Out 1 Film Journal

Out 1 Film Journal's Top 13 Films of 2011

2012-02-06T11:30:00.002-05:00

by James Hansen

At this point, there isn’t much left to say about The Year in Movies 2011 Edition. It may have been a down year for Hollywood – at a year-end party, many in my local critics group, for instance, mistakenly characterized it as a bad year for movies because of this – but, looking at this list, it is hard to remember a year with so many masterpieces. (Credit to that same local critics group for awarding my best film of the year as the most overlooked. Deservedly so.) And, considering further the films that didn’t make this particular list, it seems safe to suggest that 2011 was actually quite miraculous. Ambitious films continue to be produced; even if they are locked away for years and arrive in a somewhat fractured condition.

Then again, it could be precisely this fractured impulse which drives many of the best movies being made today. Although many of these films arrive at this through different means, pristine, perfectly polished works evoking past eras and the Hollywood “ideal” seem of less and less interest. Instead, this movies on this list deal with a sort of brokenness and disunity, often operating not only on the level of narrative, but also holding a deeper relation to questions of art, artifice, form, and life. Perhaps this is what led this critic to dismiss several acclaimed efforts to restore the picture-perfectness of the past. This isn’t meant as an inherent rejection of nostalgia, but of how the past becomes filtered through movies into our present moment. The best films this year didn’t show a desperate longing to reunite with a golden age, but of the past’s ability – through certain fracture – to explode the current moment and bring to it a vibrancy of past moments, characterizations, and ideals.

For the sake of sanity, I have limited this list to feature films. In some ways, I already regret having done this. Significant short films continued to be made – largely in “avant-garde circles" – and they deserve further recognition. Having attended both Ann Arbor and Views in 2011, and becoming more and more enmeshed with experimental film as part of my program of study, I feel more equipped to say something about these works which still don’t get the attention they deserve. But I still have a difficult time judging hand-processed 16mm films and Season of the Witch. Because of this, I have also made a (shorter) list of best short films. The list is somewhat conflated given when I saw the films (some from Views 2010 – which I did not attend – premiered in Columbus in 2011; and then I attended Views 2011, so those are included as well). If this is confusing, I apologize.

On with the show...

James Hansen's Top 13 (Features)
1. Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)
2. House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello)
3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
4. A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
5. Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
6. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
7. Make It New John (Duncan Campbell)
8. The Pettifogger (Lewis Klahr)
9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)
10. Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird)
11. Putty Hill (Matt Porterfield)
12. Drive (Nicolas Windig Refn)
13. Poetry (Lee Chang-dong)

Best Director
Bertrand Bonello - House of Pleasures

Best Actress
Anna Paquin - Margaret (with apologies to everyone in House of Pleasures)

Best Actor
Michael Fassbender - A Dangerous Method (with apologies to Gary Oldman)

Most Overrated
Midnight in Paris

Top 7 (Shorts)
1. These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us (Michael Robinson)*
2. Cry When It Happens (Laida Lertxundi)*
3. Slow Action (Ben Rivers)
4. Ricky (Janie Geiser)
5. Words of Mercury (Jerome Hiler)
6. The Return (Nathaniel Dorsky)
7. Trypps #7 (Badlands) (Ben Russell)

*I want to make specific reference to a wonderful program at the Wexner Center – "Look At Our Life Now" – which showed these films, as well as several others which have remained with me throughout the year. It was the best curated program of shorts I saw all year. Chris Stults and Dave Filipi (and anyone else involved) deserve an award for this, or at least some recognition. Take this as the latter.

Fight The Future: "The Artist" (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

2012-01-13T10:00:00.005-05:00

“Cinema...appeases a certain sense of nostalgia that lies dormant in our hearts, nostalgia for countries never seen that will perhaps never be seen, but where it seems that we have already lived in a preceding life.” Fausto Martini, 1912

by James Hansen

In his book Eye of the Century, Francesco Casetti quotes Italian journalist Fausto Martini, who wrote the following in 1912: “Cinema...appeases a certain sense of nostalgia that lies dormant in our hearts, nostalgia for countries never seen that will perhaps never be seen, but where it seems that we have already lived in a preceding life.” Now, one hundred years later, cinema still presents us with this same does of nostalgia. From this, it could be argued that nostalgia itself is the cinematic (rather than merely photographic) condition. Without going too far into these issues – not to mention the significant changes brought on by a perhaps more contemporary condition in which irony and sincerity are a double-sided coin – it can be noted that many popular movies of 2011 provided heavy doses of nostalgia: The Help presented a dangerous nostalgia by overlooking its own preconditions; Hugo, the best and worst children’s movie about film preservation ever made, made a case for remembering histories and the enchantment of living within them; similarly, Midnight in Paris stumbled through its own enchantment with various time periods, ostensibly making a case for “the present,” as long as it involves a foreign country and beautiful companionship. The latter two films reflect Martini’s quotation – both Scorsese and Allen showcase the wonders of the past and suggest different alternatives for how those pasts cast be incorporated into the present. Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist further illustrates this nostalgiac tendency. However, unlike Scorsese or Allen, Hazanavicius offers little in the way of contemporary relevance. Rarely has a film ever been so autonomously nostalgiac; if ever there were a definition of nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s sake, The Artist is it.

Of course, this isn’t to say The Artist is without its pleasures. (And I imagine that some have no problem with the appeasing pleasantries of the nostalgia-for-nostalgia condition.) Starting in 1927, The Artist tells the story of George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent film star at the peak of his powers. With a trusty canine sidekick by his side, George is, at all moments, a performer, sometimes to the ire of his castmates and producers. Soon, he runs into Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a cute, young girl with a sly smile. Before long, George’s producers are telling him about talkie pictures – the wave of the future! – to which George firmly resists. Almost overnight, old-timey George is released and the up-and-coming Peppy takes his place. (Have no fear: George has invested well enough to make a major motion picture completely independently and release it to theaters.)

Historical problems aside for the moment, Dujardin and Bejo are both very charming. Though several of the best scenes are drawn from other silents, they provides the scenes with a certain energy that isn’t built into the insipid screenplay. Dujardin won the award for Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. He is in control of the film at every moment – and his period-based pantomime creates some genuinely smart and touching moments. Valentin’s nightmare sequence – in which interrupts his quietly controlled world – creates a visceral affect, signaling the true shock and radical change that sound brought to the center of movies.

At the same time, there is something missing at the heart of The Artist. Its final moments come off as cheap and easy. The much-discussed inclusion of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score indicates not only a complete disregard for the period detail which supposedly define the film, but also an amateur, lack of control by the director and editor refusing fairly simple, logical parameters in order to flash their cinematic playfulness. Why make this a silent film at all? Similarly, the cheap thrills and laughs of the Oscar-hopeful dog ultimately ring false and completely vapid – both in a literal Lassie rescue and in a dumbfounding use of intertitles toward the end of the film. Ultimately, a place is found for our hero (thanks to the beautiful woman who he brought into the biz): The Artist pivots on simple-minded history – if only silent stars weren’t so stubborn and put on dancing shoes! – that ignores its own subject matter.

Unquestionably, there is something in The Artist’s (or any) transitional focus which could echo the current state of filmgoing, even if it’s merely in striving to replicate a similar experience which is being lost. Perhaps people will see The Artist who have never seen a silent film before and it will draw them into the silent film world (although, given its slow, rollout, limited release strategy, one has to wonder about its effectiveness.) But, in the end, The Artist reads silent films as pleasant, but cheap – simple-minded sight gags for the world filled with sound. The tide has turned. Put on your dancing shoes, get a dog, and a beautiful girl, or be left behind. Its seeming cheerfulness ends with a menacing grin. In looking back in the manner of nostalgia-for-nostalgia’s sake, The Artist unwittingly sees itself as an outmoded commodity – one with a history, and one without a future.

Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In" (2011)

2011-11-25T14:13:00.006-05:00

by James Hansen

There are many reasons to call Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In uncomfortable. Without going into major spoilers, the first could be the overall strangeness and darkness of the plot – Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a celebrated scientist, has found a way to create a new, perfect skin, particularly burn victims, which can withstand all cuts and burns. Inside his enormous, secluded home, he runs a lab testing experiments on a beautiful patient, Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya), who lives in a locked room. She does yoga. Writing covers the walls. Soon, he is told to shut down the operation or else he face pressure from the scientific community. Obsessed, he retreats to his home to keep close watch over his patient as he finishes his project.

This may be strange enough, but it isn’t new for Almodovar whose stories have been decidedly zany and slightly deranged throughout his celebrated career. Ever the stylist, Almodovar’s has fallen into forms of self-parody throughout his 2000s film, employing sly winks to his own repertoire instead of using his plastic veneer and popping color palette to enhance his stories. In Skin, at first, it seems as if Almodovar may be back to his more productive ways. His hyper-modified world (glass doors, laboratories, contemporary domestic interiors, molecular modification) is benefited by the faux-glaze of Almodovar’s design. It echoes and deepens the space in which Skin’s narrative takes place. But. after a guy in a tiger outfit emerges for a rape scene that seems to be played for laughs, the expanding emotional tenor is completely upended and the stylistic balance abandoned for shock.

Moving midway through the film into a series of flashbacks to provide expository (and crucial) details of the scientist and his patient, Almodovar uses style as a means of revealing unexpected (not to mention unjustified) details while ignoring the turbulent physical and emotional complexities of Skin. There is a sense of pleasure in the swift melodramatic twists, but they aren’t fed through any kind of pathos. Almodovar piles on the shock without earning (or logically proposing) its moments or its catharsis. A stain is cast across Skin leaving Almodovar’s world in a state of confusion. Of course, melodrama pushes events to the nth degree, but, even as everything boils over, there is a reason for that boiling, an incident that caused the effect, and a justification for action. The Skin I Live In boils for the sake of boiling and its formula never coheres. The overall sense of emotional confusion isn’t a symptom of affective response, but rather of a filmmaker displaying his own uncertainty and discomfort in confronting the issues his film raises. This film is uncomfortable in its own skin – and it shows.

On Naming and Animals: Sean Durkin's "Martha Marcy May Marlene" (2011)

2011-11-11T17:00:00.001-05:00

by James Hansen

There’s something about this title, this name – Martha Marcy May Marlene. Of course, it is the name of a new movie out this week, written and directed by Sean Durkin. Within the film, it reflects the various states taken on by the lead character, most commonly known as Martha (Elizabeth Olsen). These stages are temporally dislocated by the film’s non-linear structure creating a constant slippage of who is on screen (is this Martha or Marcy May?), which events are impacting what (it certainly isn’t so easy as to be unidirectional), and who follows whom (who comes where? who is going where? when did they get there?) Because, while the plot bounces between two levels, there is a critical third register which remains absent from the narrative. This missing element has something to do with Martha’s origin, with Marcy May’s emergence, with the calling of Marlene. There’s something about a name.

MMMM begins with an ending. After a dash through the woods, Marcy May escapes from a seemingly nice group of people. There are some strange signs – the women stand outside the dining room as the men eat – but, at the start, nothing seems that off-putting. (Like Martha's own experience with the group, MMMM slowly wades into its troubling world.) Still, Martha calls her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson). Lucy is more than surprised to hear her voice. Quickly, Martha becomes hysterical and inconsolable. Confused and concerned, Lucy comes to the rescue. Whatever had happened before is over. But within this ending lies the potential for it to begin again, for it to violently reemerge, for it to appear like a mirage across a serene lake. For Martha, her new beginning follows this ending, while, at the same time, it is followed by the ending. The end is, then, not an end, and the start not a beginning. They are one in the same, despite personalized attempts to pull them apart. Like an alliterative series, there may be separate fragments, but they are bound together, they have a role, and they demand a chained circular cycle.

MMMM shows that the chain’s breaking is just another way of the cycle extending its reach, deepening its impact, and claiming new victims. Before long, Martha isn’t the only one damaged. Unable to remember details (or unwilling to share them) Martha cannot communicate her inner-torture to Lucy. Try as they might, Lucy and her husband lash out at Martha’s blank stares, indifference to life, and unwillingness to communicate. As MMMM develops, they perpetuate the same cycle as the one from which Martha ran away. Durkin perhaps overstates the case, reaching for unexpected (not to mention unbelievable) histrionics and building upon far too many trying-to-be-clever match cuts which come across as cutesy rather than instructive. Nonetheless, the message is clear, controlled, and effective. Once the cycle is instilled, it cannot be thought away. In all likelihood, it cannot be cut off, only extended further.

It starts so simply. It starts with a name. Martha arrives at her new home (How did she get here? Why did she come here? Only Martha knows.) She meets a group of men and women. The men hummmm songs while playing guitars. (Footnote: given what I go into later, it should be noted here that only Patrick sings songs with lyrics. He is the only one granted a voice. If, as we'll see, naming plays a large role here, then its dominance extends into larger concerns about language as a whole.) They work together in the garden. They all contribute. They are all assimilated into the group. At the start, Martha seems happy, but her role is uncertain. She meets Patrick (John Hawkes). In their first exchange, she introduces herself as Martha. With a sly smile, he responds, “You look like a Marcy May” and walks away. Following Derrida, God allows Adam, without his intervention, to name animals. Man, and man alone, is given the ability to name. First and foremost, this not only asserts man’s dominance over animals, but, indeed, the power and authority of man over all living things. This creates a dangerous position in which all living things are stripped of their subjectivity and treated as lifeless objects. Marcy May has been named. Marlene is the name which the women must answer when (literally) called. Patrick’s ability to name (and Martha’s inability to assert her own name, which came before Patrick but is obliterated by him) isn’t merely in the name of appearance (“You look like a Marcy May”); rather, this singular act of naming initiates his dominance over the secondary creatures in his Garden of Eden. Moreover, it is the first step which feeds into the systematized violence, rape, and murder which he commits, oversees, and directs throughout the course of MMMM.

It starts with the animal. Marcy May is in the woods learning to shoots guns. Shaking, her first shot flies astray. Patrick comes along and gives her a hand. Emphasizing a feeling of hate, fear, and anger, he tells her to channel those tensions through her body and into the trigger. Bullseye. But, after shooting the glass bottle, Patrick isn’t done. He asks her to shoot a cat. She refuses. He tells her it has cancer and is suffering terribly. She can’t. He gives her another option – shoot one of the men, Max. He’s worthless and doesn’t do his work. Max stutters and almost giggles until Patrick grabs her hand and raises the gun towards him. He freezes. Marcy May balks. Patrick pushes further. Death is a kind of nirvana. Max tries to walk away, but Patrick commands him to stop. He does, for a moment, until, fearfully convinced of Patrick’s threat, he walks toward Patrick and shoots the cat. “Why did you do that?” Patrick asks. “You said it had cancer.” “One of the cats had cancer. Zoe knew which one.” Max apologizes and runs away.

Marcy May is off the hook, but Patrick’s dominance is further entrenched. Marcy May refuses to shoot the cat or Max. To her, they are equally living beings. Max, on the other hand, is willing to kill the cat (and save himself.) It is, after all, just a cat. Known as “cat,” it doesn’t have the same subjectivity as Max. Though Max proves his misplaced dominance over the cat, Patrick affirms his authority over everything. Patrick is willing to kill the sick cat or Max. Both are under his control and both are weak. Not only weak, but he doesn’t know them and doesn’t take their death seriously. By ignoring mortality (“everyone just exists”), every creature in his house functions as an object to be dominated. In fact, Patrick extends this beyond just his house and into all the surrounding areas. His creatures, like a well-greased machine, break into houses and steal various items. When they are caught by a man, they cannot take any chances. Patrick’s group watches as the man is killed. Patrick appears less rattled by this than by the death of the cat. It creates a sort of breaking point for Marcy May and, still, Patrick chides her weakness to which Marcy May apologizes. It starts with making the animal an object for dominance. It starts with a name.

His world is in place. Its chains are locked. MMMM begins with Marcy May breaking from it. Yet the further she gets away from it, the larger the circle becomes. The deeper the cycle goes. Once in place, it subsumes everything around it. It ensures new beginnings are neither new nor beginnings. It follows everywhere and becomes its own following. It says “follow me” while it is simultaneously in front and behind. In the film’s brilliant final shot, Durkin locates the impossibility of resolution in the recognition of the film’s own resolve. Martha sits in the back of the car. The car has nearly been hit. “Some kind of maniac.” In a medium shot, we see her confused, slightly worried face and out of the rear windshield behind her. The car starts to move forward. Yet, here, what is behind her – a lurking SUV – does not recede in the distance. Instead, it gets closer as she remains static – moving in the car to some new destination, some new beginning, some answer, while also resolutely in the same place. The SUV approaches. It gets nearer and nearer, so close as to almost hit the car. There isn’t a wreck, but the wreck is obvious. This SUV, Patrick’s world, is following from behind, but it is inevitably what she is heading towards. Inescapable, it is already waiting at her next destination. It is there before her and following after. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but she know what’s coming with her – Martha, Marcy May, and Marlene. But who is following whom?

Andrew Haigh's "Weekend" (2011)

2011-11-07T10:00:00.001-05:00

by James Hansen

On first glance, it seems easy to pin Andrew Haigh’s Weekend onto the tired formula of romantic dramas – guy meets girl, eyes cross, sparks and sex, consequence/decision/fallout, doom or reconciliation. Of course, the most obvious “spin” here is that Weekend is distinctly gay. Russell (Tom Cullen) meets Glen (Chris New) at a gay club, they hook up, and so the relationship fall-in/fallout begins. (Make no mistake: many critics have attempted to dilute the film’s gayness in hopes of drawing in scared-straight audiences – a respectable attempt, I suppose, but a misguided one all the same. Yes, folks, this is a Gay movie.) But is this all Weekend has to offer?

If one looks only at the surface, then, perhaps, yes. The formula is evident throughout and becomes even more so as it nears the inevitable conclusion. But where Weekend’s unique power resides is in Haigh’s gaze toward what is neither on the surface nor under it, but the deeply embedded, unspoken tensions in between. This isn’t a space that can be determined by grand formulas, sweeping scale, or grandiose ideas. In fact, it isn’t a realm that can be defined, although it defines. It is where everything happens. It is modern experience. And its identity is found in the subtle minutiae that Haigh astutely observes: an indecisive stutter, the light touch of a hand, a glance through a window, the stirring of instant coffee, the shuffling of emoticons, the clenching of a jaw – in these perfunctory, banal moments, Weekend finds a world waiting, a relationship brewing, a person forming. Yet, oscillating in the unfixed gap between one and another, there is always a sun setting, a night ending, a train leaving.

Here, Weekend reveals itself through these moments, which open further onto its conceit, its “formula” – the weekend. For Russell and Glen, the weekend may indicate the completion of a work week, but it isn’t an end to anything. It is the time when, free from the constraints of labor (lest we be too Marxian), they are free to be themselves in whatever form they want to be. The weekend, then, isn’t an end or a beginning, but it is the very space between these formal constraints of identity (work/not work, hetero/homo, single/couple, union/marriage) – the very same area that Glen explores in his art – that Weekend lives in. On the weekend, there are no tenable solutions to problems. The fracture is too large. Filled with trepidation, the critical, unanswerable question is where to position oneself outside of the gap. Can unassailable romance still be an answer? Can that question even be seriously proposed? In his final moments with Russell, Glen finds no cure, but realizes the appropriate response to the weekend’s symptom. With a hug, a kiss, and, the tables turned, an indecisive stutter– “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” And on he goes.

Shadowing the Spotlight: Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive" (2011)

2011-09-16T16:20:00.001-04:00

...Refn makes it clear the Driver isn’t fit for the spotlight, nor does he want to be caught in it. Instead, he lurks in the shadows waiting for the scanning lights to vanish – a sign of his opportunity to assimilate with the rest of humanity. He is nothing if not a reluctant super hero decidedly unaware of his powers due to their quotidian function in his life.

by James Hansen

The opening scene of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (winner of Best Director at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival) provides a gut check for the stoic, passionately low key Driver (Ryan Gosling). With almost no dialogue, the Driver runs through an entire mission. Clenching his fist, he sits in his car. He waits patiently, listening to the slow crackle of his gloves, the gentle hum of his car, the reports of a police radio, and the excited voices calling the final quarter of a basketball radio broadcast. He negotiates the information gathered through this array of sounds, perfectly timing his escape from approaching squad cars and choppers with the outpouring of fans from the Staples Center.

The bright lights of downtown Los Angeles shoot around the screen, as do the flashing blues and reds of cop cars and the bright white beam of a helicopter’s spotlight. Despite these apparent dangers, the Driver’s world is understated, simple, and perhaps second rate – he waits on the end of a Clippers game, not the Lakers. He is in such control of his surroundings and the given situation, nothing comes as a surprise.

While the scene bristles with excitement, the Driver’s gaze is casual, if not practically bored. As the criminals shudder with fear in the back seat, the Driver remains defiantly neutral and unaffected by the perils of his situation. His knowledge of the darkness of the streets, as well as his day job as a Hollywood stunt man, grants him a sense of ease. He absorbs urban complexity, supposed danger, and potential failure and projects them as decidedly simple, non-threatening, and undoubted successes. With this early scene (not to mention the appropriately praised soundtrack which underlies the dated, otherworldly textures which permeate Drive’s swift running time), Refn makes it clear the Driver isn’t fit for the spotlight, nor does he want to be caught in it. Instead, he lurks in the shadows waiting for the scanning lights to vanish – a sign of his opportunity to assimilate with the rest of humanity. He is nothing if not a reluctant super hero decidedly unaware of his powers due to their quotidian function in his life.

As Drive continues, it becomes clear this is impossible. He isn’t a normal guy. He can’t escape his heroic destiny. It is just a matter of time before the spotlight catches up and shines on him. Refn confronts this notion through questions of family, allegiance, and protection. Although Driver lacks such personal qualities, he finds them through his interactions with his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her son. Their relationship is brief and dreamlike – they float around unexpected places in Los Angeles building a solemn, yet deep rapport through glances, sly smiles, and light touches. Refn refuses a clearly delineated romantic narrative – an element that will surely frustrate many viewers. The extreme brevity seems a hollow short cut, but it importantly mirrors the temporal nature of Driver and Irene’s relationship. They don’t have many moments together, but, when they do, it always means something. Refn understands a standard romantic narrative would never happen. Rather, like a flickering light, their “love” can only flash up for a split second before it disappears.

When Irene’s husband returns from prison, Driver sits idly by, even as the chances for a love connection are complicated. There are some brief moments of tension (benefited by the great performances), but Driver’s willingness to remain on the sidelines of the family indicate the stronger psychic willingness of his character to just be there – something Irene’s husband is unable to do. Driver doesn’t aggressively pursue Irene. Instead, he finds her husband in a difficult situation and tries to put his talents to use for them. This isn’t a competition for Irene, and Drive’s narrative seems wholly uninterested in this being deemed a love story. But if love means someone always being on your side, the Driver abides.

In the final act, the impossibility of the situation takes over. Drive, initially so restrained, is taken over by extreme violence, hostility, and heartless backstabbing. Driver can no longer maintain his blank slate status. Echoing the opening scene, as the situation crumbles around him, the Driver knows every move he has to make. This time, though, he steps into the sun and accepts his role as the hero (as the soundtrack makes completely obvious). Still, he can’t be hugged, accepted, or celebrated as such. Unable to be the heroic everyman, he must fade away, once again, into shadows and darkness.

Lewis Klahr's Music Video for Gabriel Kahane's "LA"

2011-09-12T14:00:00.004-04:00

Simultaneously adaptive and original, the music video lays claim to both sources of inspiration through disjunctive unity and its own originality. Is this a Didion adaptation, a distinct music video for Kahane’s song, or a Lewis Klahr video? Like the lead character in all three forms, LA maintains this wonderful, contradictory status.

by James Hansen

Adapted for Gabriel Kahane's single "LA" and based on Joan Didion's novel Play It As It Lays, Lewis Klahr's music video LA echoes the soft repetition of Kahane's song as it quietly reflects upon the larger narrative of Didion's novel. (You can view the video here). Klahr’s work may be the third element of connective tissue here, yet its unique assemblage harmonizes origin and adaptation by placing them in direct dialogue with one another. At the same time, Klahr’s LA is a dual adaptation of each dialogic element thereby becoming its own link in this inspired chain. Simultaneously adaptive and original, the music video lays claim to both sources of inspiration through disjunctive unity and its own originality. Is this a Didion adaptation, a distinct music video for Kahane’s song, or a Lewis Klahr video? Like the lead character in all three forms, the video maintains this wonderful, contradictory status.

Beginning with a highway of unsettled lights, a blonde woman drives. If not on the road, she sits in various rooms staring towards an out of focus television, busily rotating a tuning signal. The object is so unsettled it fails to serve its own function – providing a proper image. A shot of loose, dangling keys puts the woman back on the road. Shuffling through an endless array of cars and flashes of newspaper clippings, she seems to settle, briefly, near City Hall in downtown Los Angeles.

As Kahane begins to sing (“The color wheel and the western sky...”), Klahr's video fades to black then comes back to the same location. The black-and-white female figure enters the scene. She arrives in a split plan – the corner of the Klahr’s cutout of the building creates a harsh black line, separating her from the landscape. A dangling tree limb on the right side of the plane nearly matches her eyeline. Hidden from view behind this figurative tree, she recedes behind the picture plane as she moves toward the building, disappearing into an invisible, non-existent (perhaps psychic) space beyond the city. (“The reflection of a stranger in a strange fluorescent light”) Her shadow reflects on her plane – in her private space – but it cannot carry over into the public space of the city.

Suddenly amidst a colorful crowd, she wanders through a group of dancing couples who provide a view of life drastically different than her own. Echoing Didion's novel, Klahr, in this moment, reveals her detachment from and inability to communicate with the people of Los Angeles and the modern world at large. Colorless, she is unable to place herself among this crowd. Instead, she wanders through these spaces in order to pass the time. She smokes, drinks, and has casual sexual encounters with men. Distressed and exhausted, she doesn't live in her own world. Rather, as seen in the several moments throughout the video, she hovers above it, fades in and out, and is also pulled down - literally and figuratively - into endless malaise.

Through the rest of the song, Klahr reveals a series of events caused by this cycle. A series of different colored circles unites the video. Floating through the space or spinning in place, the circles rotate like a tire across a neverending landscape. Klahr plays off the imagery of Kahane’s song (“The man puts on the yellow gloves,” “She sees herself in stereo”) and Didion’s novel (needles, pills in hotel rooms, mental anguish, frozen clocks in clinics, rain) creating a dialectical narrative through his signature, cutout style. Where does this all lead? The woman continues to drive, but, caught in a closeup, a sharp, white light burns her memory away. The road is her pathway to nowhere. Still, she has to keep moving. The selfish city wins again.

Reviews In Brief: "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" (2011)

2011-09-03T16:31:00.004-04:00

Self-restricted by their punch-line premise, Gregory and Huyck fall back on their concept to an unbelievably cookie-cutter degree. By the time Orgy ends, it is nothing more than a turgid Vegas fantasy: random sex, t-shirts, and no consequences.

by James Hansen

With a title like A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, writers/directors Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck aren’t afraid of their central concept. Surprise, surprise – it actually is about a group of 30-something friends, headed by Eric (Jason Sudeikis), who attempt to configure an orgy as the final party in Eric’s East Hampton summer home. There isn’t really much development past this. Instead, Gregory and Huyck let Orgy wander hoping the cast provides the magic for their sketch.

The strangest thing of all is that it almost works. Despite his friend’s sexual inhibitions and concerns – “it’s an orgy, not The Accused” – Eric eventually convinced everyone to participate in the orgy. Just as this happens, he starts crushing on Kelly (Leslie Bibb), the realtor responsible for selling the house. Sudeikis gives a great performance, playing Eric as soft and considerate while also having a real connection full of in-jokes with his friends. Charming as hell, he builds a nice rapport with the chameleonic Bibb who manages to look like a different person in every scene.

Discussing the exploits of today’s teenagers, Eric hears that “blow jobs are the new French kiss.” However, his sweet and slow approach run counter to the nostalgiac desire to relive adolescence. For a few fleeting moments, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy appears as if it may turn the corner from a summer dude movie to an effective rom-com, carefully treading through the contradictory desire for liberating, meaningless party sex and the nurturing touch provided by a caring relationship and a series of small kisses.

Self-restricted by their punch-line premise, Gregory and Huyck fall back on their concept to an unbelievably cookie-cutter degree. By the time Orgy ends, it is nothing more than a turgid Vegas fantasy: random sex, t-shirts, and no consequences. While hardly unexpected, Orgy overlooks the good it has going for it in favor of easy laughs. Though it stands out as a surprisingly decent summer comedy, if Orgy has some guts, it could have been a keeper. Instead, it was only interested in a one-night stand.

Derailed in Creatureland

2011-08-26T15:43:00.005-04:00

"What is perhaps more strange is that the creatures are never pleasant, entrancing, or inviting. Their maniacally hushed, whispery voices seeping from a dusty ash pit undoubtedly resemble a children’s nightmares, not their unique opportunity for fantastical escape. Why a young, scared girl follows creepy voices into a basement and down an ash pit where she finds a pile of teeth is a mysterious concept, even taking account of Sally’s family circumstances."

by James Hansen

Produced and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, Troy Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a near carbon copy of del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. A young girl, Sally (Bailee Madison), is pushed into unfortunate circumstances – a cross-country move in with her architect father, Alex (Guy Pearce) and Kim his interior designer girlfriend (Katie Holmes). Putting the finishing touches on an important redesign, the house’s strange history is buried literally beneath its surface. Among the remnants of the creepy, yet refurbished house, Sally finds the possibility of escape within a fantasy world of creatures who, unlike her parents, want her and need her.

Unlike Pan’s Labyrinth, Sally’s escape appears as misplaced. Kim shows Sally the real imaginative wonders of the house (and the film’s expectedly solid production design) – lush gardens, expanding mazes, and a small pool filled with fish from Japan. However, Sally, still drawn towards the calls of the creatures, falls deeper into trouble as her curiosity soon leads to violent acts around the house. What is perhaps more strange is that the creatures are never pleasant, entrancing, or inviting. Their maniacally hushed, whispery voices seeping from a dusty ash pit undoubtedly resemble a children’s nightmares, not their unique opportunity for fantastical escape. Why a young, scared girl follows creepy voices into a basement and down an ash pit where she finds a pile of teeth is a mysterious concept, even taking account of Sally’s family circumstances.

Nonetheless, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’s first half successfully establishes a moody, destructive atmosphere. As light wind blows through the shafts of the basement, Nixey allows the film to linger among the chilled, strange spaces. The black hole of the open ash pit signals the incoming, unexpected horror. These brief moments are among the film’s most successful. As Sally, Bailee Madison performs with a distanced, quizzical gaze as her ambivalent pouts turn into genuine terror. Madison embodies the film’s dark, dreary tone. Perhaps entranced by her own fear, Sally’s fragile psyche begins to wear down as the creatures’ presence becomes more prominent.

And, as is becoming more typical, the reveal of the creatures derails the film. The story’s most basic logic – the weakness of the creatures is light – is bent, abused, and reveals itself as a worthless plank. In what seems to be a critical set piece – pulled from the Silence of the Lambs playbook – Sally attempts to create visual evidence of the creatures. Yet, this extended sequence amount to only mild annoyance for the hostile creatures and the seemingly important, late-addition subplot is dropped. What is more, the creature’s capabilities multiply as they slowly shift from strange voices to knife-wielding bastards who can turn off lights and bound people with ropes. This creates an unnecessary imbalance between the opposing forces and ultimately flatlines the film’s final act. Even in the standard expository visit to the library amount to a recognition of truth, but no new knowledge to bring forward. Without a weakness and a mechanism for escape, the story and the film drag to an inevitable, uninspired conclusion. Once again, mystery and dread are abandoned in favor of nonsensical screeches, cheap reveals, and swelling music. Obsessed with their creatures, Nixey and del Toro merely organize scenes rather than letting the film naturally develop. This leaves the wonders of the film’s first half buried under the surface of a surprisingly standard movie in desperate need of redesign.

C+

Morris Makes a Tabloid, For Better and Worse

2011-08-22T13:38:00.006-04:00

"DA Pennebaker said of his 1993 documentary The War Room that if Bill Clinton hadn’t won the election, they wouldn’t have really had a movie. Tabloid certainly fits the bill as entertainment, but it is unclear whether it is much of an Errol Morris documentary without Kirk."

by James Hansen

Although it has been around since the 1820s, Mormonism seems to be having a cultural moment in 2011. There has been The Book of Mormon, which uses a Mormon mission to brilliantly situate musical theater as one of the world’s great religions, as well as Mitt Romney’s second-run for the presidency, again undercutting political debate with effervescent theology. Added to the list is Errol Morris’s new film Tabloid.

Tabloid documents the strange life story of Joyce McKinney. In the 1970s, the beauty queen McKinney moved to Los Angeles and fell in love with Kirk Anderson, a young Mormon. After Kirk leaves the country for his Mormon mission – a brainwashing disappearance according to McKinney – she flies to England in order to save him from the Mormon cult. McKinney finds Kirk at which point they either have a lovely, sex-crazed honeymoon or McKinney kidnapped Kirk, chained him to a bed, and forced sex on his pure Mormon soul for three days. His planet doomed, word of the story got to the press. Shortly after, the story became a tabloid sensation.

Like much of Morris’s acclaimed work, Tabloid cycles around the key players in McKinney’s strange story. As different versions of facts appear from McKinney, her accomplices, and tabloid writers, it becomes clear that the sensational nature of the story is also what fascinates Morris. The whole situation is pitched as rather silly and perhaps rightfully so: the virginal beauty queen chasing down the crazy Mormon and ruining his mission to become a god. Morris’s film represents its own version of the tabloid: whizzing by with more and more details that get stranger and stranger as McKinney expounds on her love affair with Kirk. She, of course, never has a chance against Morris, as his film exposé turns into something of an entertaining hit piece, albeit one with a subject that is so consumed by her untruths that recovery of a sense of sanity appears long gone.

Yet, also like a tabloid, Morris’s film becomes increasingly entertaining just as it reveals itself as strangely shabby and devoid of serious consideration for its subject matter. Morris’s editing establishes an ironic banter with both Mormonism – an ex-missionary unrelated to the story details notorious aspects of the Mormon religion with an unkempt tie and frazzled hair – and Christianity via McKinney’s claims of chastity with God channelled through her star-crossed, brainwashed Mormon. But where is Kirk in all of this? An end credit states that Kirk refused to be interviewed. In the film’s latter stages, Tabloid strains through this non-presence. Rather than adding to some sort of mystery, Kirk is a distracting elephant in the room, a crucial element missing in action. DA Pennebaker said of his 1993 documentary The War Room that if Bill Clinton hadn’t won the election, they wouldn’t have really had a movie. Tabloid certainly fits the bill as entertainment, but it is unclear whether it is much of an Errol Morris documentary without Kirk.

All the same, this may explain why Morris gives so much time not just to the Kirk story and its fallout, but also the rest of McKinney’s tabloid-filled life. For an invested audience, this is certainly fun and games. Nonetheless, the final third illustrates its fatuousness with an overwhelmingly tangential aside regarding McKinney’s extreme love for her dog, Booger. This makes it clear that Tabloid isn’t really a religious intervention, nor an encounter with versions of the truth. It is a Looney Tunes documentary of the living tabloid Joyce McKinney.

Reviews In Brief: "Horrible Bosses"

2011-07-08T09:00:00.013-04:00

by James Hansen

There are several scenes in Seth Gordon’s Horrible Bosses in which the main characters, Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), Dale (a painfully unfunny Charlie Day), and Nick (Jason Bateman), scream at each other while driving around in a car. Trapped in this environment, their voices create a cacophony of screaming (Sueikis), squealing (Day), and mild-mannered whining (Bateman). It is a messy collision of noise, the likes of which is fairly typical in buddy comedies. Nonetheless, it manages to seem egregious, not to mention particularly symbolic, of the Horrible Bosses’ pitfalls.

Gordon places three comedic styles in a car, turns up the volume, and hopes for magic. However, Sudeikis, Day, and Bateman consistently perform completely different styles of comedy. While this may create some chaos for the inept, scantily-written characters and the obnoxiously obvious storyline (“We were just joking the other night when we were talking about killing our bosses, right?), there is no comedic sense from the mini-ensemble. Save the brief, pleasant turns from Colin Farrell as a coked-out boss’s son and Jamie Foxx as suspiciously uninformed hitman, the only thing that comes out is cobbled-together, tone-deaf clutter.

Further destroying the case is perhaps the film’s major “buzz item” – Jennifer Aniston’s supporting role as Dr. Julia Harris, a sex-crazed dentist. Only slightly less disparaging than message board and blog discussions of whether Aniston will or won’t show her boobies is her actual performance. Pitched via the screenplay as an extra-textual cry for attention from an “aging and sexless” actress, Julia is so desperate for sex that she performs a striptease in order to hook up with someone who stalks her from a parked car outside her apartment. (This someone is the ladies man, Kurt, who teaches the important lesson that every woman is just waiting for an anonymous man to screw them). The rampant sexism and homophobia are the ultimate insults in a movie that absurdly relishes in them.

Caves, History, Humanity, Herzog

2011-05-16T19:00:00.000-04:00

by James Hansen

What is it exactly that is being forgotten in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams? Following his recent line of “nature documentaries” (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World), Herzog locates a strange, uninhabitable place in which he finds traces of unique humanity. Crucial is the idea of forgetfulness which is more present in Cave than the prior documentaries. And it is easy to forget. The humanity in the caves has been temporally displaced by 35,000 years and is, in some sense, unrecoverable.

Scientists and archaeologists speak with educated hypotheses. Herzog uses this model to grant himself leeway to make many of his boldest claims. Are these caves and cave paintings signs of the foundation of the modern human soul? Are the figures in the painting calling out to the present? Art lovers should find this of inherent interest, as art is the thing that crosses the void of time and space between the present day researchers and the mythic man with the crooked pinky finger who has forever left his mark on the cave walls.

Here, we may find the strongest link between Cave and Grizzly Man. If Timothy Treadwell used video and documentary to create a endless archive of his experiences with the grizzlies (and, perhaps, as Seung-Hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew argue, it becomes a vision of man becoming-animal), history is written not in video, but on the cave walls – the nature of man inscribed in nature itself. What then of animals? Although there are exceptions which Herzog seems more drawn to in Cave, the majority of the paintings are of animals: skulls and ancient footsteps of wolves cover the ground of the caves. The paintings indicate a deep connection and fascination with animals – their movement, shape, and sounds. Is this a sign of a model of the world that Timothy Treadwell dreamed of? Was everything united? And would a permeable conception of history reestablish this supposedly utopian vision?

What can’t be overlooked in this equation, however, is Herzog. To some extent, Cave lets the caves speak for themselves. There are countless, stand-alone images of the paintings calling out to the audience (and in 3D no less!) Still, Herzog – as The Modern Man – plays an essential role. He not only writes Cave’s narrative, carrying with it his oftentimes tiresome, sometimes engaging, musings on art. In his attempts to recover the origin of man, companied with Cave’s mutant coda and a remembrance of Grizzly Man, Herzog brings in a new dose of old modernism. Given its failures, Herzog attempts to overcome this modernist gap. Cave won’t let us forget how rare an opportunity it is for the cave’s to be recorded. This is the last chance for them to be filmed, seen, experienced, and recovered. With Cave, Herzog reenacts Treadwell’s archival process as a means of capturing this fleeting place, space, and moment – a moment when recovery and origin appear possible.

Nonetheless, Herzog, in his brief coda, wipes out the aura crafted throughout Cave and turns us again toward a rehash Grizzly Man. Power plants suggest a transformation of humanity into contemporary mutants. If Grizzly Man captures a uniquely modern encounter with the violence of nature, then perhaps this is what is being forgotten – or, at least, what has changed. As humanities bond with nature has broken down, violence overtakes both nature and man. The violence of nature cedes to a nature of violence. Humanity has forgotten nature and, in so doing, has transmuted into a version of our own forgotten selves.

Yet even if the caves call to us from the past, Herzog wags his finger at the audience for not listening to them and puts himself in the place to be the man who hears. The power is placed in the creator and crafter of all images, whether an ancient man, Timothy Treadwell, or Werner Herzog. Herzog’s call for permeable history and interaction with the paintings, however, splits from this sense of grand arbiters of humanity. Is democratic, unified humanity to be celebrated by the trumpeting of a single man? Herzog interjects himself into the caves (and into his movie) too far and runs counter to his own method. It nearly becomes the mark of a man who came, saw, recorded, and went, leaving claw marks instead of bread crumbs on the way from the darkness of caves into the bright light of nature. When the researchers asked for silence to let the caves speak for themselves, it might have been best for Herzog to turn down the megaphone.

Rubber (2011): Self-Destructing Detachment

2011-05-06T12:00:00.001-04:00

by James Hansen

It would seem fitting to start this review by asking the question “What the hell is this movie?,” but I fear that already gives too much credit to Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber, a puzzlingly simple-minded take on Hollywood’s recent obsession with object-based horror and the implicit violence contained within the simple-minded bemusement of captive audiences. Here, the killing object – Jimmy the Tire – is given a powerful subject position, while the viewing audience (in and outside the film) revert into dumb(founded) objects. Rubber tries to mediate these experiences and challenge the agency granted to subjects and objects in both art and industry. Dupieux hopes to do this through a Beckett-like strategy described by Adorno as “the abdication of the subject.” These lofty aims are difficult to meet – so perhaps I shouldn’t be as hard on Rubber as I’m about to be – but, in the end, Dupieux shows a misunderstanding of his own project. Instead of challenging the audience and moving the bizarrely relevant narrative basis to unique heights, Rubber sputters and implodes. But is that exactly what it wanted to do?

This is all quite unfortunate considering that Rubber, after a prologue which begins the film, has an incredible sequence with layered concerns central to its philosophical premise. The tire’s first moments of life establish a connection between subject and object, which is to be navigated and confronted. That this is a tire naturally adds to the allure of Rubber. Buried in a pile of dirt, the tire begins to spin and rises from the ground. It shakes some dust and tries to get to its feet. Moving slowly in circles, it travels short distances before collapsing. Again and again, the tire tries to roll but sputters to the earth. Like a fawn rising to its feet for the first time, the tire looks for traction and can’t seem to find it.

After several attempts and a night’s rest, the tire stays standing and strolls along peacefully through nature. Winding down the road, the problem’s begin when the tire confronts another object – a plastic bottle. The tire stops in its tracks, rotates back and forth and back and forth. The bottle, somehow, appears as a threat to the tire. The tire rolls on the bottle until it is flattened. Soon, the tire comes across several other things – a glass bottle, a scorpion, a rabbit, a man. Given animated life, the tire stops and destroys each of these object/subjects. The tire doesn’t talk, but, granted subjective agency upon its birth and independent movement, all other subjects with potential agency become a threat to the tire’s existence. Subjectivity immediately becomes a sign of life. The subject must establish power and dominance over the other subjects. Otherwise, they may position the subject as an object causing it to plummet into nothingness.

Unfortunately, Rubber’s problems started even before this scene. The failures don’t come so much in the repetitive nature of the killer tire. In fact, Dupieux may have done himself some favors in the long run by just making a horror movie about a killer tire. (Hey, it worked for Killer Condom). But he has larger, metaphysical aims not only related to the phenomenological concerns of subject/object, but also concerning audience engagement with objects, social aspects of viewing and its relationship to violence.

Perhaps because of this, Rubber is nothing if not prescriptive. It certainly doesn’t try and hide what it is. An opening monologue shows its cards and instructs the audience as to how its deck is stacked. Dupieux lays out what he calls the Hollywood history of “No Reason,” which Rubber uses to avoid a logical narrative and instill a detached audience. The audience is given binoculars (like in theater! kazzzzing) to view the story of a tire from afar. They comment as it kills a rabbit and moves about town. When night comes, the audience members are given sleeping bags. They sleep in the desert and are awoken when the tire’s story continues. They are given no food and begin complaining about the narrative and their hunger. When they are brought food, they devour it like insane animals. All things considered, the tire is perhaps the most sane character of this modified epic theatre. Still, no matter this up-frontness, the conceptual premise functions not as an experimental destruction of its own formal, narratological underpinnings, as in the work of Brecht and Beckett whom Dupieux is clearly channeling; rather, this socially and politically radical basis serves only as a cop out for tonal ambivalence, abject contempt, and heedless dawdling.

Each of these steps could be defended if Dupieux followed Brecht and/or Beckett’s mode of “interruptions,” but the strategies are merely a ploy and fail to disrupt. What Rubber regurgitates is pure bile – an elementary, if not completely vacuous, critique of detachment. That it purposefully uses detachment to critique detachment is a potentially brilliant move. Nevertheless, Dupieux misses the mark. His own destructive nature, mirrored by the complete demolition of all subjects by the tire, blows up everything in sight without stepping back and surveying the destruction site. Dupieux fails to recognize that the double bind he crafted (between object and subject, audience and story) is actually a triple bind. He has forgotten himself in it. The subjects in the story are detached from the unliving/living object of the tire. The audience wandering around witnessing the tire’s carnage watch captively, from a distance, until their ambivalent distance becomes carnivorous and they destroy themselves.

However, there is one audience member – a man in the wheelchair – who avoids this pitfall and remains committed to the story of the tire. Like Dupieux, demanding a complete narrative, he sits and waits for the story to progress, and, when it doesn’t, he makes suggestions as to how the story should operate. Yet, in the end, his attachment brings him too close to the scene of the crime and he too becomes a victim to the process. This moment shows Rubber’s unwillingness to commit to its own project and Dupieux’s ultimate failure in the triple bind. He only showcases destruction rather than any kind of contemplation. There is no escaping the destruction precisely because Dupieux condemns everyone and everything involved in this series of relationships. The man succeeds with distance until he comes too close. When he transforms into a narrative subject rather than a distanced object, he interrupts his safe distance and threatens his existence. He, Dupieux, and the audience have been placed in the position of the tire in its opening stroll through nature. In so doing, Dupieux ignores his own demands and never removes himself from the simple-minded bemusement and implicit violence he means to critique. He is stuck and we are stuck. The only thing that keeps moving is the tire, the wheel, the destructive object itself. By disowning its own conceits, Rubber becomes mere clay. But, then again, perhaps that’s the point.

No Doubt

2011-03-04T18:04:00.004-05:00

by James Hansen

Let me suggest that movies battling through issues of free will and determinism require an individual character trait to sustain their prerogative. If Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report has brains, Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day has courage, and Richard Kelly’s The Box has balls, George Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau wants to have heart. Taken quite literally, the driving force behind free will in Nolfi’s film is the desire for romance, connection, and intimacy – or, in one word, heart. However, unlike the similarly themed films mentioned above, The Adjustment Bureau ducks the complications of its thematic basis. Instead, it retreats into “heart” and action as simple answers and rejects the basic (although challenging) questions of its chosen framework.

David Norris (Matt Damon), an up and coming politician, first encounters contemporary ballet dancer Elise (Emily Blunt) at a moment when his planned out future suddenly becomes uncertain. Amidst an unexpected loss on election night, Elise, in this one meeting, provides David with unexpected inspiration which reestablishes his desire, re-ignites his ambition, and puts his life back on the right track. Naturally, David falls instantly in love with Dream Girl. Nevertheless, the nefarious plan of The Adjustment Bureau – a group of urban space-traveling individuals who ensure that people don’t exercise enough free will to stray from their mapped life paths – is for David and Elise to be apart.

When a bureau members snoozes through a planned adjustment of David’s morning, a chain of events results in David witnessing the world and inner workings of the Adjustment Bureau’s evil geniuses. This revelation opens a window for David to doubt the world around him and his place within it. Threatened with a resetting of his mind if he speaks of the evil geniuses or their plans (i.e. does anything to move the plot along), David stays quiet and continues along his pre-determined path. While often bemoaning the system for keeping him from his true love, he maintains hope of breaking through his role as an automata, human robot in a rigged world.

As soon as these questions are referenced, however, The Adjustment Bureau becomes oddly uninterested in its mysterious Cartesian world. Removing all questions of doubt, it has each character clinging to their certainties. The bureau is certain that their maps cannot be re-written, despite acknowledging that David and Elise’s maps had changed. David clings to his only certainty – love, man – and uses it as a catalyst for each of his dangerous actions. Meanwhile, Elise breaks off her engagement with a famed choreographer when she meets David, but quickly becomes re-engaged as soon as David removes himself from the picture. Ultimately, The Adjustment Bureau stagnates in its environment of certain certainties – known knowns, if you want – by refusing elements of certain uncertainties and/or uncertain uncertainties of which its system and characters are resolutely aware.

What this really means – lest you think this has just been a fun, backhanded academic exercise – is that The Adjustment Bureau is snooze. Nolfi’s script sets up a single either/or question – should he stay or should he go? – with which it hardly tinkers or deepens during its running time. There is one obvious question (often stated in different scenarios by each member of the bureau) and one even more obvious answer (which is as certain as can be, else there be no movie). While Anthony Mackie spouting goofy vampire-esque rules of the bureau with faux-seriousness and Matt Damon (w/ Emily Blunt) space-traveling through New York City are not without pleasantries, The Adjustment Bureau, too pre-determined by its star-crossed romance, lulls itself into an inactive stupor. Forgoing fundamental nuances of plot and character (not to mention epistemology), The Adjustment Bureau spends it entire running time treading water without noticing it hasn’t even set foot in a pool.

On View: André Guerreiro Lopes' "The Flight of Tulugaq"

2011-02-28T23:59:00.005-05:00

by James Hansen

André Guerreiro Lopes’ The Flight of Tulugaq is a short, reflective piece fitting for the Wexner Center’s The Box. The Box’s intimate screen confronts the expansive flight of ravens across the Alaskan skyline, yet Lopes’ film undoubtedly suggests the intimacy of this mysterious act. The Box allows the viewer to stand amidst the expansive universe, yet also get close enough to interact with the patterned actions of the unbounded, expansive mythology built around Flight’s 9-minute running time.

Seen first coming out of and around a series of trees, a group of ravens ravens fly together in a group. They quietly rattle the branches of the trees, their movement altering the limited sounds of the landscape around them. The ravens bound from tree to tree, or rise just above. The birds, seen from the view of Lopes’ camera, are impossible to contain. They start closer to the frame, but quickly move further away, becoming dots in an empty sky. They glide across the landscape with an indefinable sense of freedom.

Flight continues as the birds move further away from the trees, slide upward and away from the abandoned world below them. Once isolated, they begin a strange dance in the sky. The ravens seem to play off one another, rolling downward before turning back up. Bouncing from side to side, up and down, they become partners of this mystical tango.

Yet, one by one, Lopes freezes the birds in the air. Forcefully stopping their flight, they are slowly brought together, peering out (and in) as two isolated eyes, two undoubtedly connected presences in this wonderful “song of the winds.” The ravens are no longer really flying so much as hovering, situated in a far off space to which Lopes’ camera cannot have access. They embody some long forgotten transcendent figure, always floating amidst an inaccessible, ungraspable expanse – one that can be seen and reflected upon from afar, yet can only be experienced and known by those part of its unique, distant flight.

The Flight of Tulugaq screened in the Wexner Center’s Box from February 1-28. See Jennifer Lange's conversation with Mr. Lopes for more information.

Love Is A Battlefield

2011-02-08T11:00:00.002-05:00

by Chuck Williamson

At its core, Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is an experiment in teratology: a stripped-down sideshow attraction where the toned, juvenated, hyper-sexualized bodies of movie stars mutate into scuzzed-out white trash grotesqueries. Moving fugue-like in odd atemporal rhythms, the film cruelly alternates between vesuvian post-marital meltdowns and the fumbling flirtations of a new relationship; it deliberately counterpoises every moment of halcyon romanticism with its self-destructive inversion until a final cataclysmic crescendo set against a literal barrage of fireworks.

Unfolding in a series of startling juxtapositions, Blue Valentine relishes in the perverse thrill of using its performers as blank canvases that can be hyperbolized and rendered ghoulish in the service of (over)enunciating its one-note “love stinks” theme. But even as Williams and Gosling exhibit a brutal and implosive intimacy, their transformations into working-class caricatures are symptomatic of the film’s confused oscillation between naturalism and hyperbolization; it continuously sledgehammers its myopically apocalyptic view of romantic ruination, punctuates several scenes with a veritable exclamation mark, and often nullifies the subtle, poignant poetry of moments that capture the minutiae and quiet interactions that form (and fracture) its central relationship.

As a pair of punch-drunk Brooklynites in love, Cindy (Michelle Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) exude a youthful effervescence and raw libidinous energy: scrawny, spontaneous, matching every furtive glance with an act of carnal physicality. As embittered parents, they resemble a corn pone fever-dream of working-class miserablism: doughy, droopy-eyed, abjectified into a grotesque bodily spectacle that feeds our illicit love for the freak-show aesthetic. Little else exists beyond these extreme polarities as the film boils down the messy intricacies of relationships into simple, surface-level dichotomies.

Small, poignant moments of intimacy and despair—the incredulous laughter produced from an off-color joke, the small gestures lovers use to urge one another up a staircase, or the mournful response to the death of a family dog—subside in favor of combative, bare throated histrionics where each performer tediously implores some variant of, “What do you want me to do?” Blue Valentine uses its structural juxtapositions to render context and causality opaque, a potentially radical narrative device that merely makes the downward spiral of its central relationship frustratingly superficial. We never see even a glimpse of the intermediate five-year period where, with apologies to Annie Hall, “love fades,” but are instead disingenuously bounced between two extreme polarities: the idyllic beginnings and the purgatorial breakdown where bodies are dramatically deglamorized. Their relationship is reduced to dueling sound-bites.

As such, Blue Valentine is streamlined to the point of suppressing its contingencies, trading in moments of quiet observation for a collection of eruptive, overplayed, on-the-nose encounters that spell everything out in big, capital letters. Why else would the film so nakedly strain for dramatic irony through Gosling’s full-bodied ukulele rendition of “You Always Hurt the One You Love,” or foreshadow its central dramatic set-piece—set in a sci-fi themed love-motel—with winking one-liners like, “Pack your bags, babe, we’re going to the future?” Why else would it telegraph its marital dissolution with two fussy, overwritten exchanges where Dean and Cindy philosophize on the nature of love with their friends and family? Why else would the characters lack an interior life outside their combative romantic entanglements?

Even its structural conceit hinges on over-explicit juxtapositions that contrast multiple scenes from past and present to the same eye-rolling conclusion: love is easy and marriage is hard. Set against the din of meatloaf-tossing patriarchs, vituperative ex-boyfriends, and sleaze-bag doctors (“I thought you were promoting me because of my talent,” Cindy demurs at one point), Blue Valentine leaves little to the imagination as it repeatedly hammers the same note with a single-minded relentlessness.

But even at its most problematic, Blue Valentine still succeeds as an actor’s showcase for Williams and Gosling, who anchor even the most overblown and preposterous scenes with a bruised and battered humanism. Often transcending the more overheated passages from Cianfrance’s screenplay, the two principle performers make even the most repetitive shout-fests compelling and emerge as a source of pathos that almost makes up for the film’s clumsier solicitations for our sympathy—and that includes its perverse, rubber-necking fetishization of their deglamorization.

Which brings us to the veritable teratogenesis. Williams, for instance, slinks into frame like a haggard, sleep-deprived somnambulist who never seems to physically recover from having been forced out of bed by her shrieking five-year-old daughter; at times, she seems to sink into the cluttered and perpetually dingy mise-en-scene. But it is Ryan Gosling, as a harried, “too-old-for-this-shit” hipster past his sell-by date, who embodies the film’s worst impulses. Bleating out absurd pronouncements like, “Let’s get drunk and make loooove,” Gosling plays Dean as a twitchy, tattooed, balding, chain-smoking, pot-bellied loser, sloppily dressed in paint-smeared cargo pants, a Salvation Army eagle sweatshirt, and a pair of pedotastic tinted aviator glasses; his body, in a sense, is specularized into a ridiculous, pathos-hungry white trash spectacle that visualizes his fall from grace in a blunt, overreaching, semi-comic fashion.

Rendered ghoulish under the auspices of method acting (extolled in celebrity gossip columns in narratives of courage, commitment, and precipitous weight gain), their bodies denote a wild, larger-than-life exhibitionism that, to some degree, disrupts the inherent voyeurism of Blue Valentine’s unhinged emotional fallout—aided by intimate handheld camerawork and extreme close-ups—by privileging hyperbolized exteriors over psychic or emotional interiors. Their broken-down bodies double as objects of a fetishistic display that externalizes (and embellishes) Cianfrance’s contention that, well, “you always hurt the one you love,” and ultimately become hyper-visible in his last-ditch effort to show the literal damage of fading love. At its most poignant, the film opts to decenter corporeal grotesquery as the prime source of spectacle, as in an assaultive sexual encounter where claustrophobic framing and camera movement blur their bodies into a diaphanous tangle of torsos and limbs. But most of Blue Valentine puts us in an odd position where we are asked to empathize and gawk.

Obsessed and Confused

2011-02-04T18:00:00.000-05:00

by James Hansen

Befuddlingly bland, The Roommate has a stock set up with plenty of room for crazy, but can’t even match the bizarre terror unleashed via the naming privileges of director Christian Christiansen’s parents. Perhaps trapped by its PG-13 rating (although it is consistently so cobbled together that placing blame is quite difficult), The Roommate never feels like horror movie, at least certainly not a scary one, and its attempts at psychological terror are equally ill-conceived and ineffective. The jumbled direction and screenwriting, punctuated by a distressing causal justification, leaves it terribly confused. Uniquely inept, The Roommate plays out as a completely different movie than the one pieced together before the viewer’s eyes.

Sara (Minka Kelly) is a college freshman moves onto campus at the University of Los Angeles without her boyfriend, Jason, who snubbed their deal to go to school together for a last minute spot at Brown. Eventually, she meets her roommate, Rebecca (Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester), who comes off as a bit strange – a trip to see Richard Prince’s Nurse Paintings doesn’t help – but mostly stays in her room and appears to be relatively kind. Rebecca starts cracking when Sara’s attention turns elsewhere: the friend down the hall, the suave fashion professor (Billy Zane!), the sexy boyfriend (Cam Gigandet aka that dude from The OC and Burlesque!). Rebecca can’t handle anyone getting between her and her obsession.

Sadly, The Roommate is miscast, poorly written, edited, and directed, or all of the above. Meester, as Blair Waldorf on Gossip Girl, has proven she can play a complex queen and evil bitch quite effectively, swinging from the world of backstabbing, artificial validation (and great clothes) to the world of a deeply effected, vulnerable, privileged teenager trying to figure out the world around her (while still wearing great clothes). Here, Meester’s nonchalant charisma and charm turn Rebecca into something more than the purely evil roommate. It is rather clear The Roommate wants nothing to do with these added dimensions, as Meester’s performance contradicts the dangerous tone proposed by many of the Christiansen’s horror-based directorial choices.

But what is calling for Rebecca’s straight up craziness? Christiansen’s direction pushes her in that way. The script, on the other hand, calls for Meester’s characterization through its building of a narrative beyond its standard set up. The contradiction, then, that we feel coming off the screen does not involve Meester, but rather the disconnect between the screenplay and its direction. Screenwriter Sonny Malhi provides us with a strange amount of exposition about Rebecca, complete with a Thanksgiving trip home to her supportive, concerned, upper class parents. Christiansen and Malhi construct this scene merely as a way to reveal a downplayed, explanatory plot point, yet it shows not only that Rebecca has two sides, but also poses a much larger problem.

The parent’s revelation pinpoints a fundamental shift in The Roommate’s schema, which goes unrecognized by Christiansen or Malhi. Malhi’s half-hearted, yet fully invested justification for the Rebecca’s unstable actions – she’s schizophrenic and/or bipolar and off her meds! – inadvertently turns this horror saga into a strangely sad one. [I would have included a major spoiler sign if it seemed like The Roommate actually cared about said “spoiler.”] Rebecca isn’t some crazed slasher, terrorizing the friends of her roommate out of sheer delight. (Truthfully, that would make for a better horror movie and seems to be the movie Christiansen & Malhi think they are making). Instead, she’s a mentally unstable girl with no friends whose problems potentially could have been offset by a helping hand and a trip to the guidance counselor. At least when Buffy wanted to kill her college roommate, she made sure it was a conspiratorial, soul-sucking demon first.

Out 1 Film Journal's Best of 2010

2011-02-01T13:30:00.000-05:00

Before we get to the lists, a personal note. (Skip to after the break if you want to skip this jibber jab). If the creation of lists has us reflect on the year past, it is hard to do so at this site without offering a bit of an explanation (and, perhaps, an apology) for our limited output in 2010. While our absence could be seen as an ‘alternative’ web site, surrounded by another year of underachieving Hollywood films, and quietly folding into cavernous, academic caves, there is more to it that has less to do with our ongoing interests in cinema and more to do with a major transition year for each of the writers you’ve come to know (or are stumbling upon) at this site. (I don’t intend to speak for Chuck or Brandon in the next paragraphs, but our attitude towards the site and movies in general is precisely the reason this site has continued for the past 3+ years and is revamping, so we hope, in 2011. Have to say, we’re off to a good start).

For brief, exclamatory, explanatory recognition: each of the writers at this site is currently working towards a PhD in some cinema and/or art-related field. Not that this actually gives us any more qualifications or anything, but it’s something I’m proud to tout nonetheless. In 2010, my major transition (which contributed to the lack of a site for much of the year) came in the form of leaving New York, Columbia, and Film Studies proper for Columbus, The Ohio State, and Art History. An exciting change, but one that had me in the middle of nowhere over the summer before situating in Columbus and trying to find ways to make it seem like it isn’t also nowhere. Thanks mainly to the Wexner Center, film culture, as it were, isn’t lost, but it took most of the last third of 2010 to re-find its place in myself. I wondered if the site should go the way of New York for me – a great memory that I cling to, but know I have to leave behind.

What I slowly remembered throughout my first quarter in Columbus, though, was why I started this site in the first place (and why I was determined - and thrilled - to find dedicated writing cohorts with whom the site would be built): without a level of engagement, critical thought, and reflection, cinema (and art) can become meaningless. Some people accept it as such, and I fear, when I stopped writing, that I began feeling that way too. But this site, from its inception, was not only invested, but demanded – and knew – there was more. Nearing the end of 2010, I realized the reason I missed the site was also the reason I felt distant from art – I was leaving behind a crucial part of the process. I don’t intend on doing so again. Part of that process relies on a community – whether in local cities, states, art houses, dollar theaters, film festivals, or Twitter where I had most of my favorite discussions about film this year; part of it relies on finding artists who create work to examine questions rather than play inane tricks and force-feed explanations and answers; and part of it relies on viewers who ask for more from artists and hope, no matter the kind of work, that they discover new worlds.

The best cinema in 2010 did just that. Very few of the best came from expected sources, but that may be precisely why they continue to stand out. In honor of the film whose name this website yoinked, we offer our individual lists of the 13 best films of the year. And, with a nod of gratitude, we wish all of our readers uniquely great cinema in 2011.

Brandon Colvin’s Top 13 of 2010

1. Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine)
2. Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)
3. Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
4. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
5. Dogtooth (Giorgios Lanthimos)
6. Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Refn)
7. Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)
8. Jackass 3D (Jeff Tremaine)
9. Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio)
10. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy?)
11. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright)
12. Let Me In (Matt Reeves)
13. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

Best Director:
Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer

Best Lead Performance:
Aggeliki Papoulia - Dogtooth & Steve-O - Jackass 3D

James Hansen’s Top 13 of 2010

1. Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa)
2. Dogtooth (Giorgios Lanthimos)
3. Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine)
4. Flooding With Love For The Kid (Zachary Oberzon)
5. Carlos [330-minute version] (Olivier Assayas)
6. Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)
7. Jackass 3D (Jeff Tremain)
8. Lourdes (Jessica Hausner)
9. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
10. How Do You Know? (James L. Brooks)
11. Everyone Else (Maren Ade)
12. Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
13. Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes)

Best Director:
Jessica Hausner - Lourdes

Best Lead Performance:
Sylvie Testud - Lourdes & Zachary Oberzan - Flooding With Love For The Kid

Best Supporting Performance:
Greta Gerwig - Greenberg & The Crying Cowboy- Sweetgrass

Best Unreleased Film:
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (duh)

Chuck Williamson’s Top 13 of 2010

1. Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio)
2. Dogtooth (Giorgios Lanthimos)
3. Mother (Joon-ho Bong)
4. White Material (Claire Denis)
5. Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor)
6. Wild Grass (Alaina Resnais)
7. Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
8. I Love You Phillip Morris (Glenn Fearra & John Requa)
9. Burlesque (Steve Antin)
10. I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino)
11. Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine)
12. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
13. Enter The Void (Gaspar Noe)

Best Director:
Gaspar Noe - Enter the Void

Best Lead Performance:
Kim Hye-ja - Mother & Do-yeon Jeon - Secret Sunshine (tie) & Jim Carrey - I Love You Phillip Morris

Best Supporting Performance:
Olivia Williams - The Ghost Writer & Song Kang-ho - Secret Sunshine

Best Unreleased Film:
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives & Oki’s Movie

Back to the Junkyard

2011-01-28T10:00:00.001-05:00

by James Hansen

Simon West’s The Mechanic, a new version of the 1972 Charles Bronson film by the same name, starts as an existential character study, morphs half way through into a hitman apprenticeship story with no real purpose, and ends as a bizarrely off-putting, conspiracy-laden, action-espionage thriller. Without any connective tissue between these shifts, not to mention an unfortunate atonality and lack of conviction throughout, The Mechanic fails to succeed in any of its three mutated forms and piles up into a garbage heap.

Arthur Bishop (the always serviceable Jason Statham) is a “mechanic” – a hitman – for an international organization. He is successful and trusted because he follows orders and cleanly carries out his missions. The first 40-minutes or so of The Mechanic follow Arthur as he ponders his life of violence. A sweeping shot of Statham sitting in the dark here, a reverse version of the same shot there – existential crisis! After he is assigned a hit on his longtime friend, Arthur (for some reason) befriends Steve (Ben Foster), the son of the man he just killed. Steve, unaware it is Arthur who killed his father, lashes out after his father’s death at random car jackers. Finally, Arthur takes him under his wing and trains him to become a mechanic.

That getting through this basic premise takes nearly half of the 90-minute running time is the first (all too long) indication of adaptation trouble for Mr. West and screenwriters Lewis John Carlino and Richard Wenk; they have tried their hand at mimicking the atmospheric, silent opening of Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (a hold over homage from the 1972 version, which apparently spends it first 16 minutes in silence as Bronson prepares his first job) – a difficult task, to say the least, and one that The Mechanic misses by a mile. Showing neither the restraint nor half the intellectual intensity of Melville’s classic, The Mechanic’s first half is both tedious and tepid.

In the second half, once Steve’s apprenticeship begins, The Mechanic becomes a different movie, but unfortunately still a bad one. Ignoring the potentially interesting relational dynamics between Arthur and Steve, The Mechanic turns into a hitman training video, except without any consequence. The sideshow of disparate missions (kill a Colombian, kill your backstabbing friend, kill a 6’7’ “mechanic” who loves chihuahuas and young boys, kill an obese preacher who think he is the Messiah, etc.) occurs without a semblance of context, randomly moving from one hit to the next without a framework for any kind of narrative urgency.

When Arthur sends Steve on his first solo job to hit the 6’7 “mechanic,” he warns Steve to keep it clean, do it in a bar, and don’t take on this guy. Of course, Steve doesn’t follow the directions, gets his ass kicked, and does the job as messily as possible, all to which Arthur merely chides, “I told you to keep it clean.” And, in the next scene, out of sight, out of mind. Here, The Mechanic reveals its pornographic action construction – rather than being strung together for sexual arousal, it gets off on action sequences functioning purely to fetishize violence and first-person shooter fantasies.

Needless to say, this makes the last-gasp injections of a double-conspiracy twist and a nonsensical coda (all on top of previously non-existent narratives) all the more hysterical. Statham is a strong action star, and Ben Foster’s feisty underling provides a good counterpoint to his stoic ferocity, but The Mechanic proves unwilling (or unable) to cohere enough on any level and properly utilize Statham’s badass persona (as was done in The Transporter series, Death Race, Crank 2 High Voltage, etc.) Rather, it sets a number of disassembled pieces beside each other and never figures out how to put them together.

I Wanna Be Your Lover

2011-01-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

by James Hansen

In what is sure to come as a surprise to entertainment prognosticators damning Natalie Portman’s Oscar hopes for making her post-Academy Award win “shit movie” before she even wins the award, Portman’s “shit movie” – Ivan Reitman’s No Strings Attached (and, incidentally, executive produced by Portman) – is far from an awards kiss of death (if you believe in such things) and actually shows more nuance than most mainstream romantic comedies, not to mention “awards movies” which seem more and more willing to abandon any subtlety in favor of bludgeoning audiences with their awardyness.

While not as radical as James L. Brooks’ How Do You Know?, the widely reviled film which found an equally ardent cadre of supporters (#TeamHowDoYouKnow?!), No Strings Attached literally passes over the typically conservative romcom formulas – the film opens with a seemingly sloppy sequence of flashbacks which hopscotch over classic romcom scenarios (questions of teenage virginity at summer camp, slutting it up in college frat houses) – and reverses them. Sex, here, is not an end goal where the triumphant white male claims his prize and high-fives his buddies. Rather, in No Strings Attached, sex is a given component of a relationship, a starting point from which issues of self inevitably arise for both persons involved. It isn’t really a question of “Can sex friends stay best friends?,” but when, why, and how silly pleasure transforms into more complex companionship. Oh yeah, it's also funny.

The aforementioned romcom scenarios revolve around Emma (Natalie Portman) and Adam (Ashton Kutcher), two sensitive, loner kids at camp who go different directions (he, a frat life at Michigan, she, working to become a doctor at MIT), before ending up in the same place (Los Angeles) where things come full circle. A night of binge drinking with his pals, Wallace (Ludacris!) and Eli (Jake Johnson), ends with Adam waking up in an unfamiliar apartment and re-living the classic college situation, Dude, What’d I Put My Dick In? Luckily, Emma’s doctor roomates, Patrice (the always exciting Greta Gerwig) and Shira (Mindy Kaling), resisted the swoons of a naked, depressed Adam. So, too, did Emma, at least the night before, but a passing glance here, a naked guy there, and their multiple almost-happened moments finally happens. No big deal – some afternoon sex, Emma’s off to work, and Adam heads home.

Naturally, this is just the beginning (else we wouldn’t have a movie). Though the major storylines are all by the book, No Strings Attached gleefully bounds along thanks to the supporting cast. Gerwig, after conquering the indie world with her unique, natural energy, had a breakout year in 2010 with her role in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg. Here, she provides each of her scenes with a surprising vibrancy, instrumental to the maintaining the film’s casual charm without stopping it dead in its tracks, as so often happens with secondary characters in mainstream comedy. The characters aren't floundering aimlessly in screenplay mechanics, but part of a developed world. (Watch how the crazy producer with a crush on Adam transforms from a one-line joke to an actual character). The awkwardly constructed subplot between Adam, a would-be writer spending his days assisting on a High School Musical knockoff, and his aloof father (Kevin Kline), a famed sitcom actor, comes closest to sinking the film, yet, on the brink of disaster, Kline schmoozes his way through a birthday song, which is funny, yes, but also an exemplary, desperate charade of trying to regain love and respect once it has been lost.

Of course, such charades aren’t needed – something Kline’s ridiculous charicature won’t understand – and, to its credit, No Strings Attached doesn’t solve Adam and Emma’s dilemma with the vapid scenarios that pile up near the film’s conclusion. And while the genre mechanics fall back into all too familiar territory – Emma is the confused one and has to come running back to her [squeaky clean perfect] man, duh – No Strings Attached ends with a nice touch, a punch line, a final reversal of the scenarios it skips at the beginning. For Emma and Adam, it isn’t a question of sex. It’s the problem of breakfast.

On View: Ben Russell's "Trypps #7 (Badlands)"

2011-01-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

by James Hansen

Currently on view at the Wexner Center in The Box (which wonderfully contributes to the work’s critical questions by installing a certain object-to-be-named-later-in-this-”review” along the walls), Ben Russell’s Trypps #7 (Badlands) is all about deception. Drawing on an array of influences and continuing his own engagement with the experiential, trance-like capabilities of moving-image media, Trypps #7 initially appears to be some sort of update on an Andy Warhol Screen Test. A loud bell chimes and a young woman, tripping on LSD, stares out at the camera and the spectator. Shot in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, she stands in front of a barren canyon. She closes her eyes and opens them again. The camera lightly bobs, as if caught in the rustling breeze heard on the soundtrack. The woman’s hair swirls. Another bell chimes, birds chirp, and the wind intensifies. The woman’s eyes seem glossy and her face slides into a smile.

But, suddenly, the film stops and a white light shines out. Another bell. The woman is there again, but the the vivid, blue sky is the only thing behind her. And then, shockingly, the camera swings downward and Trypps #7 spins into the dizzying territory of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale. (As we will see, this is in no way to suggest Russell’s film is merely a Snow follow up by way of Warhol). When the camera whirls downward and begins to rotate more rapidly, Trypps #7 showcases its initial deception – it is not the camera that is shifting, as in Snow’s film, but rather a double-sided mirror, a reflective apparatus, which, strangely enough, has literally been cracked. We have seen the woman, but only through the representation of a mirror. Between the mirror’s rotations, the actual canyon can almost be seen, but only in the briefest of glimpses. The crack in the mirror indicates our illusion has been broken and the deception uncovered. Yet, Trypps #7 is just getting started.

As the speed of the mirror increases, making perspective and the space nearly indecipherable, the woman leaves the frame, but the mirror continues to spin. Here, Trypps #7 shows our initial “tripping” with the woman has shifted. This is not only a vision of tripping on LSD or merely a film questioning the representative status of the image (not that achieving either of those aims would be any small task). Instead, it becomes a tryppy reflection of the cinematic process actualized. The mirror, ultimately serving as the shutter and douser, rapidly rotates, breaking up our vision, yet a constant stream of different images (enacted by the mirror reflecting in all directions of the somehow unseen camera) flickers before our eyes. Trypps #7 shows us a reflection of a world and a reflection of a reflection of a world. This doubling gives us the opportunity to see an image and understand that the image we see is a deceptive representational reflection of a place we can see, hear, and experience, yet never actually see, hear, or experience in the way that film does. The eye of the camera in Trypps #7 lives inside a projector’s lamphouse, recording and reflecting the process in front of it. Remarkably, Russell puts us in a position to witness the sight of an image passing in front of a stream of light, shattering into small pieces, and uniting as it beams out from a projector.

By embodying multiple positions which are blocked and shifted by the rotating apparatus in front of us (the mirror, the shutter, the douser, etc.), Trypps #7 shows us the full range of what we see when we engage with cinema and highlights the inner workings of the system that we enter into when we experience moving images. Throughout Trypps #7, Russell slowly reveals how he has inverted and coalesced the distinct, divergent processes of Warhol, Snow, and others into a singular, unbounded double or triple-vision which is simultaneously reflective, static, and wildly kinetic. What a trip.

Trypps #7 (Badlands) is on view through January 31.

January Cages

2011-01-10T09:00:00.002-05:00

by James Hansen

In what has become an annual January tradition, movie studios bestow their leftover turds upon various multiplexes and audiences across the country – movies too inconsequential, half-baked, and economically unviable to be gloriously sacrificed among spring comedies, summer blockbusters, fall horrors, and winter “prestige pictures.” January brings with it a super-sized tinge of laziness. (Notably, the same hasn’t been true for foreign film or art houses – two of my favorites of 2010 opened in early January – and many of the Best Movies of 2010 are still working their way to secondary and tertiary markets. Out 1's belated Best of 2010 lists are still in the works. Fashionably late). Alas, the true scent of January is in the air with Dominic Sena’s Nicolas Cage-vehicle Season of the Witch.

So, a long time, there were some witch hunts. And then the Crusades happened. Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) pretty much kicked ass and took names, quipping about single-handedly killing entire armies of men. What a jolly good time! But lo, what treachery is this!? Behmen and Felson are sent into a Church full of infidels, only to realize they are slaughtering women and children. (Cue the repeated smash cut to woman getting stabbed). Pissed at The Church's evil deeds but following their vows to God, Behmen and Felson abandon their army and happen upon a plague stricken town. Discovered to be deserters, Behmen and Felson meet plague stricken Jabba the Hut priest who sends them on a mission from God to take a supposed witch to a faraway town where monks can try her for witchcraft and provide heavenly help to rid their land of the plague.

After collecting a band of hilariously named misfits (a pleasant surprise was Eckhart, played by great Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen), Behmen and Felson wander out into a journey of which they don’t really want to be a part. Neither does the audience. Never quite sure if it’s a sweeping fantasy adventure, an action comedy, or a sci-fi witch thriller, Season of the Witch plods through its running time with constant shifts in tone, a completely transparent plot, and few of the oddly fascinating bursts of unexpected energy typical of Cage. Sena’s blandly dutiful, obligatory storytelling (someone insults witch, witch summons an attack, attack happens, on we go) shreds his actors of their most unique attributes. And despite Sena’s choice to contain the actors and his narrative, Season of the Witch still manages to become resolutely slipshod. With sloppy CGI and non-stop overly descriptive dialogue, mass confusion abounds over what this movie is supposed to be. Sera surely doesn’t know, but he also doesn’t let his actors doing any of the work for him. Instead, Season of the Witch is left to drown in its own ineptitude.

The long-awaited final sequence – a strange riff on Saving Private Ryan with Nicolas Cage being repeatedly stabbed in the back by a demon – provides life support amidst the dreadfully boring slog, but it barely resuscitates it into mild enjoyment. Luckily, shortly after, Season of the Witch ungracefully puts itself down with an overwrought coda (of sorts) among the hills of Calvary dominated by an inexplicable voiceover that is as slack-jawed as it is form fitting. Just because we expect dallying, half-hearted distractions in January doesn’t make them any better.

C-

Pussy Control

2010-12-24T18:03:00.006-05:00

by James Hansen

Mirroring its own central conceit in several unfortunate ways, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan functions as a double-edged sword on which it repeatedly impales itself. At once an artistic “prestige picture” and a Tex Avery-esque Looney Tunes riff on Tchaikovsky’s famed ballet Swan Lake, Black Swan tempestuously navigates these concepts alongside the similarly fractured mental journey of doomed protagonist Nina Sayers/The Swan Queen (Natalie Portman).

Nina’s personality splits when she is chosen to perform both Swan roles in the highly anticipated ballet. She must be The White Swan of purity and precision and also The Black Swan of fear, desire, and improvisation. With mounting pressure from director Thomas Leroy/The Gentleman (Vincent Cassel) and a unique relationship with new girl Lily/The Black Swan (Mila Kunis), Nina tries to loosen up from her White Swan tendencies to achieve artistic perfection by embodying both states of mind. This mixture of reality and fantasy, good and evil, failure and success pushes Nina beyond anything she has experienced before. She is in a new, strange world which she must either journey through or become lost within.

Black Swan’s journey quickly reveals itself as having little to do with art or artists, but rather dicks, pussies, and earth-shaking orgasms. Thomas chooses Nina for The Swan Queen after a timid request for a second audition results in a seductive, unwanted kiss in which Nina bites his lip. Thomas questions Nina’s sex life and suggests she have sex. After multiple masturbation attempts with no “success,” Nina goes out with Lily and explores her Black Swan side. With barely a hint at lesberation, Nina is rolling on E and howling in her bed via Lily’s magical cunnilingus. Nina’s orgasm is more than a sign of sexual pleasure, but one of the perfection she seeks in life, work, and art. Still, this false moment of perfection leaves Nina lost in time, late for work, and threatens her success in the ballet. Her climactic scenes late in the film with Lily and Thomas indicate a further presumption of sexual pleasure as cataclysmic, threatening, overly demanding, and strangely confining. The residual effects of sexuality understood in this manner come through in Nina’s final swan song, which make her choices harder to stomach. Threatened by a perfect pleasure outside of her art, she destroys it.

Yet – no matter the bizarre, enormously entertaining, trash genre hijinx – Black Swan remains a thuddingly literal extension of Swan Lake and purely surface level. Nina’s existential crisis, fear of failure, and ambiguous sexuality plays out as a cartoonish fodder. Instead of exploring the ideas of psycho-bisexuality, artistic creativity, or pressures on femininity which seem inherent in the mtaerial, screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John McLaughlin loads the script with softballs (“lose yourself”) which they pay off by literalizing the terse statements. This strangely unthoughtful approach creates a checklist for Nina’s tragically battered psyche and quickly knocks off each aspect as Black Swan plods forward becoming simultaneously more entertaining (as The Black Swan of hilarious trash spectacle) and disappointing (as The White Swan of an artistically considered film) as it goes along. (For more on this, see Martha Polk’s terrific critique).

That it devolves into sexual games is a further indication that Aronofsky’s direction of underlying dualisms is far from complex. Constantly maintaining an obvious grip on the Swan Lake story told several time throughout the film, Black Swan shows neither controlled mania or tight composition of cinema made by true artists. In a journey of a fracture mind, everything is perfectly clear and logical. Unfortunately, this also means that Black Swan works only off statements, rather than instilling thought or ideas. By bringing everything pointedly to the surface, Black Swan chooses to stay shallow.

Entertaining enough for a B, but thoughtfulness earns it a C+

The Revenge of the Bitch with Mutant Lungs

2010-12-17T13:58:00.005-05:00

by Chuck Williamson

A garish mash-up of backstage musical and divalicious pop spectacle, Steven Antin’s Burlesque works best as a hyperkinetic, hootchy kootchy parade of plasticized bodies where a coterie of chorus girls writhe and wriggle as the pseudo-vaudevillian “living curtain” backing up their bitch-goddess Xtina who soulfully caterwauls at center-stage. The film’s narrative, a creaky collection of showbiz melodrama clichés complete with the inevitable “a star is born” catharsis, erupts in brief staccato bursts that intermittingly punctuate the razzle-dazzle of the deliriously trashy production numbers with what traditional screenwriters might misconstrue as “motivation.” Cher and Christina sashay through one gauzy burlesque performance to the next, high-stepping, posing, and dishing out the high octaves while periodically loping into frame to discuss whatever low-stakes dilemma will be resolved either through an inexplicable third-act deus-ex-machina or the combined powers of divadom. Does it matter? Because, like, who cares? Burlesque is all about kinetic momentum, open-palmed sass, and the forbidden thrill of bad taste, doubling as a sequined love-letter to the pre-code backstage musical that oscillates somewhere between reverence and camp (but mostly camp).

Equal parts earnest and ridiculous, Burlesque indulges in the trashiest sub-quadrants of pop-culture ephemera, reveling in the most empty-headed and spectacle obsessed sort of bad taste; the film wallows in the garish, the grotesque, and the gleefully artificial. Even its glittery production numbers, once the interstitial passages in Hollywood musicals designed for authentic, spontaneous, or—heaven forbid!—introspective expression, function more as a tacky, carnivalesque displays that turn showbiz kitsch into a delirious bodily performance. Each production number is forceful and frenetic, chopped up into a near-indecipherable tangle of limbs and filled with glitter, garish neon lighting, and Aguilera’s hyper-charged vocal solos; they do no express the characters’ psychological interiority because—wouldn’t you know it?—the characters are all surface and no soul. For Ali (Christina Aguilera), the mid-western farm-girl turned overnight burlesque sensation, “keepin’ it real” entails gaining fame, fortune, and her deliciously muscled songwriting lothario all while re-imagining herself as a one-dimensional pin-up, an eroticized icon whose corseted frame and ghoulish stage make-up suggests a performative masquerade at odds with her oft-exposited desire to rise to the top without “losing herself.”

Perhaps no character pays better lip service to the film’s credo of shameless superficiality than Tess (Cher), who occasionally slinks out from the film’s periphery to delivery sage advice like, “When you are putting on your make-up, it’s like you’re an artist. But instead of painting on a canvas, you’re painting your face.” And as the so-called “bitch with mutant lungs” shimmies down the stage and delivers a full-throated rendition of Etta James’ “Tough Lover” while decked out in S.S. fetish gear—transforming herself from small-town zero to cooch-dancing superstar—she follows the Tao of Cher and splatter-paints her face into a near-parodic extreme of femininity. Extreme close-ups of Aguilera’s dolled-up face and kinetic bodily movements (recalling similar imaging techniques from The Red Shoes) make the performer look phantasmagoric and unreal, a plasticized shell that can paradoxically belt out high-octave renditions of blue standards.

But rather than grate on the nerves, this willful embrace of the frivolous, fake, and borderline idiotic makes Burlesque strangely charming and compelling; it is a paean to kitsch, camp, and bad taste that delights from beginning to end. And why shouldn’t it? What else could we expect from a film where the temptation of materialist excess is literalized as a gaudy pair of Louboutin pumps? Why should we expect interiority or introspection from a film that has its soulful songwriting love interest pay homage to Aguilera, his creative muse, by penning a deeply personal but innanely trashy showtune called “Show Me How You Burlesque?” How could we not be sucker-punched by a film that compresses its narrative into multiple musical montages, that pauses everything so Cher can get diva on, that uses “eating cookies” as erotic innuendo, that’s so replete with cat-fights, hissy-fits, tacky costumes, and eye-rolling one-liners?

My mind says B, but my heart says B+

One Style Does Not Fit All

2010-12-15T19:21:00.006-05:00

by James Hansen

The only really positive thing about Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is that the audience gets what it expects. The story of Aron Ralston – the extreme adventurer who amputated his lower right arm to free himself from a boulder which pinned him in Blue John Canyon for 127 hours – was a media circus when the event took place in 2003 and has become a well-known inspirational story. Boyle, long before the success of his supremely overrated Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire (2008), defined himself as an “auteur” to the film community by crafting a highly kinetic visual style and spinning it through a variety of genres, most successfully in the druggie epic Trainspotting (1996) and the contemporary zombie spin 28 Days Later (2002).

If Boyle’s best work indicates the ability of his style to cross heterogeneous genres, his worst films loudly illustrate exactly that one style does not not fit all. In these cases, Boyle undermines his own films by confronting his narrative logic, his actors, and his actual story with cut-and-paste stylistic “obsessions” which grate against those former elements. Boyle’s direction (and his entire movie) ends up having nothing to do with the material at hand, but, rather, stands as a useless continuation of expected, inappropriate directorial choices. Case and point: 127 Hours – a story of individual strength amidst extreme isolation and deathly circumstances as directed by a zombie with the Rage virus.

Problems start with the first frames of the film – a tryptych, split-screen of large groups of people, vehicles, and nature displaying Boyle’s “kinetic vibrancy.” The pop soundtrack propels us onto Aron Ralston (James Franco) setting off on his adventure. He screens his mom’s phone call, forgets his Swiss Army knife, and soon enough races through the canyon on his mountain bike. This split-screen method may intend to counterpose Ralston with that contemporary world, but Boyle’s use of it throughout the film destroys its credibility in that regard. That aside, Ralston appears enmeshed in a similar form of movement, a mere extension of the crowded city energy pushed out into nature.

If all this, as well as Ralston’s amusing trail-guide excursion with a couple lost girls, showcases a thematic shift once the boulder traps him, Boyle and company seem either unaware or unwilling to let the challenge of their story – supreme desolation – become a demanding element for the limited audience who wants to see this as a cinematic narrative in the first place. Aside from one nice, if expected, shot of Ralstion crying for help as the camera tracks out and above the vast, confined canyon, Ralston never feels very alone. By repeatedly intercutting scenes of Ralston in alternate locations with masses of people, friends, and family, Boyle removes 127 Hours from the precarious situation at hand and uses it as a pedestal to launch into overwrought flashbacks and sequences which more aptly fit his stylistic choices. In allowing other characters to become a part of the movie during the crucial time span, Boyle lets the audience (and himself) off easy. Ralston appears here, there, and everywhere allowing his position to embody a dramatic one-liner instead of a draining and stirring emotional and temporal experience. Things become so confused in Boyle’s stylistic rampage that a fantastical dream sequence appears as plausible as Ralston’s seemingly unbelievable story.

Franco’s strong performance, slowly replacing his bemused loner attitude with anger, fear, and desperation, signals the emotional swings of his interpersonal journey through the traumatic experience. The dramaturgy, perhaps understandably, occasionally slips into histrionics, but Boyle’s push towards sentimentality thwarts the complex reasoning behind Ralston’s state, and hence his entire story. Much as Franco tries, Boyle’s moves undercut him at every direction.

In the film’s much-anticipated climax, Boyle finally demands that the audience face Ralston’s dire position head on. The amputation sequence has been a lot for the squeamish, and rightfully so. Saw really has nothing on this. But, in waiting for the final moments of this challenging story to make any kind of challenge, it becomes clear that Boyle is wholly unsure about and uncomfortable with the material, its questions, and its lessons. Rather than confront the difficult questions inherent in the actual story, Boyle pushes his own directorial machine buttons instead of anything else. In this way, Ralston becomes just an oddity with which Boyle could make another one of his “inspirational” movies. 127 Hours got what it expected from Boyle – kinetic style, tears, Dido, a children’s choir – but it needed something completely different.

C