata scene; the film eventually overcomes its handicaps through taut, assured direction by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, razor-sharp editing and its willingness to undermine its own previously mentioned pedohysteria. Essentially, the grimmer and more frantic the protagonists become, the better the film gets.

* I'm a bit confused on what happens to the wife near the film's end. But if it's what I think it is... oof.

Grade: B

2008-02-06T18:40:00.000-05:00

Submission (1969)

* Look, I know the softcore-sex genre isn't the most impressive of genres. But there's one thing you have to do if you're going to inhabit it -- you've got to show us some good fuckin'. It's simple: Sex is exciting. Movie-watching is a safe form of voyeurism, and voyerism can be exciting. If you've made a film with no plot and lots of bare flesh, and somehow that bare flesh is unexciting, you're doing it wrong.

* I'm really not sure what happened in this film. We're given the thinnest skeleton of a narrative, per the usual, but I'm unclear as to what that narrative is. I think it involves a rude sadistic guy and his attempts to keep various chicks in a boarding house under his thumb. Then there is sex. And more sex. Then a scene with a couple of people standing around. Then more sex, and so on.

* As kinky as director Allen Savage tries to make his film (there's lesbianism, group sex, rape-fantasy sex and other stuff), he never quite tops the bizarre pull of the early scene where the Guy lords his power over some chick (his girlfriend, I presume) by throwing out her secret stash of chocolate bars.

* The musical score is really awful -- it's eerie minimalism better suited to a sci-fi or monster movie. This may be one big reason why the myriad sex scenes aren't sexy.

* One wan positive is the odd interesting shot or angle that floats through every so often like the shot of two post-coital lovers, legs still locked together, bodies splayed in opposite directions. I think the aim was to give this the high-class gloss of a Joe Sarno or Radley Metzger film, but the impression given is rather one of second-year art students slumming in a genre they despise. Still, it's something worthwhile, and we take what we can get around here.

Grade: D+

2008-02-06T18:31:00.000-05:00

We're back in business, folks. Starting today, the writing will return. The format shift I promised? Well, I'm still short on time these days, so it's all about the bullet points. This way, I can at least get my thoughts out about the things I see without having to worry about whether or not I'm being coherent. I never am coherent anyway, so it's not like much will change.

2007-12-20T00:29:00.000-05:00

Hey folks. Remember when I said I wasn't going to update until the New Year? Still kinda true, but just so nobody gets too bored and swears never to come back, here's something from the Odds 'n' Sods pile. This is a review I whipped up for The Devil's Rejects as a writing sample in applying for a film-writing gig a couple of years back. I didn't get the job, but that doesn't mean the review can't serve some purpose. So here it is, plugging a hole until I can find the time to write something new. Hope ya like it.

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Rob Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" is a mean and nasty film about mean and nasty people. Stuffed to bursting with violence and immorality, it is a seriously unpleasant movie. Nobody should ever need to see it. Needs and wants, however, can be mutually exclusive. And for those with the temerity required to want to see "The Devil's Rejects", it offers a bracing cinematic experience that is seldom seen in these times.

"Rejects" is a sequel of sorts to Zombie's 2003 film "House of 1000 Corpses". It's a sequel in that it involves members of the deranged Firefly family introduced in "House" -- vicious killer Otis (Bill Moseley), deranged sexpot Baby (Sherri Moon Zombie), grotesque huckster clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) and acid-tongued whore/matriarch Mother (Karen Black in "House", Lesley Easterbrook in "Rejects") -- but the similarities do not extend very far beyond that. "House", for all its unappreciated merits, worked at one level removed from the audience. Written and directed in 2000, it was still very much a product of the Age of Irony: The grue and violence were there, but the tone was skewed just far enough away from the scary and towards the sleazy that the film felt like a creepy-cool carnival ride through Zombie's prodigious id. The follow-up, though, skips the camp and takes its premise at face value, thus guaranteeing that those looking for another good time at the pictures are going to be left unsure how to respond.

On its face, the film seems simple enough. The plot, such as it is, follows the adventures of Otis, Baby and Spaulding as they slaughter their way across Texas and elude the grasp of revenge-minded Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), whose brother fell victim to the Firefly clan in "House". It certainly sounds like the set-up for some grisly-minded fun, and to a certain extent it is. More often than not, though, the horrific acts shown on-screen play out as just that -- horrific acts. Zombie thankfully hasn't entirely left behind his black sense of humor (note, for example, the perfectly sick timing involved in the film's centerpiece 'road kill' gag), but his intentions are elsewhere. He wraps his big arms around the audience like snakes and refuses to let up until the prom's last dance (scored, naturally, to "Freebird"). Quite simply, this film is meant to hurt you.

So the question remains: Why would anyone want to see this film? Despite its unpleasantness, the fact remains that "The Devil's Rejects" is a strong, effective and uncommonly well-made genre effort. Zombie's direction has improved in the time between "House" and this -- where the previous film often called to mind "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" re-envisioned as a rock video, "Rejects" takes the rough-n-grainy aesthetic found in many low-rent '70s B-movies and weds it to the expansive big-empty road movie stylings of "Badlands" and "Vanishing Point" (not to mention more recent efforts like "Gerry" and "Twentynine Palms"). The result is a film that feels both agoraphobic and claustrophobic in the same breath: No matter how big the landscape is, it's not big enough to escape to freedom.

The actors, too, get to stretch a bit. The ghoulish caricatures from "House" get rounded out a bit and allowed to be seen in quieter moments as well as nasty ones. There is in particular a dialogue about ice cream that turns out to be a funny and brilliant bit of humanizing, as well as the marking of the sea change in the film's true intent. For while Zombie goes a long way to keep from empathizing with the titular psychos (that, after all, is what the entire motel sequence is for -- so that we don't forget that these people are horrible), his ultimate point is that evil is relative. As the film progresses, the actions of the 'good' character (Sheriff Wydell) become indiscernible from those of the 'bad' characters (the Fireflys). Traditional morality becomes useless in the face of these characters. All we're left with is the idea that there are ordinary people and there are terrible people, and the terrible will do what they will and the ordinary will sit back, powerless, and wonder what the hell can be done. (As Sheriff Wydell says during the climax, "We are working on a level that most people will never see!") Zombie gives us a world with no heroes, only villains, and while that may be nihilistic there can be a certain power in confronting nihilism and walking away: You've stared into the abyss of human darkness and walked away stronger for it. And if that's not enough to get you to run out and buy a ticket, know that the film does also include a wicked strain of sick-minded gallows humor (there's a scene, for instance, where a minor character explains in great detail the particulars of fucking a chicken, and Captain Spaulding's introduction is a great linking of sex-n-violence). Plus, it has a fantastic credit sequence (the Allman Brothers never sounded so threatening), an unexpectedly powerful climax and ample evidence that Rob Zombie is totally enamored of Sherri Moon Zombie's unclothed ass. (As you might surmise from the surnames, the two are married off-screen.) For most, "The Devil's Rejects" is unwatchable; for those of a certain constitution, it's unmissable.

2007-12-16T20:51:00.000-05:00

Site's not dead. Promise. However, the next update won't be until the New Year in all likelihood. In the interim, interested parties can follow my Twitter page, on which I have blurbed the fifty-plus films I've seen since September and haven't written about. Back in '08 with a new format...

2007-11-27T14:26:00.000-05:00

Santo vs. Frankenstein's Daughter (1972)

Even by the standards of the Man in the Silver Mask, this series entry is pretty whacked. Considering this was helmed by Miguel M. Delgado, who also gave us Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dr. Frankenstein and Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man, this weirdness isn't really that surprising; Delgado seems to have realizes, with his Santo entries, that the mythology and character were established enough for him to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Thus, we get an extended bit where the title villain actually removes Santo's mask. We also get a protracted, unexpectedly brutal duel between Santo and Dr. Lady Frankenstein's slave Truxon (who, despite the name change, is actually Gomar from Doctor of Doom/Night of the Bloody Apes), which I think is the only time I've ever seen Santo beat someone to death. And we also find out that the reason Lady Frankenstein is so bent on capturing Santo is that her eternal-youth serum requires his super-blood. Yes, apparently, Santo has super-blood, which explains his ability to take grievous amounts of punishment and bounce back relatively unharmed as well as his ability to make his wounds disappear in between scene transitions. (Being told this is kind of like the midichlorian revelation in Star Wars: Episode I except that here I think it's stupid on purpose.) Stir in the requisite choreographed beatings, some icky makeup FX and lots of cheese, and you've got a superior Santo entry.

Grade: B

2007-11-25T15:08:00.000-05:00

The Condemned (2007)

If that rumored Neal H. Moritz-produced remake of Battle Royale ever comes to pass, it will probably look a lot like this dumb flick, which, being a product of the WWE, emphasizes the violence above all else (in more ways than one, but we'll get to that). Part of the film's deficiencies can be attributed to the man they call Stone Cold: If Steve Austin had one-tenth of the natural charisma of The Rock, he might be bearable in the lead role (or in any lead role). But he's a phallus-domed, stone-faced dead zone, a placeholder with muscles. The filmmakers seems to realize this, considering what a small percentage of the running time requires him to be on-screen; director Scott Wiper tries to compensate for the gaping hole at the film's center by following other characters and introducing side plots whenever possible, leaning heavily on Vinnie Jones's laddish sadism and Madeline West's ability to look worried in thin T-shirts that showcase the spectacular nature of her breasts. Even if Austin was the second coming of Olivier, though, The Condemned would still be hamstrung by an idiotic screenplay rife with cliches, contrivances (most awesome plot hole: wouldn't the morally-offended newswoman who interviews the villainous, venal producer bankrolling this bloodsport nonsense just tell the authorities where this island was?) and characters thinner than rice paper. The cherry on the shit sundae, though, is the ridiculous third-act moralizing about how violence is Bad and Wrong and perverts the soul and some such junk, which might mean something if it wasn't coming from a company that would cease to exist if people actually listened to such imprecations. As it stands, The Condemned is no Funny Games. Hell, it isn't even Hostel: Part II, though it does have as one of its few bright spots a dryly funny performance from motormouth Rick Hoffman, last seen as the American Tourist in the first Hostel. It's just cinema at its most disposable, meant to be seen and forgotten. Nickelback plays over the closing credits, which I think says it all.

Grade: D+

2007-11-25T13:59:00.000-05:00

Air Guitar Nation (2007)

Someday, we are going to run out of unusual competitions about which to make quirky documentaries. The latest entry in the post-Spellbound genre of strange games people play concerns the world air guitar championship, and if you didn't know such a thing existed, neither did I. As usual for this subgenre, Air Guitar Nation has more on its mind than just dudes in goofy costumes shredding on invisible instruments -- director Alexandra Lipsitz uses this to offer a broader statement on the need for validation of achievement (one contestant in the world championship talks of a victory meaning he's the best in the world at something, at least) as well as the lure and excitement of role-playing and persona assumption. On the latter, it seems only appropriate that one of the film's two main "characters," David Jung AKA C-Diddy, is an actor by trade; a clear division is seen between stage and off-stage personas for most everyone in the film, the most striking being the line between quiet, polite Dan Crane and his cocky-to-the-point-of-dickishness alter ego Bjorn Turoque. It's this admission of artificiality, the idea that the participants recognize the silliness of it all yet do it anyway because it makes them feel good, that keeps the film from sliding into condescension and/or falling victim to the allure of novelty; it doesn't really catch fire, though, until it gets to the World Championship in Finland, an event as exciting as it is improbable. The final bout of the competition might be the only circumstance under which The Darkness has ever or will ever be cool.

Grade: B

2007-11-25T13:28:00.000-05:00

Cannibal Man (1972)

Far from the gut-munching bit of sleaze promised by the title, Eloy de la Iglesia's atmospheric horror flick is a slow-moving but well-made depiction of one man's mental breakdown. Vicente Parra plays Marcos, a slaughterhouse worker who goes from accidental killings to straight-up murder and psychosis in the span of roughly a week, and his expressive eyes and body language get across the helplessness of the character and his squirmy, almost apologetic descent into madness even underneath the de-riguer crap dubbing. De la Iglesia's directorial eye, though quite lovely at times, is detached and unsparing, with a more muted palette than many other European exploitation films of the period; interestingly, this makes the explosive crimson splashes all the more shocking (the butcher's knife gag is especially effective). The screenplay, unfortunately, has a number of imperfections, notably a weak thud of an ending and a severely underdeveloped thematic strand holding up Marcos's actions as symptomatic of the decrepit final days of Spanish Fascism. Also, anyone expecting flesh-eating as per the title is in for a disappointment -- the only on-screen acting of person consumption is inadvertent. Still, this is pretty engaging. I'd like to see some other films from Eloy.

Grade: B-

2007-11-15T00:46:00.000-05:00

Captivity (2007)

The purpose and meaning behind this godawful concoction can be quite easily gleaned from studying the film's big gore scenes. There's three of them worth noting, and they're all as queasy and disgusting as you'd imagine them to be. However, if you can divorce yourself from the content (which includes acid baths, blendered eyeballs and shotgunned poodles) and discern the context in which they exist, you'll find that there is none. These supergore scenes float free of the rest of the film, affecting the plot and character arcs in absolutely no way. They're just little suites of sickness, and they've pretty obviously been shot and inserted after the fact so that the film could potentially capitalize on the "torture porn" wave of films that have brought us the Hostel and Saw films, among others. In other words, this dumb, dumb movie is shallow opportunism at its crassest. Not that the gore scenes weren't, on some reptilian level, appreciated by my entertainment-starved brain -- at least trying to shoehorn Captivity in between Eli Roth and Rob Zombie gives the otherwise-generic and hopelessly boring film a reason to exist besides concrete proof that Elisha Cuthbert is a terrible actress and should never be employed again for any reason ever. But then, that's a pretty dubious fucking reason to exist. I'd be offended if this weren't so laughable.

Grade: D-

2007-11-15T00:36:00.000-05:00

Eastern Promises (2007)

There's two films warring it out within the skin of David Cronenberg's mobsters-and-tattoos extravaganza. One is a righteously indignant slice of vaguely boring social-problem drama in the vein of screenwriter Steven Knight's Dirty Pretty Things; the other is a wired, black-hued comedy of mobster manners. Guess which one wins out. It's entertaining enough for a while anyway, mainly on the strength of Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel's high-camp high-wire act as, respectively, a beefy chauffeur/bodyguard trying to crack his way into the upper echelons of the Russian Mafia and his neurotically violent, possibly homosexually enamored confidante and sponsor. The last twenty minutes, though, allow the A-plot, wherein plucky and determined nurse Naomi Watts (never duller) does everything she can to uncover to story behind an orphaned baby and her teenage mother, who bled to death in labor on Watts's surgery table, to take the reins and ride roughshod over all the interesting bits. Consequently, characterizations and plot points shift on a dime; the scene with Cassel crying at the river might be the worst thing I've seen in a movie all year, and the big twist is not only stupid but stupid, pointless and almost entirely unnecessary. The last shot consciously echoes Cronenberg and Mortensen's previous collaboration A History of Violence; unfortunately, doing so only points up what a botch this new film is in comparison.

Grade: C+

2007-11-15T00:18:00.000-05:00

Tristana (1970)

Stodgy two-men-one-woman melodrama from Luis Buñuel, lacking the violent fire of his Spanish-exile work and the wry playfulness of his later work. There's some interesting moments early on (the bell-based nightmare is as close as this gets to prime Luis); eventually, though, everything sinks into a swamp of Sirkian sludge, except Sirk would at least have the good sense to go ridiculously over the top with this material. Fernando Rey shows up and does the dissolute-European thing that was his stock in trade, while Catherine Denueve, surprisingly, is a porcelain-masked non-entity (the distance between her early girlish naivety and later jaded manipulativeness can be measured in microns). Religion gets replaced by capitalism, the innocent get corrupted, love is anything but pure, ho hum. I already saw Viridiana, thanks all the same.

Grade: C

2007-11-14T23:55:00.000-05:00

Benny's Video (1992)

Obviously a passkey to much of Michael Haneke's later work, as the obsession with the video image, to the point of advanced alienation (Benny only relates to things through their video counterparts, so that, say, a vacation is experienced by him second-hand even as he's experiencing it first-hand), points forward to the meta-nihilism of Funny Games and the cryptic threats of Caché even as the use of violence and detached destruction as a symptom of soul-crushing class friction refines the thematic heart of The Seventh Continent. I just wish it didn't fall apart in its final third -- Haneke runs along with his formal mastery (the most disturbing line in the final is a banal, "Please be quiet") and his thematic dexterity (the connection between commerce and killing is illustrated by a seemingly-unimportant pyramid scheme being run at Benny's school, with money passing virally like violence) as far as he can go with the story he has, but he pulls the trigger far too early, so the main plot is concluded after roughly an hour. Thus, the third-act trip to Africa, which should be a wellspring of bourgeoisie discomfort but instead just turns into a way to stretch the film to feature length. This is still very much the work of a world-class artist finding his bearings, and it's fascinating as such. But it could have been so much more, really.

Grade: B-

2007-11-14T23:42:00.000-05:00

Severance (2007)

Somehow, the smugly righteous air that infects the first half hour or so of this British bucket of crap, coupled with the corporate-retreat plotline and the filmmakers' oh-so-clever designation of said corporation as a manufacturer of military weapons have led this to be typified as savage satire of a sort. It's not -- the obvious, broadly painted leftist leanings are a distraction, not a way of thinking. Writer/director Christopher Smith and his co-writer James Moran have pasted such sympathies on here as bait for the overanalytical, the idea being that if a prospective audience member is fooled by its status as a film-fest journeyman and its lip service towards Redeeming Value, they won't notice that they've lost ninety minutes of their life to yet another obnoxious, formulaic slasher comedy that's not as funny or gruesome as it thinks it is. But that's only part of the problem: Loathsome shithead characters, lousy acting and embarrassingly clumsy attempts at veddy-British irony only make this stupid thing even more wretched than it would have been as a mere satiric shell game.

Grade: D

2007-11-14T23:28:00.000-05:00

Alphaville (1965)

"Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication." So begins one of Jean-Luc Godard's most seminal films, serving as it does as the dividing line between his early movie-brat films, concerned with genre and moments out of time, and his second-wave films filled with long, complex dialogue and political insinuations. The framework suggests a typical noir story garnished with sci-fi elements, as rumpled private dick Lemmy Caution (played with stoic panache by Eddie Constantine) attempts to find Professor Von Braun, a ruthless mad scientist-turned megalomaniac ruler of the distant cosmic hamlet of Alphaville while also engaged in a strange, halting relationship with the Professor's daughter (Anna Karina!). That's really just the cover story, though -- running alongside the detective story is a arch, wordy treatise on how the vagaries of language can obfuscate and inhibit meaning, especially when emotion is separated from logic (the denizens of Alphaville are not allowed love or passion). While this often makes for some dryly philosophical passages, Godard also indulges his strange and welcome sense of humor in making his point -- in particular, the funniest scene exemplifies logical literalism, as Lemmy duly drops a coin into a vending machine that reads, "Insert One Token," only to get nothing more than a placard that reads, "Merci." Too, Godard's mise-en-scene tends towards elision rather than explication, heavy on the odd setups and purposely misframed action scenes. (The elevator sequence, with its striking use of offscreen space and tight framing, seems to me some manner of genius.) A strangely seductive film, all suggestion and atmosphere; gets pretty logy near the end, but still pretty damn entertaining. You can't say that about 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, can you?

Grade: B

2007-11-12T12:55:00.000-05:00

Dead Silence (2007)

As if Saw wasn't sharp enough evidence, here's Dead Silence to prove two things: Saw franchise patriarchs Leigh Whannell and James Wan are terrible writers and Wan is also a terrible director. The sheer dopiness of this film can be summed up not in the fact that it's a killer-doll movie with no killer dolls but that Donnie Wahlberg has a running-gag character trait (he carries an electric razor with him at all times) that mishandled to the point where it doesn't even qualify as a gag. Wan, meanwhile, has no feel for how to build tension or suspense, hitting his marks either way too early or way too late (the "come closer" scene is a hilarious example of the latter). There's also a twist that tries to be clever but achieves the polar opposite; upon figuring out part of the ending ahead of time, I remarked that if Wan and Whannell actually did it that it would be so stupid as to be kind of awesome, yet the execution went so far into stupid that any awesome was immediately extinguished. Acting uniformly terrible, dialogue wooden bordering on unrecitable... why did I bother with this again?

Grade: D

2007-11-12T12:15:00.000-05:00

Trip with the Teacher (1975)

One of many drive-in epics cast in the mold of Last House on the Left, Earl Barton's tale of madness, molestation and motorcycles turns out about as tame as you'd expect from a guy who choreographed a bunch of late-'50s rock musicals. Despite its veneer of sleaze, this comes from a fundamentally innocent-eyed mindset, and as such it never feels as wretched as it should. A little trimming and this could be an Afterschool Special. However, what this lacks in slime is occasionally compensated for by goofy setpieces. Of particular note is a long motorcycle chase that ends on a curlicue so abrupt that it merited a guffaw and a rewind. Zalman King, in the David Hess role, sneers and twitches as though Barton's only direction to him was to look 10% sweatier from shot to shot; meanwhile, Marvin the bus driver is the smartest, most interesting character, and as such he's the first one to be offed. Pity.

Grade: C

2007-10-17T10:46:00.000-04:00

So... yeah. Nathaniel at Film Experience is hosting a Montgomery Clift blogathon. I planned to whip up something for it, but alas, my schedule lately has been somewhat hectic (as if it ever isn't), so I've got nothing to write about. Even if I did, though, I doubt any tribute I could pull together would exceed the marvelous tribute he got back in 1979. And through the magic of YouTube, some enterprising soul has given this tribute the context in which it deserves to be seen. So, without further ado, here he is: Montgomery Clift, honey!

2007-10-15T16:03:00.000-04:00

Sex and Fury (1973)

The lack of focus that marred Norifumi Suzuki's otherwise-awesome School of the Holy Beast rears its ugly head as well for Suzuki's kaleidoscopic female-revenge saga. I know two films in is a bit early to be making value judgements about a filmmaker's body of work, but on the evidence I have thus far, Suzuki lacks the artistic rigor of Shunya Ito, nor does he have the spark of lysergic inspiration that make Seijun Suzuki's equally digressive narratives more than trashy genre assignments. Curmudgeonly complaints aside, though, this is still enjoyably demented stuff. The peak comes early on, with an out-of-nowhere slow-motion swordfight featuring a very naked Reiko Ike defending herself in a bathhouse. Also not to be discounted is Christina Lindberg, spine-meltingly hot even when haltingly speaking in two languages she doesn't know. (Her final scene, with her body spinning and her hair flying, is pretty impressive.) The bold, eye-filling primary colors, saturated in that Japanese-'70s-cinema sort of way, give the film the air of a particularly deranged comic book, as do the myriad closeups of eyes and creative lighting schemes, and every now and then Suzuki will pause to whip out a scene like the late-film scouraging of Ike, complete with stained-glass Jesus in the background, that gives the hazy plot some much-needed oomph. Also, there is nudity, lots of fucking, etc.

Grade: B-

2007-10-10T16:06:00.000-04:00

The Exterminating Angels (2007)

It's like the goofball would-be profundity of the last twenty minutes of Secret Things expanded to feature length and given a shiny new coat of self-reflexivity. Shamefully entertaining as long as there's women rubbing on themselves and/or each other, Jean-Claude Brisseau's feature-length alibi for alleged inappropriate behavior becomes far less interesting whenever any of the characters open their mouths to speak. All the luminous cinematography in the world can't keep this from feeling a lot silly and a little self-serving, though it does redeem itself somewhat in the home stretch when it turns inside out the naive-innocent persona Brisseau has set up for himself via surrogate Francois (played as straight-faced as possible by Frédéric van den Driessche). Art-porn is all well and good, but justifying it to oneself kinda takes the teeth out of it.

Grade: C+

2007-10-10T15:20:00.000-04:00

Malibu High (1979)

This film should really be better known among sleaze aficionados. The title and poster suggest a fizzy sex comedy along the lines of The Cheerleaders, and there's a tonal lightness that would initially confirm that impression. But what we really get is a cheerfully immoral portrait of a youth gone wild made all the skeevier by the jovial tone. Jill Lansing plays Kim Bentley, wayward woman extraordinaire, who decides to start sleeping with her teachers as a means towards better grades, and though she's one of the worst actresses I've ever seen, she does carry a haughty snideness about her that paradoxically makes her character's ugly actions convince better than a more refined acting job might. Kim begins as a garden-variety slut but soon descends to far more rotten territory with nary a change in her demeanor; the low-grade thrum of enjoyment I get from typical drive-in cheese became a torrent of sick-eyed amazement around the time that Kim gets involved with the nicest pimp in the world and... well, it would be rude of me to give away the direction in which this shoots off. The poor acting, indifferent direction, harsh lighting and last-minute moralizing suggest an Afterschool Special gone horribly, horribly wrong, and while I can't defend it on any artistic grounds, I would compel a certain strain of cinephile (you know who you are) to give this a look. In its own fucked-up way, it's kind of awesome.

Grade: C+

2007-09-29T11:48:00.000-04:00

The Devil is a woman: The melodramatic delirium of Luis Buñuel's Susana

(Written for the Luis Buñuel blogathon.)

Luis Buñuel is my favorite filmmaker of all time. Much of my cinephilic adventurousness can be credited to digging up his films early on; teenage interests in surrealism and Roger Ebert's Video Companion led me to The Exterminating Angel (one of the first films, along with Lindsay Anderson's if...., I ever actively sought out), and after being thoroughly blown away by that film I became obsessed with watching whatever else I could get my hands on from this crazy Spaniard. Availability being what it is, though, I ended up being intimately familiar with his old-master French films (Tristana is the only one I still haven't seen) and far less so with his exile-in-Mexico period. About all I'd been able to find prior to this year was the delightfully odd The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and El Bruto. My recollection of the latter is hazy, but I remember it being a well-made but uncharacteristically straightforward bit of melodrama. I had every reason to expect 1951's Susana to be much of the same.

And much of the same it is but only on the surface. Susana is indeed a melodrama, but it traffics in melodrama that's been left to bake in the sun until it becomes fetid with sickness. Where Buñuel's later films often deal in things inexplicable and ambiguous, Susana is hilariously blunt-minded in portraying its title character as a hellion and temptress who blasts the comfortable dynamic of a wealthy ranch family all to hell. If El Bruto felt like an assigned job, Susana shows Buñuel taking something similar and doing all he can to subvert the assignment.

The mania starts almost immediately, as we open on Susana being dragged to a reformatory cell by a group of nuns; she kicks and screams, calls the nuns bitches, spits at one of them and generally sets the tone for her wicked ways to come. A fervent prayer to God and a loose window later, she escapes confinement and steals off into the storm-swept night (after being confronted in her cell by a fake bat and a real rat), where after a long soggy journey she lands at the doorstep of Don Guadalupe and his family -- wife Doña Carmen, son Alberto, housekeeper Felisa, head ranchero Jesús (the symbolism, presumably, is intentional) and various other rancheros. Her arrival is heralded by devout Felisa screaming about a devil at the window, the first of Buñuel's many bald references to Susana as such.

Her subsequent actions belie such labels. She first insinuates herself into the trust of Doña Carmen by playing the victim card, claiming to be on the run from an abusive stepfather. Once safely ensconced within the household, she sets about attracting the attention of both the young scholar Alberto and the fatherly Don Guadalupe; she also attracts the much rougher affections of crude alpha-male Jesús.

One wonders, why does she do this? The opening scenes suggest Susana is psychologically driven to wantonness; as a nymphomaniac, she would then be unable to control her own urges. That, however, would involve some manner of helplessness or mental instability on Susana's part. In another film, that might be a valid explanation, but Buñuel takes great care to show Susana clearly enjoying the chaos she creates. (Note in particular the scene where Buñuel cuts from a familial dispute to a shot of Susana raising her eyebrow and smirking with delectable sinfulness, the just as quickly cuts back to the dispute.) More likely, she simply enjoys sowing discord as any good agent of Satan would. And things like the blatant Freudian symbolism involved in Don Guadalupe's fondling/polishing of his rifles while scolding Susana for her inappropriate clothing, or the initial encounter between Susana and Jesús that ends with Susana breaking an egg and having the yolk run down her legs, intimates that Buñuel is having just as much fun as she is.

As expected, Susana's devious machinations lead to no small amount of conflict -- Jesús is fired after being discovered "molesting" Susana, Alberto abandons his studies, and Don Guadalupe becomes distant from his wife, even overriding her authority in dealing with the house staff when Doña Carmen tries to fire Susana for laziness and impudence (and, unstated, the fact that Carmen caught her making out with Don Guadalupe). Things come to a head one bleak evening when Alfredo reveals his love for Susana and his intention to run off with her, which is naturally forbidden by his father; meanwhile, Doñ Carmen, egged on by the eye-for-an-eye malice of Felisa, decides to dole out some Old-World punishment in the form of a horse-whipping. (The shot of Carmen, lit by blazing white light and fury etched on her face, viciously flailing the whip onto Susana's person is the film's most memorable.) The gleeful chaos makes for fine entertainment, yet Buñuel's slyest and nastiest joke comes right after.

True to melodrama form, the status quo is rebalanced when the shunned Jesús returns with the police to cart Susana back to the reformatory from whence she came. The last scene shows order in the Guadalupe household tentatively restored, with the whole family watching a sunrise that Felisa calls proof of God's divine grace. Here's the thing, though -- Jesús expels the sinner from the garden, so to speak, but he's also the one who carried her into the house when she arrived. And presumably, the same God who kept the family together is the one who damn near tore them apart by answering Susana's pleas for freedom. Right under the guise of good Christian values, Buñuel snuck in a cynical, atheistic dig at the concept of a fair and just God. How very much like Luis to be laughing up his sleeve the whole time.

2007-09-27T14:22:00.001-04:00

Last of the dusty backlog films! Hooray!

Hostel: Part II (2007): In which the "torture porn" genre reaches a level of self-awareness. I mostly covered my thoughts about Eli Roth's film here, though I should add that it's also possible that the notorious "Bathory" scene is Roth once again flummoxing our expectations, giving us the violence we crave but pushing it way too far in order to stymie our enjoyment. It's an imperfect film, but it's also a step in the right direction. Also, the first thirty minutes or so of this, from the somber opening credits to the arrival by train in Romania, are the best example of giallo anyone's created since Argento's Opera, and I'm curious to see Roth try and do a whole film in that idiom. Grade: B-

Killer of Sheep (1977): For a film about nothing in particular, there sure is a lot going on in Charles Burnett's famed, rarely seen debut. There's quite a bit I haven't quite parsed yet (this practically demands multiple viewings), but I think the key to this quietly observational work is the depiction of the main character's job. Stan (played with a marvelous sense of exhausted resignment by Henry Gayle Sanders), as the title suggests, works in a slaughterhouse. What's interesting is that we never see him put in a full day. Rather, a look at his average day is fragmented across the length of the film; what's more, it plays out in reverse order (the first time we see Stan at work, he's cleaning the kill floor and changing to go home). The film, then, closes on Stan herding a group of sheep into the holding pen, but what sticks about the scene is that Stan, for maybe the only time in the whole film, looks happy. As he hollers and swings his arms, he looks as though he might be grinning, which cinches the metaphor for me: We work and slave, marching to our deaths as we struggle to keep ourselves alive, but we will go defiantly, and we may even enjoy ourselves a little before we go. Filled with striking moments (the dance in the living room, the engine negotiation), and I suspect I'll like it even more on a second viewing. Also: The debt owed this film by George Washington is pretty significant. Grade: B+

Ratatouille (2007): Deliriously entertaining joint from Brad Bird and Pixar that also functions as a defense against mediocrity -- the reigning ethos of Bird seems to be that nothing but nothing should hold people back from realizing their potential, and though forces may unite to knock down those of us who attempt to create something special, talent will win out in the end. The parallel, of course, between Remy the rat's cooking skills and Bird/Pixar's filmmaking is impossible to miss; some may see it as elitism, but it's really just about trying to have standards in a Shrek world. What pushes it over the line into greatness for me, though, is the brief but perfectly realized flashback near the film's end, wherein Bird and co. redefine their purpose and try to get down to why we love food and/or the movies in the first place. Lovely, sweet and hilarious in turn; I still think Toy Story is Pixar's crowning achievement, but this might be the best film they've turned out since then. Grade: A

Sicko (2007): Um, yeah. What he said. Grade: B

Superbad (2007): The cops are important. A lot of people have complained that they drag the film down, and a lot of people are wrong. The bumbling, party-minded law enforcement officers played by Bill Hader and Seth Rogen get off some of the film's best lines (I've been saying "I'm sorry I blocked your cock" obsessively), but they also represent the sadness in the film's soul. Officers Slater and Michaels are dissatisfied screw-ups whose status as authority figures rubs uncomfortably against their desire to regain their teenage years as a reaction towards what they perceive to be poorly-led lives -- they are, in essence, the great fear of the film's youthful charges, staring as they are into the uncertain chasm of adulthood. For a comedy, Superbad has a lot of pain and suffering along these lines. Most of our heroes' plans end up in disaster, and even when success comes to them, the joy is fleeting. (Not for nothing that Seth's one moment of glory plays out in slow motion.) It's not all pessimism, though: Our happiness is ephemeral, but too our humilations pass ("That was eight years ago!"), so the point is to enjoy as much as you can, to keep your head up and your eyes forward. Loss (of friends, of face, of time) is inevitable -- it's in how we deal with it. Superbad is a hilarious and vulgar film about how learning to accept failure is part of growing up. Grade: A-

2007-09-25T12:29:00.001-04:00

The Abandoned (2007)

Awful attempt at a horror-movie mindfuck suffers from a lack of concreteness. If the whole point of the rubber-reality movie is to disorient the viewer via dislocation within the narrative, there has to first be a reality from which the script can dislocate. Director Nacho Cerdà, though, starts in with the hallucinatory shenanigans pretty much straight away, so that we never get a chance to get grounded on the rugs that will be pulled out from underneath us. I can see what was intended by that, though -- the circular structure of the narrative is meant to reflect the film's ideas on the cycle of abuse and how psychic damage incurred early in life and linger and haunt us to our ends. But if you're going to make a horror film, you have to make sure that it works as a horror film before it works as allegory, because otherwise you're just wasting your time. Considering the deficient quality of the acting and dialogue (this is the kind of film where it's obvious that everyone involved knows English as a secondary language), Cerdà must have been banking on his ability to create dread as a way to gloss over the film's flaws. But it's all for naught -- Cerdà does well by the atmosphere, all dank grays and rotting wood, but he undermines his film's status as a horror film by continually dampening the scares. The stinger is the cheapest of horror tricks, but it's also the easiest. Yet somehow, Cerdà fluffs pretty much every false scare by holding his shots too long and letting his cutting get lax, so we get the buildup but no punch. The Abandoned is a soggy wet blanket of a film, briefly enlivened late in the film by a neat reverse-time sequence and some carnivorous pigs but ultimately just so much dead space and nonsense. The closing narration doesn't sum or tie anything up as much as it merely adds an extra layer of incoherence, which seems strangely appropriate.

Grade: D+

2007-09-25T12:29:00.000-04:00

Highlander: The Source (2007)

I know very little about the Highlander mythos, beyond the fact that it involves a lot of head-chopping and basically gets rebooted with every film; I know enough about general filmic matters, though, to realize that this fifth entry in the moribund series is incompetent and muddled to the point of hilarity. Though it premiered on the Sci Fi Channel, that repository of goofy crap, the brutal pan-and-scan job speaks to an assumed theatrical release, which makes me wonder how little the producers think of the dwindling Highlander fanbase to think that this low-rent hackwork would drag them into a multiplex. Ostensibly about Duncan MacLeod and friends as they journey towards The Source (a mystical, vaguely defined MacGuffin), the real business of the film nevertheless seems to be how much ridiculousness can be spun out as they go. Here's your superfast hulking albino bellowing, "THE QUICKENING!" Here's your predictably silly death scene of a major supporting character, complete with overwrought goodbye speech. Here's your brooding, drippy main character, played by Adrian Paul perpetually on the verge of tears, as though he were a fifteen-year-old emo boy in too-tight black jeans. Here's your now-standard retconning of series lore (the "hallowed ground" denial, for one). Here's your heroes being fed gobs of exposition by Jabba the Hut. Here's your awesomely awful montage set to lame music (here, Queen's songs from the original film turned into bad cock-rock), which happens not once, not twice but three times in thirty minutes. Here's "Do it, you immortal fuck!" which only becomes funnier when the obscenity is bleeped out. Here's your nauseating New Age ending. I could go on, but I think the point has been made: If you've nothing invested in this series, The Source is a barrel of laughs.

Grade: C-

2007-09-06T08:34:00.001-04:00

Gotta hang up the CLOSED sign for a few days -- I'm in Toronto. (Hell yeah.) I will be posting (hopefully) daily updates at The Film Experience. So... yeah. Check it out. Should be fun.

The last of the dusty backlog films when I return...

2007-09-04T16:59:00.000-04:00

Oliver Twist (1948)

Not What I Was Expecting, Part 2: How is it that, until now, I've been unaware of how truly fucked-up the story of Oliver Twist is? On the evidence here, David Lean certainly realized this -- where his adaptation of Great Expectations kept a spirited tone and made no bones about its literary origins via an everpresent voiceover, this subsequent Dickens adaptation seems more image than word, more mood than story. And what a horrifying mood it is; with its sharp cutting (I love the montage of shocked faces that follows the famed "may I have some more" line), its harsh shadow-heavy lighting and its extreme, stylized angles (a couple shots, notably the long overhead shot that occurs when Nancy and Bill are dragging Oliver back to Fagin's hideout, look like fucking De Chirico paintings), this seems less Great Literature and more paranoid noir phantasmagoria. Adding to that feel is the grotesquerie of the villains -- Robert Newton shows us Bill Sykes as a sweaty, pop-eyed nightmare brute, while Alec Guinness's scheming haggard crone getup, edging up on supernatural proportions, makes Fagin almost as frightening. Fagin is also, unfortunately, heavily coded as Hasidim, which gives an odd, ill charge to many of Guinness's scenes; still, it's telling that the one scene with Fagin that stands out more than any other is the bit near the end where Guinness howls impotently, "What right have you to butcher me?" Surprisingly, the weakest thing about Oliver Twist is the story itself, hinging far too much on coincidence as it does, but then that's the fault of Dickens and not Lean. Besides, if you can work past the implausibilities and chance occurances, this is at heart a ripper of a yarn, with its propulsive final half hour among the creepiest things ever portrayed in a narrative ostensibly intended for children. It comes off as Baby's First Noir, and I think I like it verily.

Grade: B+

2007-09-04T16:27:00.000-04:00

Great Expectations (1946)

Not What I Was Expecting, Part 1: Being that my only experiences with Charles Dickens are the insufferable A Tale of Two Cities and Lord knows how many versions of A Christmas Carol, I wasn't expecting a film quite this... lively. David Lean's rousing rendition of the famed tale is, for me, the best evidence for Dickens's prowess as a storyteller -- all that needs to be done is to cut away all that excess verbiage and concentrate on how the story moves. And move this does -- from the moment young Pip sneaks off his guardian's farm to offer food to the escaped convict Magwitch, the story roars towards its destination like it's been set on fire, gathering steam and priceless details along the way. Lean's direction is appropriately lean yet solid in the classical sense (there's even a lovely little old-school travel montage of the type later fetishized by Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and he keeps the proceedings light while simultaneously bringing out the darker aspects of the story through careful lighting and framing. (I especially like the early shot where Magwitch, having been recaptured on the marshes, sits on a prison boat and stares back forlornly at young Pip until he's swallowed by shadow a la Bill Pullman in Lost Highway.) The energy rarely flags, and Lean is fortunate to have a well-cast group of exuberant thespians to bring out all the grand and grotesque notes in the source. Of particular note are Francis Sullivan as the lawyer Jaggers, all boisterous rumbling reason, and Alec Guinnes in his first major role as Herbert Pocket, the dandiest fop to ever dandy his way through Victorian England, but the whole ensemble does right by their characters. It's also interesting to note that Dickens, for all purposes, could be considered one of the first and finest practitioners of the Plant-and-Payoff narrative -- there's even a sly joke to that effect when Estella, the object of Pip's unrequited affection, tells him, "We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I." The climax could sum up the movie as being about the value of kindness in a cruel world, or it could just be about how some people are luckier than others. Whatever it is, it's hugely entertaining all the same.

Grade: A-

2007-09-04T16:01:00.000-04:00

A Gentle Woman (1969)

The fear of modernity that was hinted at by director Robert Bresson in Mouchette positively explodes off the screen with this, his first color film and first film explicitly set in the modern day. Hamlet is a big touchstone for this tale of a young woman who marries for money only to kill herself when she comes to realize that money doesn't solve everything -- there's parallels between Dominique Sanda's title character and Ophelia, particularly the use of flowers as a harbinger of sickness and/or mental unstability -- yet without having to be told, I was silently thinking, "The time is out of joint," from the roll of the opening credits. Bresson's view of the present day, with this film, moves into rage at what he perceives to be materialism and Godlessness. This gets summed up quite precisely in an early scene where Sanda brings a crucifix to sell to the pawnbroker (Guy Frangin) she later marries; Frangin removes the figurine of Jesus, weighs the golden cross and tells her, "You keep the Christ, I'll take the metal." The story proceeds in flashback from Sanda's suicide as Frangin goes over their life together, trying to figure out what would drive her to this final gesture, and the great sadness that drives the rage present in this film becomes apparent when we realize that Frangin won't find any answers nor anything to make himself feel better. He never knew Sanda, never really could have (according to the credits, he might not even know her name); her needs were never truly financial but emotional, a need that Frangin's business mind was wholly unequipped to fill (this gulf between them is represented by his anger at her overpaying needy people for trinkets and his inability to understand the kindness of such a gesture), so her death is symptomatic of a malaise within the capitalist culture he represents. There's a scene at a natural-history museum exhibit where a character notes that the building blocks of life are "the same raw materials for all animals," and Sanda's ferocious performance, saying as much as she does with a heated glance as most actors can convey in a thousand lines of dialogue, suggests that living in a world such as this where the physical is valued over the spiritual and mankind's pursuit of pleasure and comfort have turned them into just another animal is unthinkable. Bresson's edging up on nihilism here, but his outlook contains just enough overwhelming sadness for the state of things to make that come off as intelligent and not posturing.

Grade: B+

2007-09-04T15:24:00.000-04:00

Mouchette (1967)

Robert Bresson's sad, stark portrait of a young girl adrift in a world that, by all evidence, doesn't want her has its tone set by its opening scene, in which a bird walks into a trap and struggles while two men watch. While one man, a gamekeeper, does eventually act and free the bird, the intimation is that the delay is what Bresson is focused on and not the good intentions. If Au Hasard Balthazar signifies the genesis of a deep welling-up of pessimism within Bresson, Mouchette is that pessimism brought to full flower. The title character can be vicious and cruel in her isolation (her favorite activity is hiding by the side of the road and throwing mud at her haughty classmates), but is this inbred within her or is it a response to the indifference and castigation she endures every day? It's shown that Mouchette still has within her the capacity for gentleness and kindness (note her attempts to be a caretaker to Arsene the poacher or her using her own body to warm milk for her infant brother), yet there's very little reciprocation from those around her. When a gesture of kindness finally comes about (the dress), it's too late -- the delay has made things irreversible. Her one flash of happy times comes at a carnival where she rides the bumper cars, and it's a jarring scene, since it represents the first instance I've seen in a Bresson film that acknowledges the modern world. It's here that the unspoken thesis lies: As a song sung by Mouchette and her classmates suggests, hope for Bresson has died with the encroachment of the modern world. Hostility and distrust replace grace, and anyone unprepared is just another rabbit for the shooting (as made concrete in a late-film hunting scene that quotes the famed scene from The Rules of the Game yet contains its own force). Bresson's austerity and attention to detail has fascinated me for a while now, but here the detachment seems to stem from disgust rather than purity. As the anonymous epitaph goes, "The world to her was but a tragic play / She came, saw, dislik'd and passed away."

Grade: B+

2007-09-04T11:18:00.000-04:00

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

First-wave slasher with a cult following is rare in that it kind of deserves said following. Most renowned slasher flicks are famous (or infamous) for their body count or their creative kills or whatnot, but the kills in Robert Hiltzik's nasty bastard aren't what has given it a second life (the death scenes are mostly pretty tame, save for the ugly scene with the curling iron). Rather, the enduring power of Hiltzik's film comes from its skewed take on the traditional morality of the slasher film. The accepted equation is "sex = death," but Hiltzik has set his tale among the recently pubescent, people for whom sex is something to be thought about but not done. Instead, he's based his film around the corruption of naturally developing sexuality. There's a lot of dark and twisted shit going on in this film, and damn near all of it has to do with inappropriate things you can do to a minor. Whether it's the lecherous cook with pedophiliac tendencies, the camp manager who's all too eager to make time with one of the teenaged counselors or the infamous gender-warped final reveal, the true horror and disgust comes not from people dying but from sexuality gone wrong. (There's also a Heather-has-two-daddies flashback that doesn't seem to fit here, and it might be offensive if it wasn't a red herring.) Sleepaway Camp has all the problems inherent in early-'80s slasher flicks (indifferent acting, bland direction and characterization, story problems a mile long), and as such it's generally not a very good movie. It does, however, have ambition and a way of seeing the world that differentiates itself from its compatriots.

Grade: C+

2007-09-03T19:40:00.000-04:00

The Last Legion (2007)

I'd never fallen asleep on a first-run theatrical screening before this movie, but four hours sleep + ten-hour workday + B-52 at closing time - interest in film = sawing logs. The two-thirds or so I did see of the film was hovering around a C-, what with the fact that this felt like an unwelcome throwback to the wooden halcyon days of the Italian peplum film, all declamatory speeches and action scenes with the participants merely waving their swords at one another. Still, it wouldn't be fair to paste a grade on a film I didn't make it all the way through, even if I did see enough to note that the plot is threadbare and Colin Firth has a "get me the hell out of here, please" look on his face through every single one of his scenes. As consolation, though, there is Aishwarya Rai, who is one of the most gorgeous beings on this planet. Even my wife was stunned.

Grade: none

2007-09-03T19:30:00.001-04:00

Summertime (1955)

David Lean's paeon to ephemeral love in Venice, despite his finest directorial efforts (the Technicolor really pops), can't help but come off as a wan restatement of things he had already expressed pretty much to perfection in Brief Encounter. It's hoary and predictable in its structure, right down to the scene where someone falls into a canal, and though Lean gives his all and makes Venice look like the most romantic and wonderful city anyone has ever seen, the familiarity of the material is an obstacle he can't surmount. Fortunately, nobody told Katherine Hepburn about insurmountability -- her explosive star turn here single-handedly keeps the film from sinking into a morass of cliche. From the moment she intones, with just the slightest touch of quivering, the line, "I'm the independent type, always have been," Hepburn takes her natural steely gale-force personality and twists it ever so slightly to suggest a woman who long ago gave up on love yet still retains the unmistakable loneliness of the unfulfilled. Her turn here is terrific -- even the more actorly moments, like the early scenes where she's paralyzed by conflicting emotions and allows her face to become a mass of twitching expression come off well; as such, her innate dignity and Northeastern spikiness rescue a number of scenes (i.e. any part of the film in which she has to interact with the insufferable Italian street urchin) that, in anyone else's lap, would dissolve into soggy unplayability. The familiarity is dull, the clumsy contrasts (like Hepburn's honest attempts to connect to her surroundings against the oblivious ugly-American tourists) are unfortunate, but Hepburn makes this film worthwhile.

Grade: B-

2007-09-03T18:27:00.000-04:00

Shock Corridor (1963)

Delirious hothouse mania rules the day in Samuel Fuller's lurid melodrama, which happily delivers all the shock promised in its blunt title and then some. It's ostensibly the tale of an ambitious news reporter (Peter Breck) who devises a plan to get himself committed to an asylum in order to suss out a murderer and hopefully win a Pulitzer Prize, but that skeleton of a story exists only as a vehicle for Fuller to register his distaste for certain aspects of American life in as bizarre and overheated a way as possible. Jeremiads against Communist fervor, racism/anti-segregationism and the proliferation of war technology tear through the fabric of the narrative like rocks through a greenhouse, all rendered in the most brusque and lapel-grabbing way possible, though even the most vivid language I can conjure can't quite describe the sight of a black man shouting racist sentiments and wearing a sign proclaiming "Go Home Nigger." Meanwhile, despite the pulpy B-kick, Fuller's direction is cannier than first blush would have it: the first scene wherein Breck enters the asylum is filmed so that Breck passes through a tunnel of heavy shadow and darkness, then exits into bright, sterile hospital light, thus pointing up the seeming calmness of the asylum as a facade for a hellish nightmare, and the various inmates' moments of clarity are shown as carefully edited barrages of color footage that plays off nicely against the noirish black-and-white of the main story. And then there's scenes like the bit where Breck is savaged by a group of sexually insatiable women ("Nymphos!") while someone tunelessly croons "My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean" -- the whole scene plays like a scabrously funny outtake from Night of the Living Dead except that this is from five years prior to Romero's masterpiece so advantage Fuller. It would seem like splashy hyperbole to call this operatic except that Fuller makes the comparison himself by including Larry Tucker (of the awesome, underseen noir de nihilism Blast of Silence) in the character of Pagliacci, an immense mental patient who wanders around singing from The Barber of Seville. The structure is a bit repetitive, but the genius is in the details, and trash cinema has fewer pinnacles more dizzying than this.

Grade: A-

2007-09-03T17:49:00.000-04:00

Los Olvidados (1950)

Social realism, Buñuel style: This raw and brutal look at the raw and brutal existence of a gang of Mexican street kids, with particular attention paid to young scrapper Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) and prison escapee Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) begins as a ground-level social-problem film in the neo-realist style, the kind of thing that might have sprung from the camera of De Sica or Rossellini (this could, in essence, be a more sensational cousin to Germany Year Zero). It's not long, though, before Buñuel's guiding hand becomes apparent. It's there in the absurd pointlessness of the scene where the boys beat up a man with no legs (just for the cruelty of it, apparently). It's there in the concentration on superstitions and incomprehensible outside forces in place of religion. It's there in the prankish spirit of the scene where an egg is thrown at the camera. And most of all, it's there in the ferocious imagination of the dream sequence, as brilliant a stretch of film as can be found in any of Buñuel's films. If the anger and bitterness in Buñuel's French films are tempered by the fanciful surrealism and old man's jocularity with which they are adorned, said emotions are only exacerbated in this film by the melodramatic genre containers utilized by Buñuel. Sympathy is at an ebb in Los Olvidados, with few characters escaping the stain of corruption (even Pedro, in his dreams of reconciliation with his fed-up mother, admits that he wants to be good but doesn't know how); it's a grim and pitiless world out there, Buñuel seems to say, and one way or another it will eat you alive.

Grade: A-

2007-09-03T16:34:00.000-04:00

She Freak (1967)

It must have seemed like a great idea at the time: Remake Tod Browning's legendary Freaks, except without any actual freaks and nearly all plot time devoted to following the fortunes of the Cleopatra character, here transformed into a greasy-spoon waitress named Jade Cochran and played by the frightfully untalented Claire Brennan. About the only note of interest is the unusual parallelism that occurs when old-hand cinema huckster David Friedman brings his act to the carnival -- the promise of lurid thrills that accompanies any good freakshow tent is the same promise Friedman used to get butts into moie-theater seats, and both attractions had a similarly low level of payoff. Friedman setting his film among the carny set, then, is akin to a con artist coming out and telling you that he's going to be running off with your cash. Otherwise, She Freak is a bad film in that it's never bad enough to be amusing or memorably painful, yet it's never inspired enough to work within the limitations of its badness. It is dully mediocre, which is maybe the worst thing an exploitation feature can be. The overall impression one gets is that of a modest, image-based documentary on the life of traveling carnival workers that keeps getting interrupted (and ultimately supplanted) by a bad attempt at a love-triangle noir.

Grade: C

2007-08-29T17:00:00.001-04:00

Drama/Mex (2007)

It was around the time that director Gerardo Naranjo cut to an entirely random shot of two dogs fucking that I realized he was trying way too hard to get attention with this, his debut film. Which is a shame, because there's a lot of things that work here. Drama/Mex is yet another of those we-are-all-connected narratives that have metastasized since the late '90s, when Altman became an elder statesman and PT Anderson exploded out of nowhere. Naranjo, however, avoids the torturous machinations of Crash and Babel by having his dual strands run parallel instead of intertwining; occasionally, the two threads bounce off each other, but the cumulative effect is one of watching a genuine tapestry rather than a Rube Goldberg machine set up to arrive in one place and one place only. Of the two threads, one involves a runaway/teenage whore (Miriana Moro) making a tentative connection with a suicidal, dissolute office worker (Fernando Becerril). This particular plotline has some marvelous stuff in it, as what appears to be pointless button-pushing at first (the low point being when Moro, not knowing as we do that Becerril has an incestuous relationship with his daughter, asks if they should identify themselves to a waiter as father and daughter or lovers) eventually develops into something for more interesting: a subtle and observant portrait of two lost souls trying to find one another. This plot climaxes in a miracle of a scene, a long sequence at a dance club where I suddenly realized that I genuinely cared about what happened to these characters. The second plot, though, is the one that fouls everything up. It depicts a young woman (Diana Garcia) caught between her boyfriend (Juan Pablo Castaneda) and a lover from her past (Emilio Valdéz); it starts off with a rape scene uncomfortably reminiscent of the infamous scene with Susan George from Straw Dogs and despite some interesting bits never quite finds its footing. I did like how the expected violent confrontation between the two men gets played off and delayed in various ways, most notably in the bit where Castaneda shows up, drunken and raging, at Garcia's house not to challenge Valdéz but to have some traveling mariachis serenade her in a clumsy attempt to win her back, but I couldn't muster up enough sympathy for these hormonal fools for this thread to be anything but an anchor. Naranjo shows a lot of promise, and he conjures up some wonderful stretches of cinema. The final scene, in particular, hums with unassuming grace. Pity, then, that the banality of easy grotesquerie overwhelms the positive aspects of what Naranjo has achieved.

Grade: C

2007-08-29T14:57:00.000-04:00

High and Low (1963)

The title of Akira Kurosawa's immersive kidnapping drama literally translates to Heaven and Hell, but for once I think the colloquial version actually works better. The malleability of the terms "high" and "low" lead into a number of possible allusions and interpretations. There's the literal meaning, in that Toshiro Mifune's beleaguered footwear executive lives on top of a hill and is preyed upon by a denizen of the valley below. There's the nod to class warfare. There's the foreshadowing of the drug material that shows up in the third act. There's the intimation of a humbling, with Mifune's confidence and best laid plans wrecked by a twist of random chance. And there's the staging of the narrative as a literal descent, starting as it does in Mifune's elevated castle and gradually sloping down to street level and then below, into the scummy underworld of murderers and junkies. The richness of the title, in other words, is a perfect reflection of the richness of the work and how many ways it satisfies (as a tense drama, as an early police procedural, as a sad reflection on evil and the cost of living in a dog-eat-dog economic world and simply as a ripping good yarn). It bogs down a bit at the halfway point when the police are stuck chasing phantom clues and hoping for miracles (which they get, in a stunning dollop of color), but the fascination of the film's elements and Kurosawa's impeccable mise-en-scene -- note how it's careful and distanced in the first half and gradually becomes more fevered, culminating in a trip to Junkie Alley that feels like it sprang from a German Expressionist horror film -- keep it clicking along nicely.

Grade: B+

2007-08-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait (1974)

Or, an illustration of the dangers of blind hubris. This documentary about Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had to meet with his approval before being released, so one wonders if the somber narration, clearly working at cross-purposes to much of the footage as it discusses persons disappeared and the illegitimacy of some of Amin's beliefs, was added after showing Amin a cut of which he would be more approving. After viewing the film, I don't think I'd be surprised either way -- narration aside, Amin does a pretty good job of hoisting himself by his own petard. It's clear he's micromanaged this project (even creating the music) in order to put up the best image possible of both himself and his country. As such, we're given glimpses of his private life (something it would be unheard of for any other dictator to reveal to the Western world at the time) as he engages in a swimming competition with some subordinates and spends time with his children; meanwhile, his country's unshakeable confidence and might is demonstrated through public dances, musical performances and many military displays. Yet there's always the unmistakable air of manipulation, which often manifests in unexpected ways. In particular, the scene where Amin lands in a small plane and is greeted by his garrison calls to mind the opening sequence of Triumph of the Will, another infamously stage-managed bit of film in support of an evil man. The multiple sequences with Amin speaking to the camera also betray him -- as he rambles on, he reveals his raging paranoia (manifested in his "prescient" dreams), his ruthless anger and his myriad prejudices. The last point creates the film's point in a nutshell -- Amin speaks of driving out the Asian population of Uganda so African business can prosper, but footage of the Ugandan capital shows anything but prosperity. It's indicative of the things, the horrors and injustices, that refuse to be hidden; the jovial, charismatic public face Amin puts up demonstrates why he won over the populace, but the darker demons underneath that can't be completely hidden demonstrate why he was eventually chased out of the country. Rare is the ability to see such a paradox walking and talking in front of you, and Barbet Schroeder captures it admirably. He came neither to bury nor praise, but simply to watch one man bury himself in trying to praise eveything he stands for.

Grade: B

2007-08-29T13:32:00.000-04:00

Hellblock 13 (2000)

Low-budget horror omnibus in which a death-row prisoner (B-movie stalwart Debbie Rochon) regals her would-be executioner (erstwhile Leatherface Gunnar Hansen) with three tales of supernatural shenanigans. None of the tales are of any interest beyond some occasionally decent makeup effects (let's hear it for old-fashioned bladder effects), but I have to question the intent of the second story. The first story, about a woman haunted by the apparitions of her recently-vanished children, and the third story, about drug-running bikers participating in a strange ritual, are stock-issue plots treated as impersonably as possible -- they've been done before and will be done again, hopefully with more brio than has been exerted by director Paul Talbot. The middle story, though, about an abused trailer park denizen who attempts to free herself from her brutish husband through witchcraft, gives me pause. The last-minute reversal (clumsily telegraphed, but never mind that) might have seemed clever, but it comes off as ugly cruelty and sours the whole segment by revealing it all as pointless audience-baiting. In the teeth of that, I suppose it's comforting that the rest of Hellblock 13 settles for effortless mediocrity. Also: The framing segment is generally the most useless part of these multi-story films, but here it's notable for one thing -- it contains a remarkably uneven performance from Rochon. Normally, she's bang-on, and even in her worst films (i.e. the functionally retarded Nowhere Man) she can be counted on to be the ray of sunshine in the shitstorm, but here it seems her timing is off. Her broad psycho moments are properly overdone, but the quieter moments feel stilted. Compare this to her fierce work in American Nightmare, where she could shift from seductive to scary within the space of a breath, and you'll understand why the disappointment. I know she's capable of better than this. She's probably the only one involved in this film capable of better than what she gives, somaybe she was just trying not to make everyone look bad. But still.

Grade: C-

2007-08-15T11:19:00.000-04:00

The Fountain (2006)

Darren Aronofsky's long-in-the-works romantic fantasy/sci-fi project confirms him as a unique talent and a visual stylist without compare; unfortunately, it also brings to light that the guy kind of needs a sense of humor. The heavy approach worked with Pi and Requiem for a Dream because it was necessary to set up thick atmospheres of dread and paranoia and inescapable ruin; the same approach applied here, though, merely makes the film feel oppressive. Furthermore, the unrelieved graveness opens up the film to some undeserved bad laughs related to its most outre images (a hairless man floating in space, a conquistador chugging creamy white sap from a tree). On that last bit: A good counterpoint would be The Holy Mountain, which has an even higher quantity of absurd and potentially guffaw-inducing imagery; the key difference is that Alejandro Jodorowsky recognizes -- and even has fun with -- the fact that his images and concepts can come off as very silly at best, cockeyed and half-baked at worst. Then there's the matter of casting: The crux of the film, the crucial romantic relationship that causes the determined Tommy (Hugh Jackman) to trip through time and space, doesn't convince because Rachel Weisz is fatally miscast. I generally like her, but she's stilted in the 16th century scenes and flighty and superficial in the 20th century scenes. Jackman is the film's soul, and he's very good. He damn near saves the film just from the force of his belief in the material, but he's playing up against a dead zone, and the film suffers because of it. At this point, one could make the auteurist assertation that Aronofsky's entire body of work is built around the expression and depiction of extreme states of compulsion and irrational behavior, yet it's more than mere show-and-tell. One gets the feeling from watching his films that Aronofsky truly understands what it is to be obsessed, to have an unquenchable hunger or drive (it takes more than mere gumption to make a film that looks as great as Pi on $60K), and that his films are merely a reflection of what he feels inside all the time. The Fountain is certainly as uncompromised as Darren could make it, and for that he deserves credit. But he may have obsessed over this one a bit too long, and the sterility of overthinking shines through.

Grade: C+

2007-08-14T16:27:00.000-04:00

Stardust (2007)

I guess it's appropriate that a movie about a falling star should seem so earthbound. The best fantasies give us fully realized worlds, and then they dance and skip through these worlds, drunk on their powers of invention, as though their feet were not touching the ground. Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, by comparison, trudges through its grubby shopworn world as though it were wearing lead-lined sneakers. The script, based on a novel by acclaimed fantasist Neil Gaiman (which, I would hope, lost a lot in translation), is sprinkled with whimsy and sly British wit, but it's missing the wonder and playfulness that are necessary to make a narrative of this ilk sail; lacking the requisite lightness of spirit (substituting low-grade snark and a boatload of CGI isn't cutting it), Vaughn's film buckles under the weight of its groaning, overstuffed plot. Casting the vapid Claire Danes didn't do the film any favors either -- though she's better than usual, she still hasn't the personality or talent to generate any chemistry with her enthusiastic-if-bland costar Charlie Cox. The only point in which the enterprise breaks free and soars is when Robert De Niro shows up, clearly having a blast, and shocks the film to life for about ten minutes with his hilarious and charming turn as a transvestite sky pirate. The rest of Stardust huffs and blusters to no avail trying to capture the spirit De Niro is able to capture without seeming to try.

Grade: D+

2007-08-13T16:32:00.000-04:00

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Delightful bit of entertainment that also serves these days as a useful primer on how differences of tone and thought can change similar narratives into completely different animals. I now realize that Flightplan was a half-step away from being a full remake of this, but where that Jodie Foster-starring clunker was heavy-handed and smug, this takes its cues from Michael Redgrave's marvelously dry turn -- it's light and fizzy yet with enough suspense to give it heft. The suspense, true to its status as a first-rate Hitchcock film, is classically structured (i.e. the name on the window coming into camera view long before it's noticed by Margaret Lockwood) and terrifically effective. The plot structure, too, is pretty dynamic -- this is one of the great plant-and-payoff films, with small details revealed in passing becoming significant much later along in the narrative. Clever in both its construction and its sly playing-off the traditional British gentility (self-interest and the distaste for interference, for "making a scene," play a big part in the title occurance); also, there's a fantastic, physical fight scene that's all the more impressive for its gracelessness. It's kind of embarassing how easy Hitchcock makes all this look.

Grade: A-

2007-08-13T14:00:00.000-04:00

Le Bonheur (1965)

Agnès Varda started out as a photographer, and if you didn't know that you'd have figured it out by the end of this fascinating film. Le Bonheur is, on the surface, possibly the most observational and non-judgemental infidelity narrative one could conceive -- happily married Francois (Jean-Claude Drouet) is driven to cheat on his wife primarily because he's so happy that he's got to spread his love around, and for a long blissful while it doesn't really affect his life or relationship with his wife. The characters speak to one another, couple and uncouple with little friction or emotional turmoil. What Varda keeps tamped down in her characters, though, gets expressed through her vibrant mise-en-scene, whether through placement of characters (such as the dance scene bisected by a foregrounded tree and expressed through several long back-and-forth pans across both sides of the tree, behind which characters drift together and apart) or careful use of color. The latter is especially noticeable -- from the wardrobe to the scenery right down the the colored fades used to break scenes, this is a film of color. The majority of it takes place across a single summer, and as such the pallete is bright and vivacious, serving thus as a reflection of Francois's joyful state of existence. The timeline necessarily shifts to fall after Varda's sole narrative event (this event signaling, as it were, the end of summer), and this isn't by accident: Despite the veneer of regained happy normality, there is something melancholic in the autumnal browns and yellows that dominate the last ten minutes of this; after so much lush green and blazing red, it's a reminder that something along the way was lost after all.

Grade: B

2007-08-10T16:40:00.001-04:00

Second catch-up post of the year. I need to get on top of this stuff more frequently. Anyways, here's most of the films in the backlog pipe:

Alone with Her (2007): Stalker's-POV thriller is, for the most part, about as tedious as actually stalking someone. It's a hackneyed standard-issue woman-in-danger film with a voyeuristic first-person technique slathered atop it to make it seem fresh. Boredom, however, is preferable to the troubling sensation one gets upon viewing the last ten minutes. This is better overall than the ugly Chaos, but its essential worldview is the same. Yet, many people who thrashed David DeFalco's film have been far kinder to this. I think we need to ask ourselves: If this is how the film ends, what was it really about? Grade: C

Beauty and the Beast (1946): Visually sumptuous adaptation of the well-known story by stylist extraordinaire Jean Cocteau moves with the unhurried grace of a particularly poetic dream. Using Jean Marais to play both the gentle Beast and the brusque suitor Belle abandons when she takes up residence in the Beast's castle makes salient points about the duality of Man with far less fuss than something like Skin of Man, Heart of Beast, as does Cocteau's expressive use of mirror images; the latter also could be a nod to Lewis Carroll (a likely influence on Cocteau) as well as a conscious link back to the more overtly surreal through-the-looking-glass shenanigans of The Blood of a Poet. I think the film loses a bit off its game whenever it retreats back to the "real" world, but it's still pretty great. Grade: B+

Day Night Day Night (2007): Didn't realize it at first, but the crucial line of dialogue in this impressively minimal venture is when the lead character, an unnamed woman played with extraordinary physical subtlety by Luisa Williams, asks the men who are shepherding her towards her destiny as a suicide bomber, "Will you please eat with me? I don't want to be alone." Hers is a mission she will undertake on her own, yet the depths of her solitude (revealed at film's end) are unknown even to her. Writer/director Julia Loktev reflects this by making Williams not just the only major character but the only character at whose face we get a good, solid look. (Her instructors are hooded and/or masked, and the throngs of people in Times Square are treated merely as functions of a crowd.) Loktev's direction is potent and thoughtful at every turn; she shows, in agonizing detail, every step of Williams's journey towards her ultimate fate. (I especially appreciated the subtle foreshadowing involved in the opening half-hour's incidents of clumsiness on the part of Williams.) In the words of Gang of Four (via Joseph Conrad -- thanks Andy!), we live as we dream -- alone. Grade: B+

Old Joy (2006): A film of and about passive aggression. Bit of a heartbreaker, this one -- the interplay between Daniel London and Will Oldham feels natural and true, attuned wonderfully to the rhythms of friends who don't want to admit they've grown apart, yet Kelly Reichardt insists on making things real obvious for the slow people in the audience by bookending the film with snippets of talk radio that merely turn the unspoken into the spoken. The occasional bit of overexplanatory dialogue ("Mark, you really hold onto shit. Not that I should talk.") doesn't do the film any favors either. I'd probably appreciate this fragile, lovely little thing if I wasn't being reminded too often of how fragile and lovely it all is. Grade: B-

Paris Belongs to Us (1960): Jacques Rivette's first film may be a dry run for the expansive masterwork that is Out 1 (about which I should really finish writing my review some day), but that doesn't make it any less awesome -- it's still a seductive, intriguing work of art that imperceptibly moves from observational and slightly fizzy to sinister without so much as a stumble. A character describes Shakespeare's Pericles as "full of shreds and patches, yet it hangs together," yet Rivette's grand point seems to be nothing really hangs together in life, everything is in various states of chaos and the closer you get to something or someone, the less you really know about it or them. There's something mysterious within the small sampling of Rivette that I've seen -- a utilization of large canvases and deliberate pacing to get at something fundamental about human experience (the way the erosion of time clouds understanding, maybe?) -- that I really respond to. Grade: A-

The Simpsons Movie (2007): Seems pretty analogous to the double-digit-season episodes I've seen -- a fair amount of funny jokes, a larger amount of lame jokes, a strange obsession with the most dickheaded side of Homer and lots of convoluted plot. In short, it's 86 minutes of the same thing many disgruntled fans have spent the last ten years decrying at 22 minutes. Wherefore the acclaim? Grade: C+

Why Worry? (1923): I think I've finally figured out Harold Lloyd. His characters and situations often have the same sort of single-minded intent of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, but where Chaplin seems to continuously skirt disaster and Keaton remains unflappable no matter what comes his way, Lloyd's approach is extreme tunnel vision. He focuses so intently on his goals that he becomes oblivious to everything else, and the humor often stems from this inability to understand what goes on outside his perseverance, whether he's inadvertently scaling a towering building in Safety Last! or drifting through a south-of-the-Equator revolution, as he does here. Funny stuff, if a bit retrograde in both its jokes and its politics; it remains, though, that I laughed a lot, especially during the knockabout finale in which Lloyd's hypochondriac rich boy finally discovers something that'll get his dander up. Also, John Aasen is awesome and that's all there is to it. Grade: B+

Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims (2006): It's a Japanese time-tripping gay samurai/biker road movie, and it's pretty fantastic -- a florid and hilarious camp phantasmagoria, earthy and rude yet with a dark edge and a real sense of poignant romanticism (the latter two aspects come from the volatile relationship between the title characters due to Kita's raging drug addiction). The entire film. in fact, could possibly be a metaphorical journey a la The Wizard of Oz (which gets stylistically checked in the opening minutes of Yaji); the number of times the dangerously zonked-out Kita says things like, "I can't make heads or tails of reality," or "That ain't my reality," certainly seems to support this. Consistently surprising, funny, sweet and generally just marvelous, plus it all ends on a raucous punk-rock number entitled "I Want to Be Your Fuck." A must-see for the adventurous. Grade: A-

Zardoz (1974): Wonderfully insane on the surface (flying stone heads! Sean Connery licking a guy! "The penis is evil"!), yet digging a little deeper reveals a surprising thematic lucidity. It's of a piece with director John Boorman's other, more acclaimed examinations of masculinity (particularly Deliverance) in which "man was born to hunt and kill" yet aspires still to transcend his violent origins (erections are linked to violence, yet the penis is evil, etc.). Moreover, it's a pretty classically structured path-to-enlightenment narrative; the difference is that this enlightenment involves our protagonist (Connery's red-jumpsuit-clad brute Zed) taking his first step towards true knowledge by killing his God. (No wonder Nietzsche gets invoked in the third act.) There's also a number of pointed swipes at the peace-n-love crowd, as the ageless utopian commune into which Connery stumbles is revealed as a ruthlessly exclusionary society devoted to crushing even the slightest notes of intellectual dissent. The reactionary crowd doesn't squirm away, though, since the ultimate lesson is that we as a species can only advance by surrendering our weapons (and ultimately our lives). The prevailing tone is one of a man who looked at his generation with a great sadness and concluded that all that can be done is eradicate it and hope the next generation does better by humanity. So there's a lot to chew on, but there's also a level on which this is just delirious, daffy entertainment (did I mention that Connery fucking licks a guy?). I think I love this film. Grade: B+

Zebraman (2004): Enjoyably silly superhero spoof from Takashi Miike, yet not without the twinges of melancholy and disillusionment found in much of his other work; if there's a throughline to many of his films, it's about the desire for peace and/or acceptance, as it is with this film about a hopeless shlub who assumes the mantle of the title superhero from an obscure '70s television show. (A radically downbeat reading could argue that this film truly ends after the scene at the river and that everything else in the film is hallucinated wish fulfillment.) Still lots of fun, with typical bits of Miike insanity ("Don't stand... behind me!") and a delightfully game performance from Sho Aikawa. Grade: B

2007-07-20T16:57:00.000-04:00

Altered (2006)

A group of angry rednecks capture a little green alien, meaning to wreak vengeance upon it in response to their abduction fifteen years prior. This premise sounds like the stuff of low comedy, something Larry the Cable Guy might agree to star in, yet writer/director Eduardo Sanchez (one of the two guys who directed The Blair Witch Project) does the unexpected: He takes the premise dead seriously. There are some laughs, but they arise out of the surprisingly careful characterization or, occasionally, the grim absurdity of the situation. (One character asking for a beer as he's bleeding to death shows these two points nicely dovetailing.) It's interesting how well the characters are painted here; there's ample opportunity to paint these guys as standard-issue ig'nant hicks, yet Sanchez prefers to treat them as rounded individuals -- they're crass, vulgar and occasionally unintelligent yet always sympathetic, and their actions are not without reason. Sanchez, in this aim, is lucky enough to be working with some fine actors; Adam Kaufman brings spectacular intensity and resolve to the lead character of Wyatt, while Paul McCarthy-Boyington (as Cody), Brad William Henke (as Duke) and Michael Williams (also a Blair Witch alumnus, as Otis) are also quite impressive as the group's id, ego and superego, respectively. Furthermore, Sanchez proves that, even after a long hiatus, his skills for building tension and maintaining atmosphere are undiminished. So it's a shame, then, that the film collapses in its third act. Despite some good moments (Cody gruesomely falling prey to the alien's mind-control abilities is a queasy highlight), the film runs aground following plot threads into unresolved dead-ends (like the half-hearted subplot about Wyatt's "alteration" at the hands of the aliens) and eventually resorting to blowing everything up even though it's explicitly stated that doing so is a really, really bad idea. Sanchez shows enough talent to shake off any notion of Blair Witch being a fluke, but Altered has to be tagged a near-miss anyway.

Grade: C+

2007-07-20T13:12:00.000-04:00

Wait Until Dark (1967)

[Requested by Jenny Sekwa.]

Or, a climax in search of a film. The last twenty minutes or so of this famed thriller are as fine as anything in the genre, with maybe the best jump scare ever. Plus there's Alan Arkin turning in a strikingly hammy performance as a psycho terrorizing poor blind Audrey Hepburn. However, Hepburn's performance, Oscar-nominated as it is, is wholly uneven -- she swings between believable (i.e. her scenes with Richard Crenna) and stilted. The latter adjective particularly describes much of her work in the film's first half-hour, as she tries to waver between happy, frightened, confident and annoyed, occasionally within the space of a couple lines of dialogue. The overwritten, archly theatrical dialogue she's given doesn't help either -- very few people could deliver, "I'll be the one reading Peter Rabbit in Braille," and have it sound like something a human being could conceivably say. The plot is sharp from a tension-building standpoint but is full of contrivances; I know most thrillers are on some level contrived, but the test of quality is how well the plot convinces me to overlook these stretches, and here I was never convinced. As Roger Ebert pointed out upon the film's initial release, the whole film would have been nullified if only Hepburn had locked her goddamn door. Wait Until Dark is never particularly bad -- it's well-constructed from a technical standpoint, and it leads into a fabulous cat-and-mouse ending, but that doesn't excuse its hackneyed nature. It is, at bottom, sharply made dross.

Grade: C+

2007-07-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

Thirst (1949)

Another early work by Ingmar Bergman, Thirst has the distinct honor of being the first film in its illustrious director's career that could have been made by nobody else -- adaptation or no, this is a Bergman film, through and through. The tenuous, frustrated attempts at connection, the despairing spirituality and damaged sexuality, the crisp, grim poetry of the black and white compositions: It all comes together for the first time here in a way that would define much of it's director's subsequent work. This film, in particular, introduces a lot of material (a fateful train ride, a relentless heat wave, a lesbian subtext) that would inform The Silence (which I really, really need to see again). Thirst is a roundelay of emotional and sexual dissatisfaction that orbits around mentally fragile ex-dancer Rut and her husband Bertil. The dancer (the central character) is flighty, distractible and often childish, with a penchant for overindulgence in alcohol and mental cruelty; as such, her almost pathological inability to see beyond herself reflects in the various relationships Bergman shows us. There's a leering psychiatrist who wants his patient to admit that her whole life "has been one long mistake"; said patient later meets an old female classmate who attempts, very clumsily, to seduce her with bad results. The tension built up in the film's various threads erupt in a series of surreal climactic tableaux; the most striking of these (a chase down a smoke-and-fog-laden train corridor) seems informed by Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher, which is an interesting reminder that Bergman's mise-en-scene often creeps closer to full-on Expressionism than many are willing to allow. Bertil proclaims relationships to be "a sea of tears and misunderstandings," which is as close to a thesis statement as you'll get from this film. The title implies a longing, a desire for something missing. On the evidence here, Bergman's characters will forever be parched.

Grade: B

2007-07-16T14:30:00.000-04:00

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

Suitably streamlined, this distillation of J.K. Rowling's mammoth fifth book in the boy wizard series, despite apparent popular opinion, represents a step up from the ghastly hash of Goblet of Fire. There's significantly less action in this chapter than some of the others, but I don't see that as a bad thing; the disinclusion of Quidditch, to me, is only an improvement, and the emphasis on dialogue and character over spectacle provides room to start caring about the fates of these characters (a valuable thing, considering some dire fates are reportedly in store). The lack of flash also allows the mind to consider the emphasis on political turmoil and upheaval in this installment and how that serves to reflect the emotional turmoil experienced by Harry, both due to torment by Voldemort and the mere fact of his being a hormonally whacked-out fifteen-year-old boy. Besides, there's Imelda Staunton's marvelously priggy Dolores Umbridge as compensation -- her grinningly grotesque depiction of cheerful institutional malevolence is far more inspiring than any special effect. When the FX come -- and they do, in a thrilling wizardly battle royale capped off by a duel between Voldemort and Dumbledore -- they're impressive, but it's the human moments (Harry's response to his first kiss, Hermione awkwardly connecting with Hagrid's giant cousin, Ron's ever-increasing facility with Britslang) that are going to stick with me. It's not quite on the level of Alfonso Cuarón's fanciful and fluid Prisoner of Azkaban, but its sense of driving professionalism, accomplished without tipping over into facelessness (i.e. the Columbus films), keeps it compelling.

Grade: B

2007-07-16T13:53:00.000-04:00

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2007)

Sharp and knowledgable meta-slasher film about an aspiring monster who hires a camera crew to document his preparations for his upcoming killing spree. Comparisons to Man Bites Dog are inevitable, but this is cheery where that film was bleak. Much of the credit for that goes to Nathan Baesel, who plays the title character as an intelligent and enthusiastic Type-A personality -- you get the feeling that, had he harnessed that energy differently, he coulda been a hell of a salesman. (Which makes sense, since Vernon is, in essence, selling himself and his own created mythology.) Writers Scott Glosserman & David J. Stieve are relentlessly clever in hitting every possible slasher film cliche as part of Vernon's grand design, whether explaining the usefulness of cardiovascular health for would-be slashers or delving into the sexual symbology of the weaponry and surroundings he'll be utilizing (the influence of Carol Clover's Men, Women and Chainsaws grows wider every year); Glosserman also directs with confidence, switching between the verite reality-show style and the more polished modern-slasher style as necessary. It's a consistently amusing lark for slasher fans with a twist in the tail that's really quite neat. There's a feint at subtext about why we need monsters in an age of cynicism that unfortunately goes unexplored (if it had been followed out, we might be talking about the film of the year); nevertheless, Behind the Mask remains an exemplary pisstake on the slasher film while ultimately turning itself into an exemplary slasher film.

Grade: B+

2007-07-16T13:27:00.000-04:00

The Earrings of Madame de... (1953)

Sumptuous, justly famous melodrama about a rich countess, the general who is her husband, the baron who is her lover and a much-bandied pair of diamond earrings fascinates in that director Max Ophüls's visual obsession with the surface of things perfectly reflects the surface-level feelings of his characters and how everything goes wrong when those affections get below the surface. (Like the love between the baron and the countess, it's only superficially superficial.) As such, it's interesting to note how the significance of the earrings changes each time they find their way back to Danielle Darrieux's countess -- they start as a superfluous signifier of a dead marriage, but by film's end they've transformed into a painful token of the only love Madame de... has ever known. The arc of the film is pure melodrama, but it's put forth wonderfully by careful, knowing characterization and some splendid acting on the parts of Darrieux, Charles Boyer (as the general) and Vittorio de Sica (as the baron). Plus, the film's just bloody gorgeous. The long seductive sequence, in particular, where the countess and the baron fall in love over a series of dances is spectacular, time compression at its finest.

Grade: A-

2007-07-16T13:05:00.000-04:00

Smokin' Aces (2007)

A strange, strange film: One one hand, Joe Carnahan's hyperbolic neo-noir pastiche fits pretty comfortably into the obnoxious lad genre that has given us films like Snatch and Lucky Number Slevin, but on the other hand, it often functions as an autopsy of said genre. For one thing, it's a film that treats death not as something to be used for sport but to be respected and feared -- the killings in this film are generally brutal, painful and bloody, infused with a sad fatalism ("We're all dying.") that takes the smirking nihilism promised by the flashy, exposition-drenched opening fifteen minutes and turns it inside out. Even in a situation where Carnahan finds humor in death -- say, the scene where one of the neo-Nazi punks carries on a conversation with a recently deceased man by working his jaw like a puppet -- it's of a darker, more plaintive stripe than one usually finds in this genre (the punk is asking the dead man for forgiveness). But the general depiction of the neo-Nazis, outsized and grotesque as they are, is symptomatic of how Carnahan trips up his own material by offering concessions to the perceived audience. Whenever he goes for the flashy wackiness, like with the Nazis or the intolerable Ritalin kid, it rings hollow like his heart's not in it. He's trying to do something different within the confines of the cooler-than-thou shoot-em-up, and I appreciate that, but the mash-up between hyperstyle and ruminatory depression is an ill fit; Carnahan is to be commended for recognizing that, even in disposable films like this, actions should still have consequences, but it's a shame he didn't apply that to his vacillating tone. Only the last ten minutes, when Carnahan makes a rare nod to the concept that there are things, larger forces, at work beyond the hermetic character-driven worlds often set up within this genre, leading up to a devastating act of free will by a character no longer interested in serving the needs of the labyrinthine plot, really sing. The crushed look on said character's face in the film's last shot almost makes the film worth the slog. (Jason Bateman's invaluably funny performance, self-deprecatory in an ocean of macho, also deserves notice.)

Grade: C+

2007-07-16T12:30:00.000-04:00

Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy (1964)

Another slice of goofy Mexican wrestling madness from Rene Cardona, director of Doctor of Doom and Night of the Bloody Apes. This delivers exactly what its wonderfully reductive title promises -- there are wrestling women, and there's an Aztec mummy. They don't meet up until the last twenty minutes of the movie, but there's plenty of silliness to be had even before it comes time for the bug-eyed rotten beastie to lumber around and occasionally turn into The World's Phoniest Bat(TM). There's plenty of wrestling action and gloriously goofy dubbed dialogue and evil Oriental guys in black sunglasses. Above all, there's Tommy, the squat police officer/paramour of the Amazonian Golden Rubi and one of the returning characters from Doctor of Doom. If he was my favorite thing about the previous film, unflappably incompetent as he was, his turn in Aztec Mummy is my favorite thing in any Mexican wrestling movie -- his persona has spun so far into cluelessness that he's a walking game of Exquisite Corpse. The conversation where he tries to convince the rest of the gang that there might be a bomb in a sombrero is one for the ages. Charming and innocent as can be, these movies are just too much fun.

Grade: B

2007-07-10T13:41:00.000-04:00

Fay Grim (2007)

I think I've finally figured out why Parker Posey annoys me so. I always thought it was because she was a terrible, tone-deaf actress, but given free reign to study her technique in Hal Hartley's latest film, it's not quite that. She actually has talent -- she's just used it to cultivate a veneer of ironic detachment that infects every role she takes. Her mannerisms and speech are aloof and knowingly stilted, and she never quite makes eye contact with anyone else in the film. In short, she's deliberately cut off -- her sense of detachment extends so far that she never seems to be relating with anyone else around her, and I just can't swing with that. In many regards, Hartley's quasi-sequel to his 1998 film Henry Fool is pretty fun -- his halting, stylized dialogue has as many off-kilter nuggets of joy as ever ("It's hard to tell through all the foreground debauchery"), the ever-escalating absurdity of the globetrotting situation is amusing in a wry sort of way and most of the actors are game. Jeff Goldblum, in particular, gives a spectacular turn that synthesizes his trademark mannerisms and Hartley's dry loopiness into a sort of befuddled dark menace that rivals his benchmark performance as Seth Brundle. It's almost worth watching the whole film just for the scene where he tries to explain to Posey the intricacies of world politics and undeclared war only to sum it up as, "Civilization, Fay... shit happens." Also, James Urbaniak and Thomas Jay Ryan reprise their roles from Henry Fool to great effect -- Urbaniak's quizzical stillness, his refusal to be surprised or moved by anything, is even funnier in this espionage context than it was in the domestic drama of Fool, and Ryan's boorish persona, though used sparingly, provides some great moments near film's end ("How goes the jihad, you cheap fuck?"). But if Fay Grim, like its predecessor, is wounded by Hartley's bizarre tendencies towards shtick and low humor (the scene with Fay and the cell phone set to vibrate, clumsy and obvious as it is, is the film's nadir), it's completely destroyed by the fact that it's built around the great sucking void that is Posey. She doesn't care to engage the material, so neither do we.

Grade: C

2007-07-10T13:21:00.000-04:00

Knocked Up (2007)

Funny stuff, and exceedingly generous besides; Judd Apatow's films are textbook crowd-pleasers, not because they pander or stoop to the lowest common denominator but because his worldview is warm and inclusive. He loves all his characters, loves their failings and foibles and ugly bits as much as their positives. One might say he genuinely believes in the goodness of people. Even the more caustic and raunchy jokes here -- say, the running brutality of the beard jokes -- are posited as communication between friends and compatriots rather than true attempts to demean, much like the gay jokes in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This giving nature, at times, take the teeth out of the situation; problems crop up only to be glossed over or instantly figured out. Still, I can't fault the guy for figuring out what works and running with it. Besides, this is some fucking funny shit, yo. "I feel like I'm gonna poke the baby in the head" -- genius.

Grade: B

2007-07-10T13:11:00.000-04:00

Bug (2007)

The key, I think, to William Friedkin's ferocious record of mental deterioration is its rooting in the physical: Before everything goes haywire, Friedkin makes sure that we understand the reality in which all of this takes place. From the opening crane shot (certainly a sop to those who would complain about its eventual staginess, but also a fine way to orient the viewer as to the surroundings in which this will take place) to the staging of the actors in relation to each other, shifting to and fro without quite making contact, to the preponderance of bodily fluids (urine, mucus, sweat and tears all make prominent appearances), the first half of this film is devoted to providing a concrete, palpable reality which the second half can then blow apart. The dividing line is the sex scene between Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon (both of whom give fantastic, deranged performances) -- it's as intensely physical as any sex scene in recent memory, but there's also an emotional transference taking place, and it's here that Tracey Letts' script shifts its focus to the mental state rather than then the physical state of its two main characters. Madness, in Letts' world, is as communicable as any STD if you're open enough to it, and Judd's character is painted carefully enough that you can believe her seeing Shannon as her desperate last chance to have something right and good in her life. Eventually, everything goes gloriously nuts; Judd and Shannon's minds disappear completely into their own and each other's manias as their bodies are presumably further invaded by the "bugs" which Shannon insists are everywhere outside and inside his being. Progressively, the body becomes ravaged and blistered, a walking pile of meat to house the uncontrollable mind; that the film ends as it does is abrupt but entirely appropriate. Wonderfully creepy and paranoid stuff, this is.

Grade: B+

2007-07-10T12:40:00.000-04:00

28 Weeks Later (2007)

[SPOILERS.]

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's followup to Danny Boyle's sleeper hit 28 Days Later accomplishes in its opening minutes what Boyle's inexplicably overrated Romero rip couldn't do in the whole of its running time: It scared the hell out of me. Narrative quibbles aside -- and there are a couple, notably the Army's puzzling attempt at a quarantine -- Juan Carlos succeeds in crafting a tense, quick and brutal tale that, for me, ranks as the most unnerving theatrical experience I've had since Twentynine Palms. The celebrated sniping-the-crowd setpiece is probably the film's most effective and disturbing, but the bit that's really stuck with me is Don's fateful kiss with his wife -- the film's whole world of guilt and consequence hinges upon that simple, tragic smooch. The kiss is an attempt to repair things, an expression of love and apology and hope for future forgiveness, and it turns into terror and madness. Even more so than the explicit parallels to current world situations, it's this metaphorical, deeply emotional representation of good intentions thrown awry by self-interest and situational misunderstanding that has burned into my mind. 28 Weeks Later is a deeply frightening and deeply disturbing vision of the world torn apart by people who only mean well. Also: Best use of night-vision cinematography I've seen in maybe ever.

Grade: A-

2007-07-07T12:54:00.000-04:00

The Gravedancers (2006)

On the strength of Mike Mendez's amusing splatstick debut The Convent, I'd been looking forward to his followup feature. Now that it's finally here and I've seen it, all I can muster is a hearty, "So what?" Mendez is working in a more serious vein with The Gravedancers, the overt comedy of The Convent replaced by creeping dread and a quietly droll sense of humor, and I can't fault him for that. In terms of technical aspects, the film is good enough to mark Mendez as worth keeping an eye on. Neither can the artistic design team be faulted -- the cinematography is appropriately moody and dark, and the makeup effects are first-rate. (The little-boy ghost is especially creepy.) So it's not how it looks that's the problem, it's how it sounds. The screenplay, though obviously penned by two guys with much affection for the genre (note the occasional clever skirting of cliche and tweaking of convention -- this is the first horror film I've seen in years in which someone suggests that the characters not split up), is full of hackneyed dialogue and goes light on character work, substituting sketches for insight. In cases like this, a crew of good actors can fill in the blanks with unspoken understanding; more often, though, such faults are further exacerbated by stiff stars, which is the case here. The worst offender is the lead actor -- the credits tell me that his name is Dominic Purcell, but I know it's really Old Chief Wood'nhead under an alias. So what we have is slight, dull characters portrayed by slight, dull actors. Not for nothing, but the only character I gave a crap about was Culpepper, the assistant to Tchéky Karyo's paranormal psychologist; not only is she cute and smart, but she gets most of the good laugh lines. The last twenty minutes or so are effective, and Karyo gets a great closing line; shame then about the other hour-ten.

Grade: C

2007-07-06T22:15:00.000-04:00

The Science of Sleep (2006)

Half good and half crap, this dollop of whimsy from Michel Gondry lacks some of the grounding darkness of his other dollops of whimsy. It's really quite intolerable for its first hour or so; all cutesy-poo and sugary "charm," it comes off uncomfortably like a flailing apologia for/endorsement of Gael Garcia Bernal's emotionally stunted man-child Stepháne and his grating fantasy world -- call it The Secret Life of Walter Shitty. Gradually, though, Gondry drops the pretense, gets behind the shiny surface that Stepháne presents, and what was a solipsistic film evolves into a film about solipsism. Gondry burrows in, shows us the rage and melancholy that lies at the base of Stepháne's regressive desires -- the whole "capturing seconds" scene, magical as it is, speaks to the frustration present when one realizes that we can't go back, that time is fleeting and sometimes that which is done can't be undone. The offbeat effects work, in which every seam is meant to show, also progresses from mere whimsy into something more interesting -- the idea seems to be the disconnect between seeing something for what it is and for what we desire it to be. There's so much discomfiting goodness in the film's second half that it seems a shame that it's attached to the first half, but there you go.

Grade: B-

2007-07-06T21:59:00.000-04:00

Once (2007)

Modest charmer manages a fine balance of sweet/spiky so effortlessly that I wonder why it's not done more often. It drifts in, does its thing, and gets out of the way with no complaints from me. Acting is surprisingly good as well, considering both leads are musicians by trade. The true triumph here, though, is the music -- despite the fact that it's the kind of lung-ripping emo-folk that can strike me as very hit or miss, there's not a weak song in the bunch, and they're all seamlessly integrated into the narrative; the first studio scene, where the band tracks "When Your Mind's Made Up," is on the early shortlist for best scene of the year. Shame about the shite camerawork, though -- people, low-grade digital video is NOT THE FUTURE.

Grade: B

2007-07-06T21:40:00.000-04:00

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006)

All art is subjective, so I think it says something for Jeff Feuerzeig's documentary about famed outsider artist Johnston that it kept my attention even as the appeal of Johnston's music eluded me. Any man who writes and sings the line, "In my head there is a negative Superman," probably has a compelling life story; what impresses about Feuerzeig's film is that it doesn't shy away from the ugly parts of Johnston the man even as it seems reverential towards his music. Time and again, we see that the art which issues forth from Johnston is spurred by some deeply disturbing mental difficulties, the most harrowing of which is a story related by his father about an encounter with Casper the Friendly Ghost on a small commuter airplane; this story ends on a note of irony so perfect that it had to be true. Feuerzeig is also helped out by Johnston's own inexhaustible urge to document himself, as a good deal of the film is filled with archived audio tapes and old film wherein Johnston sings, rants and does whatever. Artists like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Vincent Van Gogh are cited in comparison, and the last one seems especially appropriate given the examination of where the line between genius and insanity begin to blur. The film occasionally tries too hard to be as offbeat as its subject (why is the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes interviewed while in a dentist's chair?), but overall it's genuinely sad and worthy stuff.

Grade: B

2007-07-06T21:23:00.000-04:00

American Hardcore (2006)

Lively punk-rock documentary that covers the first wave of hardcore punk (roughly 1980 to 1985). Director Paul Rachman tries to be as concise and informative as one can be within 90 minutes, and for the most part he succeeds -- while one wonders where the stranger offshoots of hardcore are (surely, for instance, the Butthole Surfers deserve a mention?), Rachman does a fine job of touching on a good majority of the major bands from the era. The real draw here is the reams of ferocious live footage; the talking heads fill in the history, but it's in the performances that one understands the energy, the release, the sheer manic appeal of what at first blush can be an off-putting genre of music. Ian Mackaye sums up both the thrust and the appeal of the film quite nicely when he says, "We were kids goin' wild, and I thought the music perfectly represented that." Also: Former Pantera/current Superjoint Ritual lead singer Phil Anselmo is so far gone that it's frightening.

Grade: B+

2007-07-06T14:50:00.000-04:00

District B13 (2006)

I admit, I haven't seen this film in full. Don't get me wrong -- I watched it from beginning to end. But the copy I managed to procure was sans subtitles. I'm gonna go ahead, though, and assume I didn't miss any big plot subtleties or nuances, since by the looks of it this Luc Besson production is about as elemental as action gets. The bad guys have a warhead, the good guys have to stop them, and there's another level of conspiracy above it all -- what else do you need to know for the film to work? An asskicking is the universal language, and the parkour-heavy fight scenes in B13 are awesome regardless of the nationality or comprehensibility of the flying feet. (Of particular note is the penultimate fight wherein the two heroes take on a massive Easten European fella named The Yeti; the capper, where one of the heroes flies through the air wielding a brick, is rewind-worthy.) This is, of course, what Besson has been working towards all his career -- action cinema as a neutral language, multiple-nation influences combined to create a work understandable in every part of the world. It's encouraging, in a way, to know that his tireless work hasn't been in vain.

Grade: B-

2007-07-06T12:39:00.000-04:00

Performance (1970)

Echoes of Persona ripple throughout this bizarre allegory about the relationship between identity and celebrity, but Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg depart from Bergman's ruminatory angst, opting instead for a splintered mania that reflects the fracturing of the psyches of both violent gangster Chas (James Fox) and elusive rock star Turner (Mick Jagger). This reflection between theme and content is similarly reflected in the film's obsession with reflected images -- the opening credits alone involve a car polished so shiny that people are seen in its gleam and a blowjob given in front of a mirror. It's a film of upheaval, of transformation and abandonment, with two characters defined by their vocations attempting to wall themselves off and leave society behind. (I saw this in the same week I saw The Passenger; musta been something in the air that week...) Whiplash editing and nimbly hallucinatory direction serve to provide an external expression of the disorientation gone through by both Chas and Turner as they are gradually destabilized in regards to themselves, and the plot fades in and out as it leads to a climax that is a literal mind-blower. (Chas says early on before shooting someone, "I am a bullet," which is a more crucial line than it first appears, given the nature of the ending.) Also: Jagger is really quite good here, and his "Memo from Turner" scene is a highlight.

Grade: B+

2007-07-06T11:47:00.000-04:00

Burn! (1969)

If Gillo Pontecorvo's extraordinary The Battle of Algiers is historical recreation written with fire and lightning, this subsequent film, the last he would make for ten years, is historical allegory written with smoke and fog. Marlon Brando turns in a powerful and charismatic performance (even with the overdubbing), but Pontecorvo never quite gets a handle on his material, so that what should strike home with the force of a mallet instead floats right on by. Some solid moments, but it doesn't cohere into the statement it so desperately wants to be.

Grade: C+