Out 1 Film Journal

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

Magnolia's Metaphysical Melodrama

2010-09-27T22:08:00.004-04:00

by Brandon Colvin

This piece was originally published in the recently completed PT Anderson blogathon at our friend Jeremy Richey's terrific blog Moon in The Gutter. I'm just posting the text here. If you want pretty pictures to go along with it, see it at Moon and catch up on what you missed during the quite strong "blogathon."

I first saw Magnolia (1999), Paul Thomas Anderson’s 3-hour masterpiece of meta-melodrama, at the tender age of 14. Lugging home two VHS tapes containing the movie, I was unaware of the formative impact the film would have on my understanding of cinema. I watched the film three times during that initial three day rental period, and I’ve seen it at least twice each year since. Every viewing serves as a reminder of the narrative virtuosity and unfettered emotion that first knocked me on my ass in a year that offered many video store treasures: Solaris (Soderbergh, 2002), Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001), Punch-Drunk Love (Anderson, 2002), and Adaptation. (Jonze, 2002). Magnolia, however, towers above these foundational pillars of my cinephilia, primarily because it almost single-handedly taught me a very valuable skill – how to understand and appreciate the melodramatic mode of cinematic storytelling.

The source of Magnolia’s instructiveness towards the end of accepting melodrama lies in its relentless self-awareness as well as its sheer bravery, complimentary traits that support the film’s two-fold method of demonstrating the emotive capabilities of melodrama. This method is realized in the way Magnolia first presents itself as a self-conscious exemplar of post-modern insecurity only to explode that trepidation with unhinged histrionics and full-throttle excess in the form of cosmic coincidences and unabashed artificiality.

The fact that Magnolia begins in the post-modern mode before diving into extravagance is indicative of PTA’s awareness of his primary audience – educated adults attuned to the conventions of “art” or “indie” cinema and the attendant “grittiness” or “realism” of such film practices (my younger self included). Throughout the film’s first few hours, Anderson is covering his bases, so to speak, anticipating possible criticisms by co-opting them into a series of strategically self-reflexive moves – moves which allow him to nip certain objections to implausibility and assumptions of “realism” in the bud in an attempt to open up the skeptical viewer to a different type of storytelling: the melodramatic.

The first of these post-modern gestures, the film’s six-minute, Ricky Jay-narrated prologue, essentially serves the rhetorical function of addressing and invalidating the audience’s potential skeptical prejudices against chance, coincidence, and melodrama as reliable narrative tools for gaining insight into the human condition. Reality is depicted as unquestionably containing the incredible chance occurrences described in the prologue’s three vignettes: the Green-Berry-Hill murder, the scuba diver and the gambler, and the failed suicide-cum-homicide of Sydney Barringer. The vignettes point to something beyond happenstance, something which Anderson seeks to investigate through his film’s engagement with causality and artifice. As Ricky Jay’s narrator comments on Sydney Barringer’s death, “This is not just ‘something that happens.’ This cannot be just ‘one of those things.’ This, please, cannot be that. And, for what I would like to say, I can’t. This was not just a matter of chance. These strange things happen all the time.” In this way, the prologue provides an immediate, ready-made defense of Magnolia’s commitment to the coincidental and the fantastic as the centerpieces of its narrative structure: “these strange things happen all the time.” Through the prologue and its suggestive narration, PTA preemptively strikes, perhaps out of fear that a modern audience will reject his seemingly naïve immersion in the ostentatious.

This almost neurotic need to justify Magnolia’s deliberately fanciful approach pervades the film’s first few hours in the form of self-referentiality and, ultimately, self-defense. During the stunning post-title montage (cut to Aimee Mann’s rendition of “One”), which introduces the audience to Magnolia’s numerous intertwined characters, this self-consciousness is prominent in the form of omnipresent screens and ornately orchestrated cross-cutting, both of which throw the viewer, almost apologetically, into an overt awareness of the film’s constructedness. The shift to slight self-parody comes soon afterward, when Phil Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman) realizes he must track down Earl Partridge’s (Jason Robards) son, Frank Mackey (Tom Cruise) in order to satisfy the dying man’s final wish. In a wide shot, Phil stands by Earl’s eventual deathbed. As Phil mentally develops his plan of action, Wagner’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra” swells, Mickey-Mousing his banal movements while also forming a sound-bridge to Frank Mackey’s infamous “Respect the Cock” speech. The joke is an intertextual one, mockingly comparing Phil’s moment of realization with the epic images of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – the cultural counterpart to Wagner’s composition. PTA seems to be self-consciously poking fun at the balls-to-the-wall ambition behind Magnolia here, placing his film alongside Kubrick’s in a way that highlights the potential silliness of his own hubris. Once again, Anderson is beating his critics to the punch by demonstrating his self-awareness, winking at the skeptics, saying, “I know, I know, but just keep watching.” Similar moments of meta-commentary (even mockery) occur throughout the film, such as when Earl’s wife, the drug addicted Linda (Julianne Moore) exclaims, “This is so fucked up and over-the-top” or when Earl himself acknowledges his hackneyed situation, apologizing to Phil for how pathetic and clichéd his “whole man on a bed” circumstance is. A certain insecurity suffuses these moments, an admittance of deviance from “art” or “indie” cinema’s realistic grounding; Anderson appears to be hesitant, but he is simply earning a sort of credibility by demonstrating his self-consciousness.

The fact that these intentionally archetypal gestures populate Magnolia’s plot is most directly addressed and defended during a scene in which Phil Parma pleads for assistance in finding Frank while telephoning an employee of Frank’s company. Anderson’s awareness of his audience’s possible skepticism is once again on display, as Phil remarks, “I know this sounds silly. And I know I might sound ridiculous, like this is the scene in the movie where the guy is trying to get a hold of the long lost son, ya know. But this is that scene. This is that scene. And I think they have those scenes in movies because they’re true, because they really happen. And, ya gotta believe me, this is really happening.” Anderson returns to the qualification that the seemingly grandiose events of his film happen all the time, that the syrupy, fantastic clichés are rooted in reality, but perhaps not “realism.” Phil’s remarks take up the self-conscious line of argument introduced by the narrator in the prologue and present the key for understanding Magnolia’s subsequent departure from rationality – that such implausible, artificial events are in movies because they actually have a correlation with reality, with lived experience. Indeed, interrogating and interpreting the nature of this correlation is what leads Magnolia to its eventual eruption of cosmic histrionics.

The film truly leaves behind its tentative relationship to the coincidence and obvious artifice that comprise it at the 139-minute mark, when the startling “Wise Up” sequence begins. Here, perhaps as well, is the point at which PTA feels the skeptical viewer will have been fully convinced to accept (or at least play along with) the type of narrative leaps found in Magnolia’s final hour – leaps that take it far away from any concept of “realism.” The scene begins with Claudia Gator (Melora Walters) snorting a line of cocaine while ostensibly listening to an Aimee Mann song on her record player; Mann’s music flows throughout the film, blurring diegetic boundaries in numerous instances (and giving credence to the film’s claim to melodrama), but nowhere is it as remarkable as in this show-stopping shot sequence. As Claudia listens, she begins singing along sullenly, continuing for a few bars before, surprisingly, Anderson cuts to Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) singing along as well, followed by Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), Quiz Kid Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), Phil and Earl, Linda, Frank, then Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman). Of course, they can’t all be listening to the same song at the same time. It is diegetically impossible. What Anderson does here, however, is to impose an extra-diegetic linkage system that unites the characters around a common emotion – sorrowful resignation, as indicated by the song’s lyrical content (“It’s not going to stop / so just give up”). All of this is deliberately artificial, yet convincing in an emotional sense. The emotional, perhaps even spiritual or existential, content of the scene blatantly supersedes any obligation to “realism” or legible causation or continuous temporality; indeed, time seems to stand still for the scene’s duration. This emotional resonance is uniquely powerful as a direct result of Anderson’s willingness to suspend “realism” in favor of artifice and contrivance. With the “Wise Up” scene, PTA lays the groundwork for his eventual masterstroke, providing an expressionistic model of melodramatic storytelling in which emotional intensity overrides rationality and plausibility as a narrative imperative.

The correlation between reality and melodrama, between what “really happens” and what cinema represents, then, is one of emotion, of feeling, according to Anderson’s film. Melodrama externalizes the most intense interior states (as in the “Wise Up” scene), dramatizing passions and beliefs individuals are perhaps too timid or isolated or self-conscious to express – whether they be romantic, violent, or even metaphysical. The progress of Magnolia’s carefully arranged self-presentation – from insecurity to justification to excess – mirrors this process of externalization, providing a cautious arc toward extravagant artifice that is careful to keep the reluctant spectator (which certainly included my teenage self) credulous and interested.

Magnolia’s full melodramatic externalization of its emotional core, of course, famously comes in the form of a rather curious bit of precipitation – a narrative gambit of Biblical proportions. I speak of the millions of frogs which cascade over Magnolia’s San Fernando Valley during its concluding half-hour, washing over the landscape and characters at the precise point that the weight of coincidence, of unmitigated sorrow, of hopelessness, of tears and sins, of all the film’s building melodrama becomes unbearable, and the film must climb to newer heights of expressive intensity. The raining frogs are, appropriately, Magnolia’s signature image, representing one of the bravest creative choices in the history of narrative cinema, a moment of melodrama in its most abstracted, virtually transcendent form. It is a scene of celestial histrionics, of the unbelievable; yet, it is also the truest, most sincere, most profound scene in Anderson’s entire filmography (which includes it as one of the greatest world cinema has had to offer in the past two decades). It is also, particularly upon initial viewing, mystifying, and its significance as an expressionistically melodramatic explosion, one that exemplifies the pulverizing power of excess and emotion flying in the face of “realism,” is best explained by answering the perplexed Phil Parma’s stammering question upon witnessing the meteorological marvel, “How are there frogs falling from the sky?”

Most basically, Phil’s question is a metaphysical one, pondering how the basic laws of reality appear to have been transgressed and contradicted. In this light, the term deus ex machina seems particularly apt (the god in question being PTA). With the falling frogs, Anderson employs a deus ex machina to a deliberate end (rather than demonstrating the laziness typically ascribed to the use of such overt narrative intervention), one which elucidates the melodramatic ethos of Magnolia by aligning the film’s entire universe with its core emotional concerns – perhaps the ultimate form of expressionism. Indeed, the spiritual overtones of the sequence (look for references to Exodus 8:2 throughout the film) point to a certain transcendence-seeking impulse often associated with profound emotion, an impulse Anderson is happy to indulge by emphasizing the act of forgiveness (Christian connotations abound). A specifically cosmic variety of forgiveness is the source from which the frogs fall in Magnolia, whether that source is an implied deity/metaphysical force or simply the writer-director (the god of the narrative machine). It is a forgiveness from outside, one which deliberately pushes people together, saves them from themselves, and retracts their seemingly deserved punishments. It is a narrative leap predicated on emotion and sympathy – that of the filmmaker, and, perhaps, the audience, for the characters; however, the leap is also motivated by the emotion and desire for redemption buried in the most intense interiorities of the characters themselves. Overflowing with these swirling sentiments, Magnolia’s surge into unfettered melodrama seems somewhat inevitable – fated, one might say, not just “one of those things.”

But the falling frogs are still more complex. As the scene concludes, the audience is presented with the same sort of defense of the fantastic and coincidental as earlier in the film. A close up of the corner of a painting’s frame in Claudia’s apartment reveals a strip of paper reading “but it did happen” and, while watching the frogs rain from within the confines of his school library, Stanley mutters, “This is something that happens.” In this new, metaphysically provocative context, however, the previously self-conscious move of rhetorical defensiveness becomes something different. Rather than suggesting the actuality of the fantastic (“these things happen all the time”) as a method of justification and reliability, Magnolia now points to the unbelievable wonder of actuality, offering a phenomenon that demonstrates the shockingly strange qualities of real occurrences. (Raining frogs actually occur in nature. Seriously, look it up.) Ultimately, the recurrence of the “this happens” motif results in an underscoring of the relevance of melodrama to our lived experience. The most outlandish moment has a relatable root in reality, even if that root is essentially emotional. It is all startlingly reminiscent of one of the most memorable scenes of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s aforementioned Adaptation., in which Robert McKee (Brian Cox) berates Charlie (Nicolas Cage) after the later remarks that he wants to make a movie in which nothing happens, as in life, to which Robert responds:

"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!"

Like Adaptation., Magnolia is a film at odds with itself regarding its post-modern and melodramatic tendencies. Magnolia, however, is decidedly more committed to the latter, demonstrating the truth of McKee’s powerful objection by extracting and externalizing the power and intensity of world that frequently seems banal. The world, Magnolia suggests, is vital, dynamic, and beyond our ken – its full expression requiring a narrative mode imbued with the cataclysmic, the extravagant, the super real, in other words, the melodramatic.

Bittersweet, Overblown Symphony

2010-09-24T17:21:00.007-04:00

by James Hansen

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Gaspar Noé’s new film Enter The Void, which was born 163 minutes prematurely at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival before resuscitating itself in 137 minute (25 fps) form at Sundance 2010 where it was met with the critical divisiveness we have come to expect of Noé whose name has become associated with in-your-face extremes of violence, sex, not to mention ambition. Mention I Stand Alone (1998) or, better yet, Irreversible (2002) to your friends and see the response you get. It will likely be polarized, which should let you know whether or not you should invite them when you go see Enter The Void. In Enter The Void, Noé isn’t just trying to stir up the audience with flashing lights, effervescent camerawork, and an (overworked) narrative of life, death, and “The Void” as summarized in a few early conversations about The Tibetan Book of the Dead; one better (or worse), he’s trying to do all that while simultaneously blowing the brains out of the back of our skulls.

This, of course, leaves Enter The Void with some advantages (it is never not interesting and is sure to find a stoned, midnight cult following) and some drawbacks (shit gets retarded). Much as I’d like to avoid it, the story of Enter The Void follows the strange relationship a small time drug dealer, Oscar, and a nightclub stripper, his sister Linda. A bond and promise between the two, replayed several times in the film, refuses to be broken even after Oscar’s death. The camera pivots from Oscar’s actual POV and take up his would be soul as it floats around Tokyo finding visions of his past, present, future, and...the void.

This is already too much description for a film that wants to be treated as purely experiential. Noé’s insistence on crafting a filial melodrama where the emotional excess is taken up by the camera (hence, an surfeit of embarrassing Metaphors) ultimately undercuts the film as a pseudo avant-garde exercise creating a vision of “life” in The Void. Much as I wish I tried to put those issues aside, it becomes impossible as Enter The Void continues returning to the family bond where rules and logic are beaten out of the bluntest details.

Still, I still find myself defending Enter The Void (to myself). It’s drugged out vision of Oscar’s displacement and isolation in the superb neon, mutating lights of unfamiliar Tokyo is oddly beautiful and completely terrifying. As the 2010 movie year has floundered on with prepackaged, tidy, and downright lousy movies, Enter The Void, despite undoing itself with some enormous (not to mention hysterical) misfires in the final third when Noé is really swinging for the 2001 fences, has stuck with me. There might be no other movie I would rather see again in theaters this year. After my screening, I stumbled into the street, dazed, where the lights of Times Square shone down on thousands of other souls stumbling through the streets, looking at the lights, staring at each other, and floating into some beyond where I will never encounter them again. Then again, I never knew them to begin. For all the faults, Enter The Void, at least afterwards, made me think about my place and our places in the world. I’d never felt so lonely than among those thousands of strangers.

Yves Klein’s Le Saut dans le Vide (“Leap into the Void”) is a photograph of a performance by Klein in 1960 in which the artist leaped into space and nothingness. The photograph captures this instant where the body, floating in the air, is forever leaping into that void. When he made this leap, Klein said “to paint space, I must be in position. I must be in space.” In the photograph, Klein’s body becomes freely trapped in the beyond in both time and space. In Enter The Void, there are plenty of wonderful moments – enough to make it a must-see – where Noé’s camera, like Klein, becomes a timeless companion of the unexpected, beguiling void. Unfortunately, Noé (and Oscar) show us the full leap. As the cycle continues and continues and continues, ashes, ashes, it all falls down.

The Sound of Realities

2010-09-03T18:59:00.007-04:00

by James Hansen

Miguel Gomes’ Our Beloved Month of August is a lot of things at once: a blatantly reflexive formalist inquiry into the nature of filmmaking, a concert documentary featuring musicians from various locales in Portugal, a documentary about a filmmaker trying to make a film without funding or actors, and a cheerily dark melodrama about a young singer’s relationship with her uncle and cousin set to leave for France. Truth be told, it might also be none of those things.

Premiering in New York this week after two years in distribution limbo following its premiere at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Gomes’ film has the (constructed?) back story to match its methodical existence as a single work. The story goes Gomes had a large screenplay ready to shoot before actors and financing were completely pulled. Stymied but determined, Gomes went to the location anyways with his crew, a camera, and shot everything he could to complete his film with whatever and whoever he could find amid an August musical festival in rural Portugal. OBMoA gives the audience little reason to believe Gomes’s wild tale, although there’s also little reason not to. Regardless, the story functions as a kind of mythic fable built into the fabric of the film.

A key to thinking about this construction is the collision between the image and the soundtrack. OBMoA performs as a concert documentary, complete with titles identifying each different band, but the sound of music carries into each realm of reality into which the film seamlessly veers. If we see the sound being recorded and then “see” the sound where it isn’t, then how does the sound belong? How or why do we accept this? These questions are asked directly in the film’s coda – played after the end credits begin, naturally – but the question (and answer) comes across as hysterical (and rhetorical). It might be best if we take a cue from the lead actress who, after crying hysterically in one of the film’s serious scenes, bursts into laughter. There may be no rhyme or reason, but, if we stop and wonder why, then we are constructing the illusion ourselves and putting up a wall against the nature of the film. From Gomes’s fable forward, OBMoA shatters the illusion of levels of reality and demands the audience follows suit.

OBMoA winds the lines between truth, fiction, and fiction-reality into a ripcord before they dissipate into the film’s being. The question that would usually come up here is what is real, fake, or pre-conceived, but the question and those terms hardly seem appropriate. Rather, OBMoA uncovers that, as filmmakers enter into the process of creating films, and as the people we see on screen prepare themselves to perform for a camera, and as audiences finish the cycle by engaging with what we see on screen, the what is undeniably malleable and hysterically useless. (In this way, OBMoA functions as the antithesis of the torpid Inception whose realities are clearly defined even within dreams). Instead, OBMoA embraces the ambiguity and asks how we see and understand these levels of reality in life and interact with films. Before the opening credits roll, the terms are laid out by a film crew, the soundtrack, and a set of dominoes. OBMoA makes sure they linger throughout the film and far past the lights coming up. How do we react and interact knowing that our dominoes have already toppled?

Our Beloved Month of August is playing at Anthology Film Archives through Sep. 11. It can also be viewed online at MUBI.

B+

New York Film Festival 2010 Slate

2010-08-16T12:40:00.001-04:00

The 48th New York Film Festival main-slate:

Opening Night
THE SOCIAL NETWORK, David Fincher, 2010, USA, 120 min

Centerpiece
THE TEMPEST, Julie Taymor, 2010, USA, 110 min

Closing Night
HEREAFTER, Clint Eastwood, 2010, USA, 126 min

ANOTHER YEAR, Mike Leigh, 2010, UK, 129 min

AURORA, Cristi Puiu, 2010, Romania, 181 min

BLACK VENUS, (Venus noire), Abdellatif Kechiche, France, 166 min

CARLOS, Olivier Assayas, 2010, France, 319 min

CERTIFIED COPY (Copie conformé), Abbas Kiarostami, 2010, France/Italy, 106 min

FILM SOCIALISME, Jean-Luc Godard, 2010, Switzerland, 101 min

INSIDE JOB, Charles Ferguson, 2010, USA, 120 min

LE QUATTRO VOLTE, Michelangelo Frammartino, 2010, Italy, 88 min

LENNON NYC, Michael Epstein, 2010, USA, 115 min

MEEK'S CUTOFF, Kelly Reichardt, 2010, USA, 104 min

MY JOY (Schastye moe), Sergei Loznitsa, 2010, Ukraine/Germany, 127 min

MYSTERIES OF LISBON (Misterios de Lisboa), Raul Ruiz, Portugal/France, 272 min

OF GODS AND MEN (Des homes et des dieux), Xavier Beauvois, 2010,
France, 120 min

OKI'S MOVIE (Ok hui ui yeonghwa), Hong Sang-soo, 2010, South Korea, 80 min

OLD CATS (Gatos viejos), Sebastian Silva, 2010, Chile, 88 min

POETRY (Shi), Lee Chang-dong, 2010, South Korea, 139 min

POST MORTEM, Pablo Larrain, 2010, Chile/Mexico/Germany, 98 min

REVOLUCION, Mariana Chenillo, Fernando Embecke, Amat Escalante, Gael Garcia
Bernal, Rodrigo Garcia, Diego Luna, Gerardo Naranjo, Rodrigo Plá, Carlos Reygadas,
Patricia Riggen, 2010, Mexico, 110 min

THE ROBBER (Der Räuber), Benjamin Heisenberg, Austria/Germany, 90 min

ROBINSON IN RUINS, Patrick Keiller, 2010, UK, 101 min

SILENT SOULS (Ovsyanki), Alexei Fedorchenko, Russia, 75 min

THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (O estranho caso de Angélica), Manoel de Oliveira,
Portugal, 97 min

TUESDAY AFTER CHRISTMAS (Marti, dupa craciun), Radu Muntean,
Romania, 99 min

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL PAST LIVES (Lung Boonmee raluek chat),
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, UK/Thailand, 113 min

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE (Somos lo que hay), Jorge Michel Grau, Mexico, 90 min

The 17-day New York Film Festival highlights the best in world cinema, featuring top films from celebrated filmmakers as well as fresh new talent. The selection committee, chaired by Peña also includes: Melissa Anderson, contributor The Village Voice; Scott Foundas, Associate Program Director, The Film Society of Lincoln Center; Dennis Lim, Editor, Moving Image Source & Freelance Critic; and Todd McCarthy, Critic indieWire.

Love Is Blonde

2010-08-11T10:00:00.001-04:00

by James Hansen

With his stature becoming more and more mythic with each passing year (and each new film), 101-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira has become something of a godfather of contemporary cinema. Active in filmmaking since 1931, his career has persisted while cinema searched for (and found) its foothold throughout the world. Meanwhile, various other art forms have redefined and recontextualized themselves in light of the rise (and fall) of the moving image, modernism, post-modernism, et al. The few Oliveria films I’ve seen have all centered around a conflict between competing art forms, art and reality, representation and actuality. Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl does the same. Eccentricities’ complex peculiarities – from the title, to the cinematography, to the 58-minute running time, to the ambiguousness of its storytelling – help contain its expanses and expand its containment. Replete with contradictions and anachronisms, Eccentricities plays like a photo-painting projected onto a cinema screen – several things all at once and each element is instantly isolated and united, beautiful and repellent, true and false, past and present, now and forever.

It starts with the Blonde-haired Girl whose hair color is one of the only things Eccentricities makes clear about her. Eventually her name is dropped – Luisa – but from the interactions seen with the protagonist, Marcario, she exists predominantly as a figure of the imagination. Marcario gazes into her room from across the street in his accounting office. Her window serves as a canvas into another world, one with a beautiful blonde-girl who waves her enchanting Chinese fan and stares longingly (but for what?) across the street. She fans herself and smiles. She fans herself and frowns. No matter for Marcario – he is completely under her spell. We never know very much about her or their relationship, but Marcario quotes romantic poets when speaking about her so there is little reason to doubt his honest sentimentality. Marcario, blinded by his love, misses the several, all be them brief, clues as to the true nature of his blonde.

Soon, Marcario pleads with his uncle to allow him to be married. His uncle, with no explanation, rejects the request and fires him from his accounting work. With his economic future in shambles, marriage is out of the question. Determined nonetheless, Marcario leaves in search of other work in hopes of becoming sound enough to marry his would-be goddess. Though the moral fabric of the story is undoubtedly 19th century (the film is based on a short story by Eça de Queirós), Oliveira fills the frame with eccentricities of its own. Macario recalls the fated story of the blonde-haired girl on a high speed train, his office has a computer, he does a goofy dance when he discovers a friend of his knows the family of blonde. Even more oddly, perhaps, Marcario visits the estate of Eça de Queirós with Luisa. Eccentricities shows Eça de Queirós in alternating forms – sculpture, figurine, and modernist painting (not to mention the film itself as a further extension of Eça de Queirós’ work). This sense of historical presence exists ambiguously (no one in the film mentions the oddity of the situation or winks towards the existence of contemporary objects) but is undoubtedly a primary concern for Oliveira. Michael Sicinski wonderfully summarizes, “Oliveira is implicitly asking his audience to lend a 21st century ear to works in a classical mode, to admire their beauty and present-day resonance, despite but perhaps in some ways even because of their temporal alterity to our world.” And, of course, this works both inside and outside of the film. Oliveira’s role as a contemporary cinematic figure shadows the historical presence within Eccentricities, while the film creates characters as figures with inescapable pasts and futures.

In the opening sequence of the film, voice-over narration advises, “If you can’t tell it to a friend, tell it to a stranger.” The voice-over then shifts to a conversation between Marcario and a stranger on a train, which ultimately functions as extended voice-over narration in conversation form. Thus, the romantic Maracario’s relationship with the blonde is fated (as always), but what is more interesting about Eccentricities is how the characters, the camera, and the film text itself serves as mere figures or identifiable objects rather than being entrenched, definable characters. However, this isn’t to say the choice leaves the film and its characters empty. Quite on the contrary, it allows Eccentricities to double back on itself and extend the characters and the film’s ideas in multiple ways. The stilted, awkwardly staged conversation between Marcario and the stranger seems almost as if the actors are reading from cue cards beyond the frame. They rarely look at one another, instead gazing at a strange angle off screen. Perhaps the mark of Oliveira’s translation, Marcario and the stranger may as well be holding his novel and reading from it. (Later, a man does exactly this with a book of poetry). The scenes on the train seem like cameos for the source text, where the characters suddenly exist as mere actors reading the narration. The actors are playing parts in a new artistic dimension, which may be understood as a piece of its own, yet – like the sculpture, figurines, and paintings of Eça de Queirós, or the harpist who plays Debussy, or the poet who recites Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa) – they embody the livelihood and existence of these "dead" artists.

On a more narrative level, even in this opening scene, Marcario doesn’t refer to Luisa but rather “the blonde.” While this may contain different national signifiers, but she fits the Western bill and serves as a traditional figure of unfathomable beauty and mystery whose downfall, in the end, is vanity (and perhaps a dash of poverty). The blonde functions simultaneously functions as everything the sentimental romantic ever wants and the last thing he should ever have. Her inability to fulfill Marcario’s initial expectation of the mystical blonde-haired girl with the Chinese fan, precisely because of the flawed assumptions in defining her as such without any details, leaves her broken and rejected, possibly forever. Unlike the artists kept alive through the arts, she becomes a dead symbol by destroying her own "meaning." Her chief sin seems rather slight, but, for Marcario and the film, once her iconography is shattered she slumps over, as Keith Uhlich argues, and becomes an “animate still life” – stunningly real, almost alive, yet always already disintegrating.

B+

The Horrors of War

2010-08-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

by James Hansen

Samuel Maoz’s debut feature Lebanon - winner of the Golden Tiger at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival (and one of the few films I missed at NYFF 2009) - may offer little “new insight” in the war movie narrative (war is hell, everyone is unprepared, you’ll never get out the same, etc.), yet its intensely personal evocation of the unavoidable, manufactured chaos inside a clunky, constantly deteriorating war machine makes Lebanon a harrowing horror movie.

Set almost entirely within the confines of a tank named Rhino, Lebanon focuses on the first 24 hours of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The four soldiers who operate Rhino - Assi, Herzl, Shmulik, and Yigal - only see the outside through their targeted scopes. With no experience in combat, the four soldiers become increasingly wary of their situation. Shmulik, the gunner, refuses to shoot a bomb at an oncoming truck which attacks the platoon and ultimately kills one solider. Soon after, a chicken truck driven by a civilian approaches and Shmulik blows up the truck without a warning shot.

Although the POV scope becomes Lebanon’s chief gimmick – overused and oftentimes too directly staged – it makes clear that throughout the battle everyone and everything becomes a target. A sign in the tank reads, “Men are made of steel. The tank is only a piece of iron.” As the scope whirls around the landscapes throughout Lebanon, the sounds of the clanking, rotating lens are a constant reminder of the mechanical nature of the Rhino. The soldiers are reminded that they need to be unflinching steel machines, but, as the film progresses, the fallacy of this idea becomes more and more apparent.

While Lebanon has many interesting parallels with the terrific HBO miniseries Generation Kill, in its last third, Lebanon begins to feel much more like The Descent. The Rhino becomes an inescapable cave. After the Rhino is attacked and nearly destroyed, it begins oozing oil, dripping water, and slowly deteriorating as the soldier’s sanity and optimism does the same. Lebanon's formal rigor – the constant, intense close ups, the violent bouncing of the tank, the horrified glazed over eyes of the soldiers – makes the claustrophobic fear palpable. The only way to get out alive is to keep driving and continue fighting in the start of a war with no leaders and no clear objective. The soldiers rarely know where they are, much less how to get out.

Even with its brief 85 minutes running time, Lebanon formally echos the traumatic mission in such a way that unprepared audience members may flee from the theater. And Lebanon makes clear, for the soldiers (and thereby Maoz himself), there are never going to be explanations for the trauma. However, in a wonderful scene near the end of Lebanon, a seemingly simple act with a POW proves the one thing the soldiers can’t afford to lose is their humanity. This might be a typical anti-war message from a war movie, but Lebanon’s focus is experiential rather than sentimental. The sentiment arrives in bursts and always feels a little overdone, but the experience is frightening.

B

An Interview with Harmony Korine on "Trash Humpers"

2010-05-07T14:17:00.015-04:00

interview by James Hansen

After its fall premieres at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers is unearthed in New York City today at Cinema Village. I wrote about Trash Humpers in my NYFF dispatches where it was one of the highlights of the festival. Shot on lo-grade VHS in and around Nashville, where Korine is from, Trash Humpers jovially observes characters who walk around humping trash, tree branches, gates, and mailboxes. They laugh at kids who can't shoot a basketball, advise putting razor blades in apples, and smash light bulbs in empty parking lots. Trash Humpers is frightening, funny, and utterly fascinating. At the festival, I sat down with director Harmony Korine (who also portrays one of the Humpers) to talk about his approach to this curious object. We discuss his ideas, methods, and the beauty of exploding toilets.

James Hansen: When did you start working on Trash Humpers?

Harmony Korine: Yeah, it was pretty recently. I only started the movie four months ago [in May 2009]. It was shot and edited in right around a month. But I had been dreaming up this idea for close to a year. I always walk my dog through these back alleys by my house in Nashville, especially late at night. I would see all these trash bins that were all laid out with these dramatic overhead lamps and lights that would light up the sewers. The trash bins looked kind of human to me. They looked kind of like they had been mauled and molested and beaten. I don’t know, sometimes I just let my mind wander and I started to dream up these characters – these old people who just walk through these alley ways, peep into windows, hump trash, and do the most vile, disgusting deeds.

JH: And once you dreamed up the idea and came up with the images, what was your approach to actually putting it on video?

HK: I don’t know...I just started thinking it might be nice if this it could be not a movie in a traditional sense, but more like a found artifact or an unearthed object – something that was buried in a ditch or lost in some ladies attic. It was this home movie made by these kind of sadists. Once I figured that out and felt like I knew the movie would replicate a found VHS tape, it got very exciting.

JH: Was it difficult to find VHS cameras to record on these days?

HK: Yeah. It was difficult. But I also wanted to work with the lowest of the low, the worst 12 dollar VHS recorders. The hardest thing was just that the batteries were so terrible in those. We had to constantly be changing those.

JH: Was the use of VHS in any way a limitation? Or was it freeing in some ways? It sounds like it could have been a restraint, in some ways similar to the self-imposed Dogme limitations of Julien Donkey Boy, but I wonder if it really was a hindrance.

HK: No, it was really freeing. The only thing I needed to stay true to was it being a found VHS tape, so everything else didn’t matter. The aesthetics, the compositions, the lighting – none of that mattered. It was all just about documenting on this one machine and that very, very freeing. It became instantaneous.

JH: How was this approach of documenting, or creating an artifact, different from your approach to others things you’ve made in terms of making a film?

HK: I think there are a lot of similarities in the other movies, but I think this is maybe one or two steps further in that direction. I think it was different because I was an active participant in the film. It was as much a character piece as anything technical. It was really just about becoming a Trash Humper.

JH: Along with this idea of a character piece, I’m curious as to how the location informs the characters. How did The South inform the characters and the movie itself? How much were you thinking about the distinct South-ness while you were making Trash Humpers?

HK: Yeah, that’s where I grew up, and, for the characters, as a kid, those types of voices and the things being said, the mannerisms were very familiar to me. A lot of it was like trying to close your eyes and tap into that place with the voices. Some of them are very horrible and some are very exciting. And the south, and I guess most of America in general, was to me, at least, as a kid... it seemed a lot more wild than it does now. Now, everything is starting to seem the same. In the south, it seemed more regional, more isolated, and more wild. There was something more susceptible to horror.

JH: And the idea of Southern horror is definitely something that has persisted throughout horror films. It seems pretty applicable to Trash Humpers.

HK: Yeah, you could almost make the argument that it’s a horror film just because it feels horrible. You know what I mean? I wanted to make a movie where the violence erupted more in the ambiance than anything else. You see most of the violence in this movie post-action. It’s more about the mood, the feel, the ambiance. That seems a lot freakier to me. And so, I guess you could call it a horror film because some of it feels horrible. I always try and make something that lingers and can’t be talked away. It has more to do with the emotion or the tone.

JH: Yeah, and it’s interesting that, despite this horror basis, Trash Humpers just as often verges into comedy. Perhaps that relates to the performances – I mean, you are humping trash, which, at least to me, is funny – so I wonder about the relationship this “horror film” has to comedy and performance.

HK: Yeah, I’m not sure. You could make that argument, maybe, that the first half is a comedy and then it turns into something else. I don’t really know. I don’t question it too much. A lot of times I’m not exactly sure about why or where it comes from. But it just feels like there’s a force pulling me in some direction.

JH: How did you get everyone else on board to perform? I know your wife is one of the Humpers.

HK: Yeah, my wife Rachel. She’s potentially a really terrific actress. I just asked her if she would be into making this movie, but she would have to hump a lot of trash. And she was up for it. The other guys are friends of mine and characters from around where I live.

JH: I’m curious about the real characters you always seem to find in your movies. I think that’s especially interesting with Trash Humpers here in terms of creating an artifact and recording real, strange people.

HK: Well, the Humpers kind of do their thing and then the movie is series of semi-vaudeville moments of where they go. All the want is a kind of entertainment, so they just knock on doors and find performers and people who tell jokes with no punch lines or play one-stringed guitars or do neck exercises and watch nine televisions. I think a lot of the people, the real people, you see are kind of their friends.

JH: And are they people you know? Or had you just heard about them?

HK: I know them all. That was the way the movie was made. We’d wake up under a bridge or something and go to their house and knock on their door. That’s pretty much how all of it happened.

JH: There’s a sense throughout the movie, and maybe celebration is the wrong word, but there’s a sort of romantic view of anarchy. I wonder if that’s a view you have or if it’s just something interesting that you wanted to explore.

HK: It’s funny because anarchy always reminds of me of high school and junior high. I had this very good friend – we used to call him ‘The Gregler’ – and he looked a lot like Count Chocula. He was a Jewish anarchist. He had read The Anarchist’s Cookbook. We were only 14 or 15, but he would do these amazing things. He would blow up toilets, but he would do it with these chemicals and stuff. He was obsessed with blowing up toilets and I always admired that. He never hurt people, but he was just really focused on destroying this one type of object over and over again. I mean, he must have destroyed millions of dollars of toilets. Coincidentally, he’s now a State Senator! Anyways, I would say I always thought there was something just as exciting in the act of building and creating than there was in destroying and burning. Vandalism could be considered a really high form of spiritual existence.

JH: Toward the end of Trash Humpers, you get a real sense of that when you’re driving around giving the monologue about the types of people. Clearly, it’s a view the Humpers believe in, but I’m curious as to whether it’s something in today’s culture that you think is worth aspiring to.

HK: Sure. I mean, it’s difficult for me to say. I don’t really know how I feel about that. But I think there’s some truth to what he says in that speech though.

Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers (2009)

James Rosenquist's Gift Wrapped Doll No. 13 (1992)
Distant Cousins?

JH: At one point, a friend of the Humpers [Chris Gantry] reads a poem off a sheet of paper. Was any more of this scripted beforehand?

HK: No. There were ideas and things that I felt we needed to achieve maybe. But we were so focused on this idea of it being a found object. In some ways, it was like once everyone became the character and once we had the camera and once we were walking through these alleyways, there was no real right or wrong. It just became what it was. Like a home movie. It means everything and nothing. It just is what it is. It’s about documenting something and making sense of it or not making sense of it.

JH: I wonder about some of the repetitive chants and songs in the movie too, like the “Three Little Devils” song. I didn’t recognize that song specifically, but a lot of it felt like it was part of a creepy children’s fairy tale.

HK: There are some of those audio threads in the movie and that’s one of them. There’s also that breathing, the maniacal laughter, and then the “Three Little Devils” song. It’s actually a very old folk song. The song that’s sung in the movie is just a bastardized version of it.

JH: After all the chaos in the movie, I think the ending provides an interesting counterpoint to much of what we see when the Humpers get an actual baby. We see several fake babies or dolls in early parts of the movie – the kid who beats the doll with the hammer, for example – but, in the end, we feel this pretty genuine moment with the real baby and the Humpers. It gives them a little bit of a dual role, similar to your other movies where we find a relationship between the real world and something else (Julien’s schizophrenia, the stage personas in Mister Lonely). Can you talk a little about that final sequence.

HK: It was a hard sequence to film. You had to be very sensitive, obviously. I felt like it needed to be heartfelt and honest, but at the same time stay true to the intent of the Trash Humpers. I guess it’s kind of open ended what happens with the baby. But there’s something slightly loving about it. But also something a little sinister.

JH: And a final question: how can we all be Trash Humpers for Halloween? Any plans for commerce of the masks or anything?

HK: (laughs) That’s not a bad idea. I’ve got to make some money somehow!

Migrating Forms 2010 Trailer

2010-04-26T16:57:00.002-04:00

MIGRATING FORMS 2010 TRAILER from Migrating Forms on Vimeo.

Migrating Forms will take place May 14-23 at Anthology Film Archives. Trailer by Leslie Thornton. For complete details, see http://migratingforms.org/

Lessons Learned

2010-03-22T22:51:00.005-04:00

by Brandon Colvin

At the conclusion of Green Zone, the film’s whistle-blowing soldier-hero-everyman protagonist, Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon), sends a mass e-mail to writers for every major American news publication containing classified documents which prove the intentional duplicity of governmental officials in fabricating the presence of WMD in Iraq. Fueled by frustration and the humiliation of being duped, his laconic message suggests that its recipients see the controversial attached files and features a simple command: “Let’s get the story right this time.” This imperative is the driving force behind director Paul Greengrass and Damon’s Bourne-style revisionist Iraq actioner.

Scripted by Brian Helgeland (as well as the uncredited Greengrass) and inspired by journalist Rajiv Chandresakeran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006), Green Zone is about applying the lessons learned from our most recent military debacle – namely, that “official reports” are not inherently reputable, that those in power manipulate the truth to their own ends, and that it is our responsibility as citizens to take our country’s wellbeing into our own hands. Or, as one of the film’s repeated maxims simply and cumulatively commands, “Don’t be naïve.” Set in 2003 Baghdad, just after the initial invasion, the film serves as an ex-post-facto reimaging of how the war could have been different if this heuristic had been followed, if complex truth had been privileged over convenience and opportunism.

Green Zone begins, appropriately, with the breakdown of its hero’s naïvete, and, implicitly, the unenlightened viewer’s. During the film’s opening sequence, Officer Miller reaches the cusp of his already overstretched faith in his superiors, storming a location reported to be housing WMD, but which ends up being a long-abandoned toilet factory. It’s the third consecutive false alarm for Miller’s team. Miller gets the feeling he’s on a wild goose chase. Not only a wild goose chase, but one with casualties – unnecessary casualties. His voiced suspicions of faulty intelligence are repeatedly refuted by those around and above him, save for a long-serving Middle East expert with similar fears and a penchant for raising a ruckus: grizzled CIA operative Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson). Urged by Brown, Miller begins deviating from his orders, pursuing alternative intelligence, including that of a helpful Iraqi, dubbed “Freddy” (Khalid Abdallah). He hits the jackpot, bringing in a slew of important targets and nearly taking down Saddam’s top official, General Al Rawi (Yigal Naor).

Success seems imminent. However, Pentagon official and all-around neo-con sleazeball Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) intervenes, sending in a squad of roughneck lunkheads to do his dirty work by intercepting Miller’s prisoner and harassing his unit. Poundstone subsequently serves as an increasingly nefarious stumbling block to Miller and Brown’s muckraking endeavors, attempting to protect a mysterious source of WMD information codenamed “Magellan” – the originator of the faulty intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion. In protecting their source, Poundstone and his Pentagon cronies utilize any means necessary, ranging from Abu Ghraib-style torture to outright assassination – not exactly a pretty picture of the highest of the higher-ups.

Though it is certainly not a flattering depiction of its “Mission Accomplished” celebrants, Green Zone is not the piece of liberal propaganda many have accused it of being. There is no humanistic tear-jerking or multi-cultural relativism. There is only pragmatic political reality, which demands the watchful interest that characterizes responsible citizenship. Miller does not investigate intelligence claims to gain an upper-hand for left-leaners. He does it to assert his legitimate right to be informed of the real reasons he is risking his life, to exercise his ability to ask.

Likewise, General Al Rawi is no sanctified victim of imperialism. Though he might be a crucial asset to securing peace – a leader to be dealt with diplomatically – he proves to be brutal when backed into a corner, killing numerous Americans with his gang of soldiers. The Iraqi militants in the film are undoubtedly dangerous and potentially ruthless, not over-sympathized or victimized. Green Zone is not interested in sugarcoating the circumstances. Instead, it views them with hindsight and healthy skepticism, concerned with solving a problem rather than following a political platform, warning the viewer against the comfortable complacency epitomized by the politically disconnected inhabitants of the titular “Green Zone” – the secure International Zone set up in Baghdad during the invasion. Such individuals, who lounge by pools sipping beers as Miller looks death in the face, lack any sense of real involvement. They are merely passive spectators, amused and safe, allowing misguided bullies like Poundstone to run the show unchecked.

Greengrass’ signature snatch-and-grab style of frenetic, yet coherent, composition and editing – honed in United 93 (2006) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) – eliminates such passivity in the film’s viewer at the most basic formal level. Jarring and somewhat disorienting, Greengrass and veteran cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s jittery technique is given rhythmic elegance by Christopher Rouse’s relentlessly full-throttle cutting – requiring the viewer to actively process and decipher a series of suddenly shifting images. Particularly impressive is a nine-minute set-piece that details the spontaneous raid of a covert meeting of Baathist officials, culminating with the crucial acquisition of a notebook that proves central to Miller’s investigation. The lengthy, propulsive sequence is lean and vigorous, each shot riddled with anxious uncertainty and the seeds of tense mistrust, expressed in the camera’s nervous framings and movements. Paranoia lingers throughout, up until the final scene, in which Miller fears Freddy has made off with the precious book, only to be assuaged when Freddy willingly returns the tome, indignant at Miller’s suspicion. Jagged and quaking, Green Zone is not a film that “washes” over the viewer; rather, it is a film that enlivens the eyes, while also seeking to awaken political awareness and curiosity.

Perhaps the most subtle, and therefore most effective, of the politically apt observations presented in Green Zone revolve around Freddy, Miller’s unofficial informant and translator. A veteran of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) who lost a leg in battle, Freddy perceives the American presence as his country’s best hope. Not only is Freddy a knowledgeable, dependent ally for Miller, he is also Miller’s Iraqi mirror image, a fact that lends Green Zone much of its concluding wallop. Throughout the film, Miller experiences self-actualization, refusing to serve as a disenfranchised tool in the political machinery of others. He takes initiative. Freddy must undergo this exact process in relation to Miller, who seems to view Freddy as a handy sidekick to be ordered around, no matter how morally dubious or incriminating a situation might be. Freddy’s final act, a brave burst of insubordination, challenges Miller’s authority and represents Freddy’s own political actualization, vocalized in his direct declaration, “It is not for you to decide what happens here.” Freddy wants to protect his country much more than the Americans, and, when he feels it is his duty to act, he does, in many ways following Miller’s lead while also educating the (justifiably) self-righteous soldier about his own capacity for manipulation.

None of Green Zone’s characters is perfect. But a handful – Miller, Freddy, Martin Brown – are certainly heroic, as is unwitting-political-puppet-turned-investigate-assistant Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), a Wall Street Journal reporter who helps Miller “get the story right.” These characters most likely existed in some form in 2003 Iraq, at least their characteristics must have, but, through and through, they are today and tomorrow’s political champions, their narrative infused with the knowledge gained from the massive, continuing failure of the Iraq War. Green Zone’s whistle-blowing conclusion amounts to a bit of wish fulfillment on par with that of Inglourious Basterds (as J. Hoberman pointed out), but with major differences: this war is still happening and similar conflicts loom. Individuals like Miller and Freddy will have the opportunity to correct the errors of the past, to latch onto the truth, to act like patriots.

B+

A Bullseye from the Archers

2010-03-10T09:40:00.005-05:00

by Brandon Colvin

Of all the greatest “color” films – those cinematographically-immaculate demonstrations of chromatic control – one stands above the rest in its mastery of expressive hues. Flawlessly photographed and delicately designed, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1946) is a startling demonstration of colorfully cohesive narration and tone, from its costuming to its sets to its breathtaking matte effects. Utilizing a bold palette that does not shy away from geographical grandeur or ethereal atmospherics, The Archers’ film – their best, along with The Red Shoes (1948) – is undeniably gorgeous from first frame to last. Aided by the unparalleled craftsmanship of their frequent Pinewood Studios collaborators – legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff and influential production designer Alfred Junge (both of whom justly won Oscars for their work on Black Narcissus) – Powell and Pressburger’s film boasts stunning visuals, but is not merely a work of superficial spectacle; the film’s psychologically dense narrative reflects Hitchcockian levels of tension and complexity, perhaps even influencing the subsequent work of the Master of Suspense himself, while adhering to a melodramatic mode reminiscent of Douglas Sirk at his most feverishly expressionistic.

Closely adapted by Powell and Pressburger from Rumer Godden’s best-selling 1939 novel of the same name, Black Narcissus takes place in Godden’s signature setting: British-occupied India, specifically, the Himalayan region near Darjeeling, where a group of Anglican nuns naively seeks to endow the locals with a Westernized school and hospital. Led by the young Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr, at her best), a handful of nuns, including the maniacally unstable Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron), initiates the project, taking the Young General (Sabu), a regional aristocrat, under their collective wing. Cultural conflicts quickly create strife between the nuns and the locals, however, whose religious ideal is embodied by the stoic mysticism of a silent holy man (the Young General’s uncle) rather than the intrusive ethnocentrism of the Anglicans.

Further complicating matters, Sister Clodagh becomes oddly attracted to the generally repulsive Mr. Dean (David Farrar), an alcoholic atheist groundskeeper with lascivious intent, causing her to confront her repressed romantic inclinations, particularly in the form of flashbacks (which feature Kerr at her most ravishing) to the failed courtship that forced her into the nunnery. Not only does this sensual temptation lurk like a specter in the shadowy, gothic corridors of their Himalayan convent, it seems to demonically possess the disturbed Sister Ruth, plunging her into the throes of psychotically violent jealousy while seeking to claim Mr. Dean for herself. Black Narcissus becomes not only a critical commentary on imperialist arrogance, but also a dreamlike, expressionistic narrative of the “return of the repressed” and the overpowering sexual subconscious – an untamable desire, impervious even to the rigorous discipline of divine duty. It is no surprise, then, that Powell declared Black Narcissus the most erotic film The Archers ever made.

The film’s scintillating sensuality is certainly not limited to its thematic content. Black Narcissus’ approach to color and design is rooted in a resolutely maximalist style, externalizing and celebrating the unbridled sensory extravagance buried within its outwardly ascetic characters. The painterly detail and lush imagery displayed in Cardiff and Junge’s work, approached only by that of Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) or Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965) or Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), is astonishing and predates the comparable efforts of those 60s masterpieces by two decades – eons in terms of film technology and technique. Inspired by the vibrant paintings of Vermeer, Cardiff and Junge’s palette is full of stark whites and grays, deep blues and greens, purple and orange-tinted lighting, and kaleidoscopically-brilliant traditional Indian garments and interiors. Working in Technicolor, but without ‘Scope, Cardiff’s cinematography beautifully captures Junge’s glass mattes and blown-up, pastel-chalked landscape paintings to depict an uncanny studio-built sense of Himalayan majesty.

The artificiality of Black Narcissus’ world accentuates the surreal, psychosexual interiority explored throughout the narrative, appropriating landscape and architecture by transforming them into symbolist playgrounds. The matte mountains are crafted to evoke the sublime spiritual abyss which Sisters Clodagh and Ruth teeter over, both figuratively and, later, literally, in a climactic scene bearing a remarkable resemblance to the conclusion of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). An eerily-lit artificial wood, glazed in ghastly orange, attains metaphorical significance when the manic Sister Ruth, her face rouged and eyes wild, stumbles through it en route to Mr. Dean’s abode, wandering through the dark forest of her own mind. Powell and Pressburger are at their most expressionistic in Black Narcissus, employing emotionally-charged artifice without the diegetic mediation of the stage, which distances the “real” from the artificial in The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann (1951). In Black Narcissus, the two are inseparably fused – reality and artificiality interlocked in a crisp, vibrant cinematic environment, dripping with color and oozing the unreal in a way analogous to Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954) and All That Heaven Allows (1955).

It is with the latter film’s concluding frames that the final shot of Black Narcissus shares a certain kinship. In Sirk’s film, the closing image is of a lone deer, standing on a studio-crafted patch of forest beyond a blue-tinted, frosted window as huge imitation snowflakes float down to the falsely snowy ground. The image is a final self-reflexive suggestion of All That Heaven Allows’ constructed nature, its recognition of its own falseness, a fact underscored by the isolated actuality of the deer, surrounded by fakery and obvious unreality. In the last shot of Black Narcissus, this scheme is inverted, but a similar effect is achieved. As Sister Clodagh and the defeated nuns somberly flee their Himalayan environs astride miniature horses, studio rain begins to trickle, dropping on leaves in one of the only non-studio locations in the film before building to a fake downpour, blurring and hazing the nuns’ retreat through the real surroundings. The real and the artificial are merged in the film’s final moments, the sheets of false rain representing the subsuming of the real under the power of the film’s design and artifice, its expressionistic bombast flourishing, being absorbed into every celluloid particle like the wash of rain. Indeed, it is impossible for the viewer of Powell, Pressburger, Cardiff, and Junge’s masterwork to avoid succumbing to the same incredible spectacle of color and craft, a visual smorgasbord of Technicolor, mattes, and shadows as striking today as it must have been over 60 years ago.

Burning Yourself Down

2010-03-01T08:00:00.003-05:00

by James Hansen

Given the recent events in Texas, Breck Eisner’s The Crazies initially seems full of restrained timeliness. Something is wrong in Ogden Marsh. The small-town has been filled with something causing several residents to act strangely. A man saunters onto a local baseball field during a game with a loaded shotgun. Another locks his wife and child in a closet before lighting his house on fire. Local law enforcement – notably the sheriff, David, and his deputy, Russell – scrambles for answers as the town begins to implode home by home. Ah yes, small town America is as crazy as ever. And what could be the cause? This would-be timeliness vanishes pretty quickly with a sloppy narrative and even messier director. Unfortunately, The Crazies follows the fate of the town and burns itself down entirely too quickly.

This premise, slightly reworked from George Romero’s 1973 film of the same name, fits the bill for standard horror fare, yet Eisner and his production team instill in the opening sequences a taught atmosphere creepily mimicking the quickly dissolving population. The first 20 minutes are a wonderful balance of hard and soft light, noise and stirring silence, and craft a dangerous aura that one can only hope is sustained throughout. But just as the narrative’s zombie-fied residents and baffled authority set up a strong base for the “small-town on the brink of nothingness” dilemma, Eisner and screenwriters Scott Kosar and Ray Wright pull the rug out from under their own first-act momentum by abandoning Ogden Marsh and heading for larger power struggles between the individual and the government, as well as internal debate, that only feels confused and half-hearted. After about an hour, it becomes impossible not to ask, “Where in the hell did the movie go?”

The Crazies shifts gears moving away from the town and into a government-run facility before our sheriff and deputy break out, wander around, go back to the government-run facility, and then walk around some more. Losing interest in the town, The Crazies tacks on story after story of David, Russell, and Co. trying to run away from...something...and defeat the...zombies?... government?... a disease?...their self worth? Trouble of it is, there is never a sense of what the characters are trying to do as they cycle around looking for “answers” amidst a narrative that never posed any questions. Instead, the characters just wander, as does the film, without the faintest purpose ultimately recalling shoddy Romero fare that has been placed in a broken blender and liquified with half-assed versions of The Road and Gerry.

Perhaps too indebted to Romero or not bold enough to move away from Romero’s obsession with trapping characters in buildings and having them escape with large vehicles (hard to know how much influence Romero had with an executive producer), The Crazies screenplay traps itself in a narratological no-man’s land. Of course, Romero, at his best, knows how to work through what he has created. The same cannot be said for Eisner and his team. After Ogden Marsh becomes totally incidental, maybe unintentionally, The Crazies pulls out a small bag of tricks to keep it moving (warning: secondary characters introduced an hour into a horror movie have no chance for survival) but it just becomes canned, flat, and crazzzy boring. After it gets lost, there is no finding its way back. In destroying its own ability to reflect on Ogden Marsh in a movie distinctly about small-town mania and destruction (you can really tell how misunderstood the material is with the inclusion of an abysmal coda) The Crazies locks itself in a closet and lights its house on fire. But if we know the house is empty, then why bother watching?

C

Wishing and Dreaming

2010-02-23T10:00:00.003-05:00

by Samuel B. Prime

“What I used to able to pass off as a bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.”

In our formative years, we define ourselves with temporary labels called our major and minor fields of study. We give ourselves over to the insular community common to college life; we fit in and find our place, but before we know it, it’s over. Each of us is thrust out into the white, rushing waters of adult responsibility, forced to fit a new mold – of growing, of aging, of moving on in stages all the while trying to keep our heads above the water. Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming (1995) is the story of a group of inseparable friends (Grover, Max, Otis, and Skippy) who would rather drown in the throes of their post-graduation stasis and indecision than move on to real life. In the endlessly quotable, equally hilarious and tragic hour-and-a-half that follows, Baumbach illustrates a post-graduate worst-case-scenario filled with failed plans, delayed impulsiveness, and a brand of nostalgia which for the viewer becomes the film’s most endearing, relatable quality.

Kicking and Screaming begins on the evening of college graduation, the type of evening where Murphy’s Law rules the night, lurking around every corner and at every bend – especially for the film’s protagonist, Grover (Josh Hamilton), it is an evening of unpleasant surprises. Not five minutes into the film, Grover finds his girlfriend Jane (Olivia d’Abo), whom he met in his senior year, has not only quit drinking and smoking (the latter a habit he picked up from her), but that their mutual plans to move to New York to make their break as budding fiction writers have been dashed by her sudden change of heart to accept a writing fellowship in Prague, in the Czech Republic.

All that can go wrong will go wrong. And this first major inciting incident with Jane sets the dour tone of the narrative’s progression, a downward spiral in concentric circles of malaise, interspersed with the absent-minded wishing and dreaming of people with too much time on their hands and frankly too little to do with it. But it’s not entirely a down note of a film, despite the unnerving sense that its characters are going nowhere and taking forever to get there. Despite their lack of any connection to the real world, the days lived from moment to moment are remarkable on account of the mass of misdirected youthful energy put towards sleeping with Freshmen and devoutly watching detergent commercials to see if they get the stain out.

Each character deals differently with their inert lifestyle – Grover repeatedly ignores answering machine messages from Jane, while she desperately tries to correct her mistake by reconnecting across oceans; Max (Chris Eigeman) does crossword puzzles relentlessly and dates younger women; Otis (Carlos Jacott) chickens out on his grad school plans, deferring so he can move back in with his mom and work at the local video store; and Skippy (Jason Wiles) wades in the regrets of four years wasted in college and so re-enrolls after graduation in another failed attempt to make up for lost time.

Each character comes replete with his own set of quirks, further amplified by Baumbach’s memorable dialogue. Kicking and Screaming is, by all accounts, the most quotable film of the 20th Century. Baumbach succeeds in capturing the witticisms of everyday collegiate life in a concrete form, the phrases overheard and the quips made by the wayside, all of which form the narrative stasis of the film. While most are funny in ways that resonate with the viewer, their only purpose seems to be for the creation of an instant nostalgia both for the characters and for the audience. In the film’s most self-conscious moment, over beers with his buddies at the local hangout, The Penguin, Max admits, “I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now. I can't go to the bar because I've already looked back on it in my memory... and I didn't have a good time.”

It is this characteristic memory and nostalgia that renders Baumbach’s semi-cautionary tale of post-graduation planning gone awry so inexplicably endearing. We, like Max, begin to reminisce moments that have not even happened, we attempt to preserve Baumbach’s narrative in our minds by recalling its many quotes precisely because the portrait of these directionless young men is so open, so uncompromisingly revealed. But memory and nostalgia, while they serve an important emotional purpose, serve in this story to work against the present by keeping its characters stuck in the past.

Grover’s story being the primary, we see the world most often through his eyes. we experience the past and present through the framing device of Jane’s calls from Prague, at first ignored by Grover, and only acknowledged once it becomes too late. A message she leaves for him is revealed in incomplete stages, and only near the film’s end is it clear that the heart of her message is that she misses him.

Grover spends his time remembering Jane in flashbacks, and meanwhile his other friends are busy concerning themselves with the future instead of the past. Max applies for a job in his former school’s Philosophy department, Otis leaves for graduate school and Skippy gets so fed up with the stasis of the environment, he has a nervous breakdown and disappears. Grover had his chance to seize the moment, to speak up and admit how much he likewise misses Jane – but for Grover that moment has passed. Jane doesn’t call any longer, and he is left alone, wishing and dreaming for recently bygone days.

The film’s final moments, contrarily, are its most beautiful and heart wrenching. Appropriately, it comes both in the form of a memory and of a wish, wherein Grover lets his thoughts take him back to a memory of Jane, a construction of what is an impossible future for the both of them, but for Grover just as much a wish in the present as the past.

Grover: Ok, the way I see it, if we were an old couple, dated for years, graduated, away from all these scholastic complications, and I reached over and kissed you, you wouldn't say a word, you'd be delighted, probably, but if I was to do that now it'd be quite forward, and if I did it the first time we ever met you probably would hit me.
Jane: What do you mean?
Grover: I just wish we were an old couple so I could do that.

Kicking and Screaming is a testament to a timeless generation, to any who face the oncoming challenge of entering the “real world” following college graduation. It is the harrowed poetic illustration of the tendency of youth to resist authority and the becoming of something they cannot satisfactorily be proud of. Likewise, it is the making of important choices and the realization of the consequences that follow, whether positive or negative. In one’s formative years, there are the trivial and there are those people and things that define who you are and who you want to be in the future. Baumbach warns us not to let these people pass us by – it’s a long life, but the opportunities that it affords us are often as temporary, if not more so, as a four-year safety net called college.

Blinded by the Light

2010-02-22T11:48:00.005-05:00

by James Hansen

Selected as the Opening Night Film for MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight 2010 (running now through March 3), David Christensen’s The Mirror focuses on an interesting story, presents it pleasantly, yet misses a larger opportunity to really illuminate various aspects of a strange town that it puts on display. In the mountains of Northwest Italy, Christensen finds a small village called Viganella, which from November to February, due to the location of the surrounding peaks, gets no direct sunlight in town. The eccentric mayor, along with a local architect, decides to build a giant mirror and install it in a specific place on the mountains so it reflects sunlight into the village square.

The story of the mirror is cute enough, but The Mirror finds its life in the town’s residents. The mayor, Pierfranco Midali, is fascinating to watch as he plans and promotes the arrival of mirror. Basking in this small bit of glory which his town has never seen before (media come from all over – even Al Jazeera, assuring him that they aren’t terrorists), Pierfranco gives The Mirror an energetic presence. A local priest compares the mirror to God’s gift of light. Other locals don’t see what the big deal is, but are happy enough to help. Christensen’s camera captures the beauty of Viganella’s landscape and goes from home to home finding an equally magnificent group of people.

Unfortunately, when The Mirror is over, it seems as if the townspeople ultimately get a short shrift. Nearly all the interviews focus on the mirror and what they think it means for the town. Though this central concept is interesting enough, The Mirror grows tiresome after 85 minutes of local musicians and mirror-talk. (Also not helping at all is an embarrassing, tacked-on reflexive conclusion.) As most of the town’s residents see the mirror as a ploy or a social experiment, The Mirror bites into the visitor ideology that it simultaneously tries to break from. Seen as a small episode in a larger project, Viganella’s mirror could be a quirky trait from this unexplored part of the world. The Mirror, however, never wanders far enough from its basic premise to fully explore other elements of Viganella. In missing this opportunity, it feels like a long news piece on a weird little town. At times, you can feel The Mirror trying to break from this mode of address, but it always comes back to the mirror rather than to Viganella.

The Mirror was apparently shot over the course of a year, so it’s even more strange that there wouldn’t be footage investigating larger elements of the town, the intimate cross-cultural founders, or the actual lives of the people. With a great opportunity like this, Christensen’s simplicity backfires. It’s a fun vacation/adventure story, sure, but why not look a little deeper next time?

C+

Cusp of Hilarity

2010-02-07T11:40:00.006-05:00

by Brandon Colvin

Saturday Night Live, that bastion of incisive film criticism, featured a sketch this week in which Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness – a condensed remake of the former Bond director’s own 1985 BBC miniseries – was described as a combination of elements from other horrible Mel Gibson vehicles: Ransom (1996), Conspiracy Theory (1997), and Payback (1999). What’s shocking is how humorously accurate the observation is. Mel loses child. Mel gets obsessed with harebrained political intrigue. Mel goes on a violent rampage. That’s the film. As SNL noted, it’s basically a compilation of scenes from other half-assed Gibson thrillers sloppily pasted together with a nice glob of whiz-bang. The film, which verges on farce, amounts to a jumble of worn-out plot devices, tritely philosophical one-liners, and ridiculous anti-corporate paranoia manifested in a government-sponsored nuclear research company that surreptitiously makes bombs for – gasp! – Middle Eastern terrorists. Seriously? Gibson’s weathered, incessantly snarling mug suggests so. Like SNL, I beg to differ.

As mourning/frantic/self-loathing homicide detective Thomas Craven, Gibson’s strained, pseudo-Bostonian bark amounts to little more than a hyperbolic hamfest of grunts, growls, and grumblings, suggesting that the actor may have a future in some sort of post-post-modern comedy shtick (I’m looking at you, Lorne Michaels). His performance presents an unintentional parody of the revenge-driven macho-maniacal hardass, one that repeatedly pushes the film to the point of hysterics, even when tempered by the typically icy demeanor of Danny Huston as the villainous Jack Bennett, proprietor of nukes and wily murderer of whistle-blowing activists – including Craven’s daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic). Tossed into the mix, Ray Winstone, whose talent is sadly squandered, does an adequate job of portraying Captain Jedburgh, an enigmatic British agent with unstable loyalties and a terminal illness who sips Scotch and gets introspective while problematizing Craven’s quest, conveniently popping up and uttering cryptic clues regarding Emma’s death like a hard-boiled whack-a-mole.

The convoluted plot unfolds predictably, replete with all sorts of stammering minor characters informing Craven that he’s only seen the tip of the iceberg, that the whole thing goes deeper than he can imagine, that he’s messing with the wrong folks. Craven does not heed their warnings. He continues bursting through doors, tampering with evidence, and getting involved in numerous car accidents depicted with an overabundance of tacky smash cuts. What happened to the Martin Campbell of Casino Royale (2006)? How did he go from directing one of the most crisply and vigorously structured thrillers of the past decade to creating one of the laziest, most hackneyed examples of the action aesthetic in years? Beats me. I’ll chalk it up to Gibson’s soul-sucking aura of boring conventionality haunting the film, just as the maudlin memories of his character’s dead daughter plague the shoddy narrative.

Such pedestrian paranoid-thriller clichés would be somewhat forgivable if not for Edge of Darkness’ complete fumbling of every possible instance of emotional intensity, including the aforementioned moments of sentimental drivel in which Craven recalls/imagines/hallucinates Emma. In addition to a few snippets of mysteriously non-diegetic home videos depicting a pint-sized Emma frolicking on a beach, the film features her disembodied voice muttering encouraging words to the despondent Craven – even having full conversations with him in which he all-too-obviously verbalizes his internal struggles – as well as younger versions of her inconsistently inserted into Craven’s surroundings, only to be revealed as his fleeting subjective projections in annoyingly routine reverse-shots. It’s hard to conceive of a film trying any harder to jerk a tear yet failing so miserably. Craven’s memories come off as awkward grasps at resonance that fall into eye-rolling banality, denying any investment in the character’s pain, a problem made infinitely worse by Gibson’s inability to appear sincere in between launching spittle and fists at sneering opponents.

But Edge of Darkness is not all bad; it has one great shot and one interesting character. The shot is the first of the film – a wide shot of a picturesque lake at night, moonlit and placid, doused in syrupy shadows. After a few atmospheric seconds of cricket chirps and gently sloshing water, a shape slowly emerges from the water, lumpy and amorphous. Suddenly, two more similar shapes float to the surface. A few glimpses of protruding hands and heads suggest the shapes are formerly submerged corpses, announcing themselves to the dim scenery. The film’s title appears in the center of the frame. Then the rest of the film starts and the provocative noir opening, full of understatement and patience, sinks into cornball slapdashery.

The subtle, evocative movie suggested by Edge of Darkness’ first frames would undoubtedly sideline Craven in favor of Winstone’s Capt. Jedburgh, the only character with psychological depth, a moral trajectory, or any memorable qualities. Jedburgh is conflicted, ambiguous, dangerous, and dying – all of which is glossed over, making him merely a useful cog in the film’s dues-ex-machinery. That such a promising character is relegated to serving Mel Gibson scenery to gnaw on is perhaps the worst of the film’s many failures. However, this is The Mel Gibson Show, as every bit of the film’s marketing suggests. Unfortunately, as a chunk of awkward chuckles and did-that-just-happen buffoonery Edge of Darkness is far inferior to the more cinematically-astute SNL; forget about a live studio audience, there’s not even a laugh track.

F

Hidden Horrors and Assured Ambiguity

2010-01-18T12:09:00.005-05:00

by Brandon Colvin

Michael Haneke’s cinema is one of elision and obfuscation. From The Seventh Continent (1989) to Caché (2005), the Austrian auteur’s oeuvre hinges, formally and narratively, upon withheld information: off-screen occurrences, inscrutable interiorities, fragmented framings, cryptic (in)conclusions. Haneke has frequently remarked that his style – owing much to work of Bresson and Tarkovsky – is intended to activate the viewer, to burden her with interpretive responsibility, thereby inciting creative participation. Crucial gaps are left unfilled. Cracks are allowed to widen, opening up the narrative. Cinematic space and time are made malleable in their uncertainty – a result of ambiguous implication and deliberate deception. Haneke’s newest film, The White Ribbon, a beautifully crafted, black-and-white, Palm d’Or-winning period piece, is a continuation of the director’s interest in oblique storytelling and is as visually/aurally precise, emotionally intriguing, and interpretively demanding as his best films, presenting the viewer with a moral and epistemological puzzle of devastating intensity.

Set in a provincial north-German village of Eichwald during the months preceding the onset of World War I, The White Ribbon details the mysterious and violent deterioration of a community terrorized by what might be best described as the wrath of oppression. Narrated as the dubiously remembered experiences of a young schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), the film is populated with despicably self-righteous, callous control mongers and their justifiably reactionary victims – not the least of which are their own psychologically and physically abused children, whose collective sense of justice has been disturbingly deranged. Whether suffering the totalitarian indulgences of the local pastor (Burghart Klaußner), the resident baron (Ulrich Tukur), or the town doctor (Rainer Bock), the villagers are subject to constant exploitation, a circumstance that grows even more horrifying once a series of brutal, seemingly connected, incidents befalls the community, culminating, suggestively, just as the news of Archduke Ferdinand’s infamous assassination reaches Eichwald. In trademark fashion, Haneke leaves the viewer with many more questions than answers regarding the various mutilations, deaths and defilements that arrive in bursts of agonized ferocity throughout The White Ribbon. Though clues abound, the culprit(s) are never specified. Motivations are never made explicit. Events are frequently left unresolved. The heart of the matter is tactfully skated around, preserving its dark complexity while providing an ominous outline for the viewer to fill in.

Of course, Haneke is not alone in creating his note-for-note, pitch-perfect symphony of cruelty. The ensemble cast never misses a beat, maintaining a consistently subtle performance style throughout – never showy, always measured – imparting an appropriate sense of communal as well as individual existence to the characters by limiting the ability of a handful to charismatically dominate the narrative. As a result, the story is effectively forged as the confluence of a multitude of fragmented perspectives (regardless of the fact that the entire film is ostensibly the memory of the schoolteacher). Most impressive are the many child actors in The White Ribbon, all of whom handle Haneke’s emotionally challenging material with startling maturity and heartbreaking depth; Haneke and his casting directors (Simone Bär, Carmen Loley, Markus Schleinzer) certainly deserve recognition for the remarkable acquisition of such capable adolescent performers, young actors who certainly make the film come alive.

The most lauded of Haneke’s collaborators on The White Ribbon – and definitely on par with the uniformly excellent cast – are production designer Christoph Kanter and cinematographer Christian Berger, both of whom contribute to the film’s impeccable visuals. Though Haneke creates shot-by-shot storyboards for all of his films, determining the vast majority of their appearance before ever using a bit of celluloid, the deft execution of his plans by Kanter and Berger (aided by certain digital effects) is masterful.

Intricate and impressive, Kanter’s work convincingly captures the film’s 1914 atmosphere without flashily emphasizing period detail, allowing the characters to exist in a lived-in environment, one that appears as if the filmmakers had somehow stumbled upon a hermetically isolated, unchanged locale, existing on a mythic plane of parable and preserved past. Berger’s efforts in actualizing Haneke’s compositions and photographing Kanter’s production design are perhaps the best in any film this year, replete with carefully obscured framings, fluid movements, and gorgeous lighting. Two of Berger’s shots have haunted me for months: the first, a stationary composition, depicts a peasant farmer viewing the corpse of his deceased wife, partially concealed by a foreground wall and held in an aura of light defused by a hanging curtain; the second, a complex steadicam shot that gracefully reveals the nature of the same peasant farmer’s shocking demise before gliding away to find his tragically unaware son nearby. Both shots are precisely lit and paced and both pack an indelible emotional wallop achieved through understatement and implication – two of Haneke’s most effective narrative tools.

Just as astonishing as The White Ribbon’s visuals, however, is its sound design, crafted by Haneke along with sound editor Vincent Guillon and Haneke’s frequent sound mixer Guillaume Sciama. As in many of his previous works, Haneke is prone to keeping many moments off-screen, seducing the viewer’s imagination and allowing representational ambiguity to flourish as a series of sonic intimations replaces visual certainty. With this narrative mode in place, Guillon and Sciama’s contributions become absolutely critical to the success of numerous scenes, providing an evocative soundtrack that intersects and complicates visual information rather than merely accompanying it. The film’s aural environment expands the narrative beyond the frame, initiating a dual perception of the seen and heard, each informing the other in striking ways. A painful scene depicting the pastor’s abuse of his young children exemplifies this technique. The camera lingers outside the room where the lashings occur, yet the sounds of the beatings make the remote spatial area as palpable as the pictured hall, doubling the simultaneous space of the scene and sparking an imaginative curiosity in the viewer, imploring her to mentally construct the unseen, yet heard, components of The White Ribbon’s cinematic world, those lying beyond the frame’s edge. Haneke’s stated aims of activating the viewer are fulfilled in such instances of audio-vision, encouraging cooperate creativity from the viewer in completing his narratives while demonstrating absolute technical virtuosity.

Indeed, from script to acting to image to sound, The White Ribbon is a masterpiece, one that recalls the sober works of classic art film directors from Bresson and Tarkovsky to Bergman and Dreyer. Refreshingly, Haneke has made a serious film with serious intentions. No winking. No self-reflexive evasion. No postmodern playfulness. The White Ribbon is as unflinching, sophisticated, gripping piece of cinema – revealing not only a trust in the active viewer, but also a confidence in the ability of a film to be successfully crafted in complete earnest. Some have criticized Haneke as being too “didactic” as a result of his undiluted solemnity but The White Ribbon’s sincerity and gravity strike me as indications of a filmmaker with sustained conviction and moral purpose – traits absent from far too many modern movies. Here’s hoping Haneke never loses his severity; if he does, we will lose something even more devastating: one of cinema’s greatest artists.

A

Out 1 Film Journal's Best Movies of the 2000s

2010-01-13T17:00:00.004-05:00

I'm sure you've all seen Best of the Decade lists, and, yes, this is another one adding to the many you've seen online and elsewhere. We tried to spice things up in a couple of ways. One, by including a wide range of writers who are friends, acquaintances, and all-around excellent critics. Two, by asking each of the writers to submit 13 movies rather than 10. This allows everyone to fit in a couple more titles in impossible difficult to make lists and goes along with a riff in Jacques Rivette;s Out 1 - revolving around Balzac's History of the Thirteen. So, using thirteen lists from thirteen writers submitting their thirteen best movies of the decade, I submit you to the following results! The only stipulation was that each movie in the top 13 had to be included on at least two lists and it wouldn't have mattered points wise regardless. Each individual list contributed can be seen after the break. A special thanks to each contributor!

1. Dogville (Lars Von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/Norway/Finland/U.K./France/Germany/The Netherlands, 2003)

2. INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, USA/Poland/France, 2006)

3. In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong, 2000)

4. The New World (Terrence Malick, USA, 2005)

5. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/France/Italy/Germany, 2005)

6. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2002)

7. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, USA/France, 2001)

8. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, Hungary, 2000)

9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

10. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2007)

11. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/The Netherlands, 2007)

12. Zodiac (David Fincher, USA, 2007)

13. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain, 2008)

Directors of the Decade
1. Michael Haneke
2. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
3. Lucrecia Martel
4. Paul Thomas Anderson
5. David Lynch

Performances of the Decade
1. Laura Dern, INLAND EMPIRE
2. Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood
3. Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher
4. Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive
5. Tilda Swinton, Julia

Individual Lists

James Hansen

1. Mulholland Drive/INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2001/2006)
2. Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003)
3. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
4. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2007)
5. When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, 2008)
6. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2008)
7. Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
8. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
9. Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002)
10. Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa, 2006)
11. In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
12. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
13. There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson, 2007)

Directors:
1. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2. Lucrecia Martel
3. David Lynch
4. Pedro Costa
5. David Cronenberg

Performances:
1. Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive
2. Laura Dern, Inland Empire
3. Maggie Cheung, In The Mood For Love
4. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Antichrist
5. Olivier Gourmet, The Son

Brandon Colvin

1. INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2006)
2. Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2008)
3. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2005)
4. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2008)
5. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
6. Punch-Drunk Love (PT Anderson, 2002)
7. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
8. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
9. Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2001)
10. I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004)
11. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
12. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002)
13. Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning, 2005)

Directors:
1. David Lynch
2. Gus Van Sant
3. Michael Haneke
4. Paul Thomas Anderson
5. Steven Soderbergh

Performances:
1. Laura Dern, INLAND EMPIRE
2. Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford
3. Nicolas Cage, Adaptation.
4. Nicolas Cage, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
5. Steve Carrell, The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Chuck Williamson

1. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
3. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
4. INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2006)
5. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2004)
6. Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)
7. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
8. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
9. The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
10. Friday Night (Claire Denis, 2002)
11. The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors (Hong Sang-soo, 2000)
12. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2008)
13. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Directors:
1. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2. Michael Haneke
3. Lucretia Martel
4. Tsai Ming-liang
5. Claire Denis

Performances:
1. Laura Dern, Inland Empire
2. Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher
3. Daniel Day Lewis, There Will Be Blood
4. Christian Bale, American Psycho
5. Thora Birch, Ghost World

Joseph Bowman

1. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)
2. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
3. Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)
4. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2007)
5. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
6. Yi yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
7. The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
8. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005)
9. Late Marriage (Dover Koshashvili, 2001)
10. Wild Side (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2004)
11. Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
12. The Intruder (Claire Denis, 2004)
13. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas, 2008)

Directors:
1. Olivier Assayas
2. Lucrecia Martel
3. Michael Haneke
4. Claire Denis
5. Gus Van Sant

Performances:
1. Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher
2. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
3. Tilda Swinton, Julia
4. Laura Dern, Inland Empire
5. Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson

Tony Dayoub

(alphabetical)
25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Spike Jonze, 2004)
I ♥ Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004)
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Peter Weir, 2003)
Miami Vice (Michael Mann, 2006)
The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson, 2007)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

Directors:
-Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood) for allowing the madmen—actors—to run the asylum.
-Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York) for being an auteur before he was a director.
-Michael Mann (Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies) for mastering the digital camera as he ventures further into "pure" cinema.
-Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lou Reed's Berlin) for following his muse, and making lyricism a priority in cinema.
-Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Ocean's Eleven series, Full Frontal, Solaris, Eros (segment: "Equilibrium"), Bubble, The Good German, Che, The Girlfriend Experience, The Informant!) for his overwhelming output, consistent in both quality and innovation.

Performances:
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Benicio Del Toro, Che
Laura Dern, Inland Empire
Mélanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds
Meryl Streep, Doubt

Jeremy Heilman

1. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
2. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
3. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
4. Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003)
5. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
6. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
7. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
8. Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000)
9. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)
10. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
11. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
12. Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002)
13. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)

Directors:
1. Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Quentin Tarantino
3. David Cronenberg
4. Lars von Trier
5. Richard Linklater

Performances:
1. Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
2. Nicole Kidman, Dogville
3. Naomi Watts, Mulholland Dr.
4. Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
5. Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher

Nathan Lee

1 My Hand Outstretched to the Winged Distance and Sightless Measure (Robert Beavers, 1967-2002)
2 Mulholland Drive/INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2001/2006)
3 In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
4 Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
5 Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002)
6 Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005)
7 Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
8 In Praise of Love (Jean Luc Godard, 2001)
9 Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
10 Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
11 The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
12 L'intrus (Claire Denis, 2004)
13 Pootie Tang (Louis CK, 2001)

VJ Morton

(alphabetical)
Capturing The Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003)
L’enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005)
Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungui, 2007)
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
La Pianiste (Michael Haneke, 2001)
Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, 2008)
Songs From The Second Floor (Roy Andersson, 2000)
Time Out (Laurent Cantet, 2001)

Jeremy Richey

1. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
3. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
4. I Heart Huckabees (David O. Russell, 2004)
5. Sex and Lucia (Julio Medem, 2001)
6. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
7. Punch Drunk Love (PT Anderson, 2002)
8.21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2003)
9. Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004)
10. Vicki Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)
11. Amelie (Jean Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
12. Auto Focus (Paul Schraeder, 2002)
13. Talk To Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)

Nathaniel Rogers

1. Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)
2. Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000)
3. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
5. Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
6. In The Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
7. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
8. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000)
10. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
11. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000)
12. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
13. Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003)

Jacob Shoaf

1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
2. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
3. Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006)
4. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
5. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
6. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
7. Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
8. Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
9. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
10. There Will Be Blood (PT Anderson, 2007)
11. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
12. Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003)
13. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)

Directors:
1. Michael Haneke
2. Guy Maddin
3. Gus Van Sant
4. Carlos Reygadas
5. Lars Von Trier

Performancs:
1. Laura Dern, INLAND EMPIRE
2. Sean Penn, Milk
3. Michelle Williams, Wendy and Lucy
4. Audrey Tautou, Amelie
5. Michael Fassbender, Hunger

Michael Sicinski

( ) (Morgan Fisher, U.S., 2003)
Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, Mali / U.S. / France, 2006)
The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, U.S., 2003)
Dogville (Lars von Trier, Demark / Sweden / Norway / Finland / U.K. / France / Germany / The Netherlands, 2003)
The Heart of the World (Guy Maddin, Canada, 2000)
Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, France, 2002)
Phantoms of Nabua (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand / Germany, 2009)
Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, France, 2005)
St. Ignatius Church Exposure: Lenten Light Conversions (Lynn Marie Kirby, U.S., 2004)
Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China / Hong Kong, 2006)
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, Hungary, 2000)
What the Water Said, Nos. 4-6 (David Gatten, U.S., 2007)
When It Was Blue (Jennifer Reeves, U.S. / Iceland, 2008)

Directors:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Pedro Costa
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Claire Denis
Nathaniel Dorsky

Performances:
Olivier Gourmet, The Son
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain
Samantha Morton, Morvern Callar
Issey Ogata, The Sun
Summer Phoenix, Esther Kahn

Blake Williams

1. INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2006)
2. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2007)
3. Punch-Drunk Love (PT Anderson, 2002)
4. RR (James Benning, 2008)
5. Melancholia (Lav Diaz, 2008)
6. In the City of Sylvia (Jose Luis Guerin, 2007)
7. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2005)
8. La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel, 2001)
9. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
10. The Gleaners & I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)
12. Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000)
13. Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003)

Directors:
1. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2. Michael Haneke
3. James Benning
4. Lucrecia Martel
5. David Lynch

Performances:
1. Laura Dern, INLAND EMPIRE
2. Tilda Swinton, Julia
3. Isabelle Huppert, The Piano Teacher
4. Eva Löbau, The Forest for the Trees
5. Juliette Binoche, Code Unknown

Best Movies of 2009

2010-01-12T13:00:00.012-05:00

As is the custom at the end of every year, we take a final look back at the year of movies in 2009. Of course, many of the best movies "made" in 2009 actually premiered at various places in 2008, which puts the time they were "made" somewhere around 2007. Semantics are always a part of these lists for what qualifies and what doesn't. Do festival screenings count? Does it need a domestic release or is it based on world premieres? Who knows. I kept a couple of my personal favorites I saw in 2009 (Ne Change Rien, Trash Humpers, DDR/DDR) since they were only seen at festivals. Alas, I included a set of films that were shown online and festivals only, and another that was associated with a festival, but screened elsewhere "publicly" during the festival. Just as we make it clear, it becomes muddy again.

So what do we know? Well, if these lists are any indication, there were plenty of good movies to be seen in 2009. Although it may have been a down year for Hollywood and American cinema, there was plenty to celebrate, denigrate, and shrug off. It was another year. And here is another set of lists.

(And stay tuned! Tomorrow, Out 1 will unveil the top 10 movies of the 2000s, as determined by 13 co-conspirators who have included their individual lists as part of Out 1's collective lists. Both collective and individual lists will be published tomorrow. Get excited.)

James Hansen

1. Primitive project (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
2. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
3. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
4. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu)
5. Let Each One Go Where He May (Ben Russell)
6. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
7. Hunger (Steve McQueen)
8. Birdsong (Albert Serra)
9. Antichrist (Lars Von Trier)
10. Jennifer (Stewart Copeland)

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis); Adventureland (Greg Mottola); Afterschool (Antonio Campos); Beeswax (Andrew Bujalski); Crank High Voltage (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor); Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson); Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso); Jerichow (Christian Petzold); A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen); Sutro (Jeanne Liotta)

Best Performances
Female: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Antichrist) & Maria Onetto (The Headless Woman) (tie)
Male: Michael Fassbender (Hunger)

Overrated
The Hurt Locker - It’s a good movie, but, I mean, Jesus.

Underrated
Crank High Voltage - Aesthetically radical (in a good way) and a total blast.

Brandon Colvin

1. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
2. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch)
3. Adventureland (Greg Mottola)
4. Hunger (Steve McQueen)
5. Loren Cass (Chris Fuller)
6. We Were Once a Fairytale (Spike Jonze)
7. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
8. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
9. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog)
10. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical)
I Love You, Man (John Hamburg); Plastic Bag (Ramin Bahrani); Star Trek (J.J. Abrams); A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen); Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Best Performances
Nicolas Cage (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) & Kanye West (We Were Once A Fairytale)

Overrated
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman) & Avatar (James Cameron)

Underrated
Watchmen (Zack Snyder) & Three Monkeys (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Chuck Williamson

1. The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel)
2. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
3. Summer Hours (Olivier Assayas)
4. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)
5. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
6. Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
7. In The Loop (Armando Iannuci)
8. The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow)
9. You, The Living (Roy Andersson)
10. Afterschool (Antonio Campos)

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis); Bright Star (Jane Campion); The Girlfriend Experience (Steven Soderbergh); The House of the Devil (Ti West); Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino); Hunger (Steve McQueen); Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo)

Best Performances
Male: Souleymane Sy Savane (Goodbye Solo)
Female: Kim Ok-vin (Thirst)

Overrated
Avatar (James Cameron) & Love Exposure (Sion Sono)

Underrated
A Town Called Panic (Stephane Aubier & Vincent Patar)

A Travail of Passion

2010-01-11T11:17:00.004-05:00

by James Hansen

It might sound like an extended YouTube video gone array, but Zachary Oberzan’s Flooding With Love for the Kid – a feature length remake of First Blood shot inside a 220 square foot New York City apartment with a budget of $96 in which Oberzan plays every role – is more a (slightly schizophrenic) treatise on the illusions of film production and the (delusional?) wish fulfillment inherent in home video production. Oberzan pushes past his imposed conceptual parameters (including blatant artificiality where stuffed animals serve as forest creatures, Oberzan plays a pack of dogs, and a toaster stands in for a radio) to on full display his incredible passion for the project which propels its surprising effectiveness.

Flooding With Love for the Kid isn’t some narcissistic experiment made by Oberzan in hopes of 15-minutes of cult status. It’s an enthralling video precisely because of the intense emotion and love for the story, characters, and cinema that floods every image of its 107 minute running time. Amidst an emotionally devoid Hollywood prestige picture season, Flooding With Love for the Kid is a challenging, yet therapeutic reminder of what movies are, why they should be made in the first place, and what it actually takes to make them work.

An opening title card labels the movie as a “one man war” and, although the story of Rambo is a one man war by its own right, Oberzan’s singular war becomes more impactful. Closely following David Morrell’s novel, most importantly the bleak, impactful conclusion, Flooding With Love for the Kid serves as a metaphoric Rambo with cinematic production, just as the narrative of John Rambo follows suit with war. Without outside influence, Oberzan single-handedly fights the mores of the Hollywood action genre, spectatorial expectations, and artistic capability in a dire economic situation. A war is raging, but who and what does it take to keep fighting?

Oberzan plays the literal Rambo as his video situates itself as the figurative. A Rambo looking to the past for reference, but wildly fighting for some kind of [artistic] freedom and a fresh start. Flooding With Love for the Kid may not send shockwaves through the typically unsubstantive, non-sensical Hollywood action genre – elements the video mirrors for purpose of confrontation – but Oberzan’s video has the answers for what it takes to win a Rambo-esque war against an unflappable foe. It’s all in his title.

B+

2009 Film Reviews (by title)

2010-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

35 Shots of Rum (Hansen)
Adventureland (Hansen)
Antichrist (Hansen)
Beeswax (Hansen)
Birdsong (Hansen)
The Box (Hansen)
Broken Embraces (Hansen)
The Brothers Bloom (Williamson)
The Class (Hansen)
Coraline (Hansen)
Drag Me To Hell (Hansen)
FILM IST. a girl and a gun (Hansen)
Friday the 13th (Hansen)
The Girlfriend Experience (Colvin)
Gomorra (Williamson)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Hansen)
Hunger (Colvin)
The Hurt Locker (Colvin)
Inglourious Basterds (Colvin)
Julie and Julia (Williamson)
Life During Wartime (Hansen)
Liverpool (Hansen)
Loren Cass (Colvin)
Moon (Williamson)
The Necessities of Life (Hansen)
Orphan (Hansen)
Phantoms of Nabua
Police, Adjective (Hansen)
Public Enemies (Colvin)
A Serious Man (Colvin)
Star Trek (Hansen)
Still Walking (Hansen)
Summer Hours (Hansen)
Sutro (Hansen)
Three Monkeys (Hansen)
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Hansen)
Tulpan (Hansen)
Twilight: New Moon (Williamson)
Tyson (Williamson)
Watchmen (Colvin)
The White Ribbon (Colvin)
You, The Living (Williamson)

An Interview with "Police, Adjective" Director Corneliu Porumboiu

2009-12-23T15:50:00.007-05:00

by James Hansen

Police, Adjective - one of the major highlights at this year's New York Film Festival - opens in New York at IFC Center today. I wrote about the film in my round-ups of the festival, but I was also lucky enough to sit down with director Corneliu Porumboiu during the festival to discuss his approach in crafting this challenging film. The following is an edited conversation I had with Mr. Porumboiu on September 29, 2009 discussing the film, his cinematic influences, and, well, words.

James Hansen: How did the story come about?

Corneliu Porumboiu: There were two stories I heard that inspired me. One was about two brothers, one of whom betrayed the other in a small case about consuming hashish. The second story: I have a friend who is a police officer and he told me about case that he had where he decided he didn’t want to solve it because of his conscience.

JH: How much did the real events effect your stylistic choices for the film like the use of real-time during the police investigations?

CP: Doing research for the second draft of the script, I discovered that police officers have a lot of time - death time - waiting and surveilling. This was very important for me because it fits into the spirit that I wanted to give to the script and to the absurd tone of my movie. I take real time and it becomes an absurd time. The movie is about meaning and a policeman trying to get that sense in his world. The real time allowed me to construct that feeling.

JH: You mention the absurdist qualities of the film, which are infused with the realism. I wonder if this is what informs the comedy of both Police, Adjective and your earlier films?

CP: I think the comedy is really just coming with me. I don’t think before I make a movie as to whether it will be a comedy or something like that. It’s something that is in my point of view on life so it’s very natural.

JH: What your major influences were for this project?

CP: I had seen many police movies (policier) like All of Us, but for this particular movie I was influenced by Bresson’s Pickpocket and Antonioni’s Blow Up. Big parts of my movie are silent and the body language counts a lot. So, in the sense of both timing and atmosphere, I was thinking a lot about these two movies.

JH: Blow Up is an interesting choice since it is all about the dissection of an image, and in Police, Adjective it seems you invert the process by dissecting language. Can you talk about your approach to text and dialogue in the film and its relationship with the image, particularly in the final sequence and conversation with the dictionary?

CP: Blow Up is one of my favorite movies. I was thinking more about the technique in Blow Up for my first movie (12:08 East of Bucharest) in trying to define the revolution. In this case, when I was doing my research, I was seeing the daily reports from police officers. With these came the idea of representation that you can also see to some extent in Blow Up. You see what he’s doing everyday by what is written on the page. And it is just a representation of what happened that day. That was the first point when I started looking at language and words and what they really mean and what the express. You have this structure that repeats day after day after day, which is what leads into the final conversation.

JH: And that all leads into the final shot of the film, which I think is stunning. Can you talk about the idea behind the last shot and how it connects back to ideas of symbology, image, and text?

CP: As I mentioned before, it’s coming from those words and details and reports. They go into the word conscience and finally the word police. The drawing on the blackboard at the end gives you the absurd tone of the movie. Everything becomes a graphic. But I don’t believe so much in symbols. An image is dealing with an image. But it all goes back to the meaning of the words. And it’s a repetition leading to a certain kind of art. Plus, I prefer being a little cynical.

JH: Is your cynical approach to the search for answers and clarity in Police, Adjective related to your personal your views about Romania, whether before or after the revolution?

CP: For me personally, after the revolution, I was thinking all the changes would come the next day. I had quite a romantic point of view about it and life in general. Years after, I’ve become a more cynical. Maybe it’s the way things should be, but, for me, the expectations that I had were broken. For my research, I asked ten different friends to define the word conscience. There were so many different definitions! After that, I started to write and that was my idea in the end: what is in the back of these words? If it’s in a dictionary, I think it’s absurd, and that is the feeling I had writing and making this movie. What is the link to these words? What is the conscience of a society? It’s coming from this sentiment I have. The definitions [of conscience] were so different, but, at the same time, they express, as I feel, that in Romania we often don’t understand each other. The words are no use at the end.

DVD of the Week: "Tony Takitani" (Jun Ichikawa, 2004)

2009-12-15T22:35:00.003-05:00

by Chuck Williamson

Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Tony Takitani is an elliptical and glacial mediation on isolation, melancholia, and loss that, through its visualizations/externalizations of psychic trauma, surpasses its source material. Few cinematic representations of trauma encapsulate the sort of stasis and inertia—not to mention the psychic wreckage of loss and grief—that, from beginning to end, dominates the life of the film’s eponymous protagonist. Branded as an outsider by his strange gaijin name—the byproduct of his father’s post-occupation paranoia—Tony (Issei Ogata) seems predestined from birth to a life of isolation and loneliness. Indeed, his is a life defined by fixed, metronomic rhythms and interminable seclusion, a self-constructed prison where Tony goes through his daily motions as if in an anesthetized daze. Ichikawa externalizes the alienation and latent melancholia that dominates Tony’s day-to-day existence through muted, monochromatic compositions, a drained and minimalist mise-en-scene framed in claustrophobic long shots and punctuated by the slow, languorous rhythm of a continual left-to-right pan. Such formal strategies further immerse us in Takitani’s hermetically sealed shell of a world, giving us visual access to its monotony and loneliness.

But Takitani’s world opens up—formally and thematically—after a chance encounter with young fashionista Eiko (Rie Miyazawa), triggering in him not only a dormant desire to love and be loved, but also the sudden recognition of his own loneliness. In contrast to Tony’s ascetic isolation, Eiko’s shopoholic materialism marks her as a woman engaged with the world, if not consumed by it; she endures the same emptiness that Tony has grown accustomed to, but attempts to fill the void with designer clothes. As Tony says to his father after their marriage, “It’s as if she were born to play dress up.” But when a sudden twist of fate puts a permanent end to this domestic bliss, her clothes transform into corporeal representations of his internal trauma. Isolated within the confines of her walk-in closet, Tony is surrounded by the physical reminders of her absence—hundreds of designer outfits, accessories, and shoes—that, paradoxically, linger like ghosts that make “letting go” an impossibility. These objects take on a special significance for Tony, transforming his trauma into something more tactile and palpable; they are tangible reminders of her absence that make it more difficult to come to terms with his loss. Even when Tony hires a female assistant—a doppelganger for his deceased wife—to wear his wife’s old clothes to “grow accustomed to her absence,” Tony’s sense of loss and loneliness deepens and, by the end, completely consumes him.

As the film sinks into the deepest recesses of Tony’s sadness and seclusion, it gives us privileged access to both the physical and psychic spaces that define his experience with loneliness and loss. In the film’s final moments, we see Tony retract even further into his shell, surrendering to what the narrator describes as “the prison of loneliness.” The cumulative effect is chilling.

While My Guitar Begrudgingly Complains

2009-12-14T08:00:00.001-05:00

by Andy Hobin

A couple times while viewing Crazy Heart, I looked at Jeff Bridges and saw Hank Williams Jr. Williams suffered an ungodly fall back in the 70's, and he took to sporting a beard, dark sunglasses, and broad-brimmed cowboy hat upon his return to public life, so self-conscious he was over his surgically reconstructed face. The beard / hat / shades trifecta is said to be Hank Jr.'s trademark look, though he hardly owns it. Waylon Jennings sported it. Merle Haggard still sports it. And for the better part of Crazy Heart, Bridges' “Bad Blake,” another relic of the “sad guy with a guitar” era of country music gone by, sports it. But like Hank Jr., Bad Blake wears his trifecta like a mask. Lest you believe otherwise, observe Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the love interest, yanking the shades and hat off of his emotionally distant head during one scene. She can't even see him, she complains.

But here's the rub. Bad doesn't quite ring true as the kind of tortured soul the film would like us to believe he is. (Bad Blake goes by “Bad” for short; his Christian name is a guarded secret.) He drives a cruddy old truck around the Southwest playing little gigs at bowling alleys and corner dives. His shows are attended by sparse handfuls of baby boomer well-wishers who were fans way back when he was the big dog. They buy him drinks, they call out requests, and collectively they're a helpful indicator of how far he's fallen from the public eye. You feel for Bad in that regard, but you also come to learn that he's not so much in a desperate situation as he is in a holding pattern of mediocrity. He whines about being broke, but his manager regularly sends him cash and he has a nice little house in Houston. He's an alcoholic, sure, but he's a highly functioning alcoholic. (How quintessentially country!) Crazy Heart asks us to invest in the hopelessness of Bad's life – to see him as a walking, talking, boozing, screwing country music songwriters hall of fame. Scratch that, the film tells us to. “Where'd all those songs come from,” Jean asks Bad early in the film. “Life, unfortunately,” Bridges drawls. Boo hoo, cowboy. You could be doing a lot worse. What's more, at this writing, 10% of the country is out of a job, and I'll bet any among that figure who can carry a tune would line up to trade lives with a working musician.

Despite all this, the acting carries the price of admission. First time writer-director Scott Cooper sets up a dusty, sweaty, flophouse world for his characters to inhabit, and then wisely sits back and lets his actors do the heavy lifting. Especially Bridges. He's just about the most charming actor working today – the Tom Hanks of all points south of the Mason-Dixon line. It's that likeability, not a series of pathos appeals for sympathy, that causes the audience to find itself rooting for Bad. This is partly due to the fact that the pathos appeals in the screenplay are not terribly effective, but ah well. Bridges is supported by another fine turn from Maggie Gyllenhaal as an impulsive, big-hearted mom who takes an improbable shine to the old bastard, and their scenes together are tender and at times entirely moving. Also surprisingly good is Colin Farrell in a small role as Bad's one time protégé turned contemporary country megastar who might be Bad's ticket back onto the gravy train. (Ireland's a long way from Nashville, you scoff. Sure, but so is Australia, and Keith Urban could buy and sell me like I'm hanging on the shelf at a dollar store.)

Also worth the price of admission? The soundtrack. T-Bone Burnett's at the wheel in this department, thank God, and he spins gold out of Bridges' and Farrell's numbers. The real revelation here, though, is a guy named Ryan Bingham, who not only appears in the film as a member of Bad's backing band but, with Burnett, co-wrote the song that Bad struggles to write throughout the story. It's called “The Weary Kind,” and it's a lovely, somber song, one that is as authentic and stirring as Crazy Heart itself wanted to be. Bingham's stock will hopefully rise considerably between now and Oscar time.

Small side note: George Clooney's character in Jason Reitman's forthcoming Up in the Air is also named Ryan Bingham. Don't get confused.

B-

New Concert Venue Not So Exciting

2009-12-12T13:53:00.008-05:00

by James Hansen

Opening this weekend and only showing for one week in select theaters, Dave Matthews Band: Larger Than Life 3D reportedly was put together to bring a new kind of concert experience to traditional movie theaters. Entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban have been talking about streaming live events – sports, concerts, and, most successfully so far, opera – in HD. Larger Than Life isn't live, so the incorporation of 3D is supposed to be the major draw here. But watching Larger Than Life, I was reminded exactly why live events are meant to be seen live and in person. As close as you put a camera and as much spaciality there is with 3D, Larger Than Life only went to remind me that what is "larger than life" in live experiences is actually being in the same place at the same time with artists you admire. The screen immediately creates a distance that simply can't be made up for with 3D glasses. In fact, it just made the concert experience seem even more artificial. If cinema wants to expand into this realm, it has to find a way to make things more interesting than a filmed concert you see on TV, except in 3D. Larger Than Life may be of interest to the biggest Dave Matthews fans, but there's nothing here we haven't seen from filmed concerts before.

Nevertheless, I have some promotional materials for the event that serve as another form of memorabilia for anyone interested in Dave Matthews. I have a few t-shirts and posters that I'll give away to four people who email out1filmjournal@gmail.com with your favorite 3D cinematic experience. If you don't have one, tell me why not. Since Larger Than Life is for a limited time, so is this "contest." Emails must be received by the end of the day on December 15. Winners will be notified via email by the 17th.

Is It Eye, Cinema?

2009-12-08T12:30:00.008-05:00

by James Hansen

In Gustave Deutsch’s found footage opus FILM IST. a girl and a gun, Detusch returns to a phrase from DW Griffith, revived by Jean Luc Godard, and appropriated to new heights by the contemporary cinema of spectacle which may have reached its zenith with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – a film starring Megan Fox’s ass, Shia Lebouf’s libido, and a bunch of war-mongering robots. Cinema has come so far, in time at least, only to repeatedly have its artists revert to the most fundamental of questions: what is cinema? Deutsch’s mission with the FILM IST. series (of which a girl and a gun is the 13th section) isn’t actually to define what film is – as Tom Gunning points out, “Film Is.” whether we define it or not – but to look at all the facsimiles of what cinema can be. Here, accordingly, Deutsch digs into the transformative obsessions of sex and violence.

A girl and a gun takes as its starting point sex and violence, girls and guns, and, eventually, men and women as a battle of the sexes. Through archival footage found by Deutsch on laborious journeys through eleven archives, a girl and a gun follows the progression of sex and violence through the shifting nature of the planet, as well as men and women themselves. Beautiful as the found images may be, the undercurrent of violence shakes the cosmos, seen through the practices of montage, reappropriation of imagery, and uncovering early cinematic representations of power and pleasure through the pornographic. In the end, Deutsch’s point is well taken, but troublesome for its directness amid what seems to be an open ended exploration. Deutsch’s addition in music, enhancing the film’s modernity, crush the images by providing too thin a context in which to evaluate the imagery. For all the formal concern at the center of a girl and a gun, Deutsch’s music makes the formalism all too literal. Rather than explore the deepest realms of sex and violence, a girl and a gun disappointingly remains on the surface while it dodges an implicit question lingering throughout: what is the weapon that allows the sex and violence? The obvious, yet troubling answer – Film Ist.

Of course, this is all part of what makes cinema thoroughly undefinable, and it would be wrong to suggest that Deutsch’s work, in both a girl and a gun and the larger FILM IST. series, is attempting to narrow the terminology. Deutsch’s found imagery conjures up an emotional reticence seemingly completed through cinematic osmosis. Sitting in front of a screen and absorbing the images, Deutsch’s point is made clear in a fascinating and exciting way. Starting with calming images of nature which soon turn into obvious depictions of violence (guns, volcanos, etc.), a girl and a gun slyly morphs from this overly explicit mode of address to one of deeper categorization. Male doctors examining a female patient, intercut with strikingly similar positions in an early pornographic film, illustrate the mechanization and inherent violence embedded within a dominated battle of the sexes. The mood is eery, dark, and voyeuristic even in the most neutral of images. Cinema quickly turns from a mode of capturing pleasure to a being that exploits it.

It isn’t until the final frame, when Deutsch uses perhaps the most famous clip in a girl and a gun, when a man points at the camera (and the audience) with his gun and fires that film is held accountable, new violence directed itself, for the arguably vitriolic actions Deutsch uncovers. The images no longer have the context of their initial beings, but instead become a representation of cinema itself, and insodoing stand as a disturbing challenge for Deutsch in asking the question what is cinema. Film is, yes, but why film? Deutsch’s outside influence, – and here I mean in external decisions rather than his wonderful sense of montage – seen mainly in the simple, yet incredibly distracting music, ends up turning Deutsch’s polemical point around. Instead of allowing his filmic representation to embody what Walter Benjamin called an optical unconsciousness, Deutsch’s model is too directional and too driven by a would-be historical narrative for the images to speak for themselves. This perplexing misstep makes a girl and a gun all that more interesting for its workshop-like qualities, exploring cinema as a newfound chemical even 120 years after its advent, which provide the troublesome elements as an active counterbalance in a journey of cinematic expectation and attempted jouissance. Too problematic in its own method to be any kind of masterpiece and too enriching and well-constructed to go unconsidered, FILM IST. a girl and a gun is...and maybe that is just the way it’s supposed to be.

B-

DVD of the Week: "Loren Cass" plus an Interview with Director Chris Fuller

2009-12-01T15:44:00.006-05:00

Loren Cass has already been reviewed on the site by Brandon Colvin (you can read it here), but, in honor of its DVD release, we all thought it deserved another mention. Plus, Brandon was lucky enough to interview director Chris Fuller about the film. A special thanks to Mr. Fuller for taking the time to talk to us. It's a hell of a film. You can buy it here. Interview after the break.

Brandon Colvin: From inception to finish, it took nearly a decade for Loren Cass to be fully realized. What about the project caused such a protracted production period? What sorts of obstacles (both creative and practical) did you face as a first time independent filmmaker and how were you able to successfully circumvent the temptation to throw in the towel?

Chris Fuller: I’d been working toward this particular project for a long time so there was never really any temptation to throw in the towel. We knew it was going to be a long road and just kept on going. We did the best we could when it came to the obstacles that were presented to us. As for the length of time it took to complete the project, it’s due to a number of things. I spent a long time working on and refining the script. Then financing took probably somewhere around 3 years, it’s just not easy as a filmmaker of any kind to secure the amount of money necessary to make a good run at a major project. Then, from a creative standpoint, I felt like we needed to get back out there and pick up some footage I felt I was missing. We ended up doing 3 re-shoot days spread over the course of a few years. The sound mix took about a year and a half. When you don’t have the money to devote to certain things, work just gets done when there’s spare time, and isn’t necessarily the full-time focus of everyone involved. That’s just the way it’s got to be when you’re working on an extremely low budget, independent film. We had to make things happen any way we could, however long it took, and we knew we’d eventually get it finished and be able to put it out there. There’s always going to be obstacles when you’re working on a film, but the limited means and resources certainly make the problem-solving that much tougher.

BC: Loren Cass is a very specific film in that it concentrates on a particular city at a particular time – St. Petersburg, 1997. How did the local community impact the creation of the film, and how did you preserve such a vividly real representation of a certain place and time that was constantly receding into the past as the film’s production progressed?

CF: The setting is extremely important for a film and I think a vivid, detailed back-drop is a vital step toward making a film that feels real and has some truth to it. Too often it seems that the layers of a film that are necessary to build a real world for the characters are neglected in favor of a hyper-focus on the events taking place on the surface of the film. Obviously those are important too, but you have to build the thing from the ground up. One of the things I always tell people when they’re asking about the film and the length of time it took to make it and all that, is that I didn’t spend twelve years screwing around, we were working on the details of this thing the entire time in one way or another. And that’s how I think it should be. Everything is important, and everything is an opportunity to evoke the story, whether it’s the color of something, a prop, the camera angle or movement, and so on. Every detail is a chance to tell your story that much better and make it that much more real. I definitely credit the focus on multiple layers to the film, the story, the characters, for the final representation of that particular place during that particular time.

BC: The sense of reality in Loren Cass operates on many levels. A few of the most striking ways the film taps into this are your integration of documentary materials from other media (both visual and audio recordings) and your use of non-professional actors and actual locations. How do you view these documentary elements, and what role do they play in enhancing, or even commenting on, the film’s fictional narrative?

CF: I really think that the best way to approach a feature film is with a combination of the two. Obviously it is art, and it needs to have an author, so the pre-determining of things is a necessity. But you can definitely blend that with certain things from the documentary world, particularly when it comes to the actors and the events taking place between them. There’s such a vastly different feel to something that is genuinely taking place between people and something that is staged and ultra-controlled. A good example of what I’m talking about are the fight scenes in Loren Cass. It’s faster, easier, safer, whatever, to stage them like every filmmaker stages every fight, but that’s just ridiculous in my opinion. People have been fighting since the dawn of time and getting punched in the face, particularly in service of your art, something that will long outlive you, seems like a small sacrifice. I think you can apply this to so many aspects of people and their relationships, to events and things that are often portrayed in films, and get something that’s a perfect synthesis of narrative fiction/art and documentary. That’s what I think the goal should be regardless of what you’re presenting, it’s just how they all films should be made no matter what’s on the surface. You’re already manipulating the story, the setting, the interactions, so much before you even get started, because it’s the nature of things, but that shouldn’t preclude you from trying to depict those events as realistically as possible and doing what’s necessary the make the best film possible, something that people can get totally immersed in. Reality on that level will allow viewers access to the other levels, or layers, in the film, which is where the meat is.

BC: Your film presents a certain formal aesthetic that has been compared to a rather wide group of filmmakers, ranging from Robert Bresson to Harmony Korine. You’ve also cited Schopenhauer as a broad non-cinematic influence. How did you develop the stylistic and philosophical principles of Loren Cass? Especially as a first-time filmmaker, how much did you rely on intuition and/or improvisation?

CF: Your intuition definitely does and should, in my opinion, play a huge part in it. My scripts are fairly detailed and I have real concrete ideas about what I want to do heading into something, but some of the best things happen unexpectedly and you definitely need to be open to that or the film can pass you by. The freedom to confidently do that sort of thing comes from a good understanding of the material, it allows you to make unanticipated choices on the fly that you know are right for the film. It’s all in the preparation, but that doesn’t mean you can’t alter a word or a movement or whatever it is here and there when it feels right. I can’t remember who it was but some filmmaker, when asked what’s the best feeling he’s had on a set, said something to the effect of “When I’m surprised.” You can’t go into a project without rock-solid ideas and a dedicated approach, but if you don’t let instinct play a role and let the film breathe a little bit while it’s being made I think it’ll end up missing its soul.

BC: I’ve read before that you believe every film should have an “author,” and you are clearly the author of Loren Cass, serving as screenwriter, editor, director, actor, and producer. Do you see yourself always playing so many roles in the production of your future films? What has your multi-faceted experience taught you about the different responsibilities involved in making a film, and which role do you feel most comfortable in?

CF: I’ll definitely continue to perform all of those duties on my films. It seems kind of silly going over each particular title, they’re really all part of one thing from my perspective. Each of those, especially writing and editing, have so much to do with what the final picture is that I can’t really imagine handing them off to someone else and not doing all of those things.

As far as which role I feel more comfortable in...I’m pretty comfortable with all of them. Going back to what I said above, being a “filmmaker” sort of encompasses all of those things to me, so I don’t really separate them that much, it’s all part of making a project real.

BC: How important is it for Loren Cass to be seen by the citizens of St. Petersburg? What sort of reception has the film experienced thus far from people living there? Does the local audience differ from the (inter)national audience?

CF: We screened a rough cut of the film here in 2006 and it did really well, so we’re excited to bring the film back to where it all started and give more people a chance to see it. We actually had to turn a number of people away at the ’06 screening because we ran out of space. The reaction has definitely been passionate around here, I’m sure there’s a slightly different effect on an audience when you recognize certain locations, places that are a part of your day-to-day life, or remember certain things that happened over the years.

BC: With the DVD release of the film and your inclusion in Phaidon Press’ upcoming book Splice, which highlights 100 of the world’s most promising filmmakers, I have to ask – what’s next?

CF: I have a lot of things planned for the future but I’m developing two particular scripts right now which I’m hoping to get moving fairly soon. Unfortunately, I can’t really get too into the details at the moment but in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to put some more information out there on what they are.