Hidden Horrors and Assured Ambiguity

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.

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An Interview with "Police, Adjective" Director Corneliu Porumboiu

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.
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While My Guitar Begrudgingly Complains

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.

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Is It Eye, Cinema?

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.

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

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.
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Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Modern Job

by Brandon Colvin

Despite being the least stylized, most aesthetically conventional example of the Coen Bros’ auteur-tastic cinema, A Serious Man is so damn unusual that it might be their most radical, difficult film.

Pondering the film’s (intentionally) obscure narrative and thematic intricacies is akin to stretching one’s brain around an elusive (meta-) physical paradox, encouraging what could be called a “quantum” viewing experience, one hinging upon the fundamental principle of underlying uncertainty—the principle that defines the existence of A Serious Man’s pathetically unfortunate protagonist, Jewish mathematics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg).

Overcast with a complex and complicating membrane of impenetrable spiritual and existential malaise, A Serious Man narrates Larry’s Job-like downward spiral with exceeding intrigue while being more than a little disjointed. As one might observe upon viewing A Serious Man, however, the film’s puzzling disunity may be the Coens’ exact intention, the narrative fulfillment of physics theories and mathematics proofs that suggest our universe is indomitably chaotic.


Larry, an archetypical conventional mensch plodding through a banal existence in suburban Minneapolis c. 1970, finds himself in the midst of a vertiginous descent into an inescapable abyss of mind-crippling, heartbreaking, soul-crushing inscrutability. Beset by fate or randomness or Hashem (God) or nothingness, Larry suffers a series of mounting crises, from the dissolution of his marriage to the bizarre death of his wife’s (Sari Lennick) manstress to his extortion at the hands of frustrated Korean student (David Kang) to his accruing debt and failing attempt to earn tenure.

Attempting to model himself after and seek advice from the “serious” Jews around him—including a slew of ineffectual rabbis, uncaring community leaders, and his wife’s self-important lover, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed)—Larry probes the (non?)meaning behind his misery, fruitlessly investigating the confusing collision of religious enigma and cryptic mathematics showering ambiguous shrapnel all around him. Though his questioning is undertaken in earnest, it is also darkly hilarious—ironic and biting in its unrelenting honesty, sharply devastating in its unsolvable futility. Larry’s tribulations are, like A Serious Man as a whole, tonally paradoxical, both emotionally-lacerating and cackle-inducing—as ambivalent as the uncertain universe its characters populate.


This elusive universe is best interpreted according to two complimentary quantum concepts discussed by Larry in his lectures: the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The first is a thought experiment revolving around the indeterminacy of atomic particles, specifically the unpredictability of radioactive decay. Schrödinger explained that if a cat were locked in a box with a device that released a tiny amount of radioactive substance that could cause atomic decay (but might not), after a certain amount of time, the cat could theoretically be either alive or dead. Because the decay is unpredictable, one could not know for certain. In this instance, with the box locked, the cat is both alive and dead, demonstrating the quantum concept of superposition—the overlapping coexistence of multiple outcomes/realities—in concrete, macrocosmic terms. The cat is not either living or dead; it is both. That is, until one opens the box.

There are, however, some boxes that cannot be opened. Their contents remain immeasurable. Larry’s trials constitute such a “box,” and, as Heisenberg suggests in his uncertainty principle, as he seems to begin comprehending some aspects of the universe, the others retreat from his grasp with ferocious intensity. Nothing can be pinned down for sure. It is always shifting, always indefinite. This is the reality of A Serious Man.

The film’s bizarre prologue establishes the nature of the narrative’s ambiguous circumstances before Larry even appears onscreen. A 15-minute Jewish parable taking place in 19th Century Poland, A Serious Man’s introductory scene depicts the eerie experience a curmudgeonly couple has with what is either a man or a dybbuk (demon) masquerading as a man. The husband (Allen Lewis Rickman), who has offered the entity (Fyvush Finkel) entrance into his home in order to repay its previous kindness, believes it to be human, a local acquaintance. His wife (Yelena Shmulenson) is convinced it is a dybbuk, citing evidence that the man in question is three years dead. The husband remains skeptical.


As they debate, the entity remains seated in a chair, until, suddenly, the wife stabs it through the heart with an ice pick. The entity’s reaction is curious. At first, it does not bleed; it merely chuckles. The wife notes the lack of blood. Suddenly, red begins staining the entity’s shirt, rippling out from the wound. Befuddled and bleeding, the entity leaves into the snowy cold, remarking that it knows when it is unwelcome. Horrified, the husband worries what will happen when the body is found in the morning, feeling his wife has committed murder. Confidently, the wife remarks that she has merely forced evil out of the house. The entity is presented as both man and dybbuk. The Coens leave the box unopened.

Despite a few clichéd moments, a couple of bland dream sequences, and a handful of unnecessarily canted angles, A Serious Man proves to be an intriguing entry in the Coens’ oeuvre. Like Job, Larry and the viewer never receive an answer to the persistent “why?”

All that is displayed in the awesomely destructive power of the universe/Hashem/uncertainty, epitomized by A Serious Man’s stunningly unexpected conclusion. Whether one is a pot-smoking teenager, like Larry’s good-for-nothing son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), or a whacked-out numerological quack, like Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), the universe remains incalculable, even with the assistance of Danny’s marijuana or Arthur’s garbled prophecy, The Mentaculus.

No solution is stable. Threats await in the form of racist neighbors, bullies, unfulfilled sexual liaisons, car crashes, subscription scams, lawsuits, anonymous defamatory letters, natural disasters, and x-ray results only delivered in-person. Though Larry is “trying to be” a serious man, he is left dangling over an abyss of obscurity, just like the viewer. There is only uncertainty; and, perhaps, even that is uncertain.

B
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Supernatural Anti-Sex Education

by Chuck Williamson

A crude amalgamation of supernatural soap opera, neo-gothic rape fantasy, and fundamentalist abstinence parable, the Twilight franchise has continually been the source of mixed cultural signals. New Moon, the second installment of this inexplicable pop-cultural phenomenon, is no exception, tempering its chaste adolescent romanticism—full of love triangles, teen angst, and pseudo-poetic exposition—with sadomasochistic kink, coded threats of sexual violence, and authoritarian alpha male posturing. But don’t get too hot and bothered. Directed by certified franchise killer Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass), New Moon recasts its supernatural boyfriend bugaboos as fundamentalist gospel, dishing out the secularized death/sex abstinence tropes in LiveJournal-lite soundbites. “Every second that I’m with you is about restraint,” predatorial dreamboat Edward Cullen (Robert Pattison) exposits, “And you’re too fragile.” For Bella (Kristen Stewart), the central dilemma is simple: keep your damn pants on or you’ll be the main course of a vampire buffet (a sexy buffet). A tangled knot of sub/dom discourses intermixed with reactionary anti-sex rhetoric, New Moon acknowledges female erotic pleasures only to disavow them, propping up its phantasmagoric romance on a broken edifice.


But none of this is particularly new. Designed to trigger a specific spectatorial response, the audible gasping, squealing, and cooing of an obsessive fanbase, New Moon hashes out the same promise of female pleasure offered in the films of Rudolph Valentino. Marketed by studios as the silent screen’s “great Latin lover,” Valentino occupied the dual position of erotic spectacle and sexual aggressor. The Sheik (1921), for instance, spiced up its orientalist fantasy by casting Valentino as the object of erotic exhibition, a preternaturally handsome serial rapist who casts bedeviling looks at the shrieking female fanbase. And like the sparkle-vamps and teen-wolves of New Moon, Valentino narrowed the gap between discipline and pleasure, stomping toward his resistant female prey for a little nonconsensual, fade-to-black hanky-panky (that, as the next scene suggests, she really enjoyed). This sadomasochistic quality is made even more transparent in The Eagle (1925), where Valentino, decked out in BDSM fetish gear, gestures at his female detainee with a riding whip—before his code against flogging women forces him to verbally humiliate her instead (predictably, she kinda digs it). But this authoritarian attitude eventually subsides when true love stops Valentino right in his tracks, sending him into a euphoric paralysis that only the look of his lover (and that fanatical female audience) might break.

As in the films of Valentino, New Moon dispenses its predictable, paper-thin plot in dull, expository chunks, focusing more of its energies on erotic spectacle. Romantic interludes, punctuated by snatches of purple prose and forced exposition, are staged as a slipshod mix gothic chamber drama and Tiger Beat photo spread, replaying the same one note ad nauseam as the camera doles out the two-tons-of-hunk money shots. Ooooh, mantastic! Nearly every “big moment” between Bella and Edward is preceded and/or followed by forward-tracking shots and slo-mo effects designed to accentuate our fang-faced beau’s super-sexy-cool mystique. Pattinson’s performance intermixes Byronic moping with teen idol modeling, and the camera eagerly frames his body in a staged series of theatrical tableaus that could double as a centerfold (check out the scene where he takes off his shirt—raaawr!). When the focus shifts from Edward to Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), the framing becomes less affected and more visceral; the camera lingers on his semi-nude body and details its every inch in fetishistic detail (the scene where he lopes about shirtless through the rain sends all the prepubescent hearts aflutter). While these sequences momentarily interrupt narrative progression (particularly since the noise of screaming tweens drowns out most of the dialogue), a bit of sadomasochistic lip service always snaps us back in shape. Like Valentino, the New Moon boys have to negotiate between their compromised (possibly effeminized) statuses as erotic objects and narrative roles as authoritarian bullies. Behind the veiled threats of sexual abuse and domestic violence (of which we see physical evidence) lurk a desire to dominate their twitchy, blank slate love interest who, by the time she becomes the world’s most inert adrenaline junkie, seems to get off on victimhood.


But even Valentino, for all his authrotiarian-meets-androgyne posturing, never wasted his time with promise rings and monologues about self-control. The paranormal heartthrobs of New Moon might steal a page or two from the Valentino handbook, but their neutered, anti-pleasure waffling makes them far less interesting as cinematic sex symbols. Like many of Valentino’s films, New Moon is a bloated, lifeless bore that succeeds only as female fantasy. But don’t let the film’s forced references to Romeo & Juliet fool you—its low-stakes love story is about as convincing as a stop-motion animation made out of crayons, poster board, and teen mag cut-outs. Pattinson and Stewart stumble into frame like dead-eyed somnambulists, regurgitating their prosaic, pseudo-poetic dialogue in bullet-points—and even though this limp spectacle does nothing for outsiders, the Twi-hards go wild. Carrying on the torch passed on from the Cult of Valentino, Teams Edward and Jacob seem to care less about the film’s quality than the promise of fantasy role-play, where forbidden pleasures can be indulged through the act of film spectatorship.

But New Moon eleventh-hour disavowal of female pleasure complicates this spectatorial engagement. As the film’s pro-abstinence subtext culminates in a full-on marriage proposal (and the crowd goes wild!), Bella sinks further and further into the backdrop and becomes little more than a prop used by Edward to prove his virtue and integrity. So much for sexual gratification — to quote Beyonce, “If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it.” Say what you will about Valentino, but at least he followed through with his promise of torrid and illicit pleasure. New Moon, on the other hand, goes from female-focused smut to after-school special.

But what the hell do I know? This movie was not made for me.

D+
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Disaster (On Your Mind)

by James Hansen

Pull back the knives! Richard Kelly, known in certain circles as THE GREATEST DIRECTOR OF ALL TIME and in others as an inexplicably successful hack job, is back again with The Box, which should be known as the third film in Richard Kelly’s Melodramatic Menage-A-Trois Sci-fi Extravaganza. With just three movies under his directorial belt, Kelly is three for three in tackling the end of the world by looking at the people who can save us, the people who can’t, and the people who contemplate disaster on the sidelines. While Donnie Darko’s parabolic singularity found new hope, Southland Tales (and The Box) illustrate a collaborative mish-mash of a society-enabling snap-crackle-apocalypse that swarms the earth faster than a D-list celebrity porn star flashes her box on reality TV.

If both Southland Tales and The Box ultimately suffer from an overly explanatory mode of address – Southland Tales in its final third, The Box a little more consistently throughout – it is only because Kelly actually has something to say. Perhaps movies with musical interludes and a Swimming Pool Transit Authority have no right to feature finales that drench overwhelming seriousness onto thin moral lessons, but Kelly seems to disagree. As the dead man standing on the corner or the boy looking through a window, Kelly makes it clear that the world is a vampire sent to drain the better homes and gardens of an objectivist mass culture without rationality.


The Box, based on the short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, delivers an impending sense of dread throughout its opening half when the recently deformed Arlington Steward offers a box with a bright red button to Norma and Arthur Lewis. Norma, a prep school teacher seen teaching Sartre’s No Exit before being asked to display her deformed foot to the class, and Arthur, a wanna-be NASA astronaut who flunks his psych exams, have a moral dilemma placed on their dining room table like it was Thanksgiving dinner. Push the button, get a million dollars and someone in the world will die. Can hell be other people if you don’t know the other people? Once the button is pushed – hence the box opened – hell remains broken loose for the entirety of the second half, as the conspiracy and trappings of the box and its associative systems becomes entangled with what seems to be entire human race.

Starting with gobbly-gook water portals run by “The People Who Control The Lightning,” Steward’s associates, looking for some good in the world, run morality tests with the box and stand by perpetuating the cycle until the humans have literally killed each other. Nothing subtle here, especially in the screenplay (“This is purgatory, isn’t it!!??”), but the moral quandary isn’t something to toss off so easily. The digital cinematography, operating as an hourglass peering into a forgotten, immoral world, echoes the period distinction, yet also allows for a hallucinogenic time warp (almost literally), which brings the distinctly past moments into the hyper-modern foray of a chaotic, uroborotic society seen in Southland Tales.


If The Box is less assured than Southland Tales – and I’m not sure it is – it may be that Kelly, for the first time, is dealing with real people and the morality that operates in a supposedly normally functioning society. (Donnie Darko does this to some extent, but its prophetization makes it troubling; Southland Tales may highlight a post-world world overtaken by modern trends and obsessions, but its deep connections to satire position it an a different context). This is a both a strength and a weakness, as Kelly tries to keeps it “real” but leaves his characters a bit too broad, which has resulted in some of the backlash, not to mention that this movie is actually bat-shit crazy making any goal of realism pretty far off target. But, then again, Kelly is a pimp… and pimps don’t commit suicide. Kelly is pushing the viewer against the grain (and himself against the critical community), for better or worse, but it’s all to keep us, and himself, alive. It’s another grand swing from Kelly who, for the third time, might be biting off more than he can chew. But he’s still biting...hard.
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Short Film You Must See: "We Were Once A Fairytale" (Spike Jonze, 2009)

See the film here

by Brandon Colvin

It is the second collaboration between Spike Jonze and Kanye West.

It is a portrait of the artist as a forlorn failure, a charismatic creep, a self-hating superstar.

It is a feverish, fickle-focused fiction about fantasy, fucked-upness, and frustration.

It is a dreamlike documentary of digital-age debauchery, of a drunken dude in debonair duds desperately clinging to the final shards of his identity.

It is auto-tuned lyrics, cultural convergence, and sweating strangers shrugging off the awkward advances of a semi-suicidal, seppuku-committing icon of media megalomania.

It is NewTube.

It is a performer performing a performance of himself as a performer performing.

It is Kanye’s stilted slurrings and their amateur-professional truth.

It is the dancefloor tears that slyly suggest both autobiography and shameless solipsism.

It is confetti blood.

It is Godard.

It is a seriously shocking ending, for once.

It is the sincerity in such an ending, for once.

It is what I expect from the director of Adaptation.

It is a poem.

It is easily one of the best films of 2009.

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Short Films You Must See: "Jennifer" (Stewart Copeland, 2009)

by James Hansen

Winner of Best Mini Doc at the 2009 Big Sky Documentary Festival and showing tomorrow evening as part of PBS's acclaimed POV Series, Jennifer explores director Stewart Copeland's relationship with his mother in both actuality and memory. Using a conversation between his mother's eighth-grade students and astronauts on the international space station, Copeland uses space as a purveyor of indescribable distance – both between the students and the astronauts, the living world and whatever else is out there, and Copeland and his mother. Wonderfully including segments of stop-motion animation of astronauts in space, Copeland shows that, while some things cannot be seen, anyone who is looking closely can still hear, feel, and love some thing, or someone, who may not be physically present. Managing a dialectic between the audio and visual components, Jennifer plays with not only Copeland's relationship to this personal film, but illustrates and challenges the spectator's relationship with Copeland, the rest of the audience, and the film experience itself. Beautifully rendered, quietly elegant, and subtly complex, Jennifer is a wonderful film and announces Copeland as a major talent to watch.

For more on Copeland and Jennifer, come back here tomorrow for an interview with the filmmaker. You can also visit Copeland's website for more information on his past, present, and future work. Jennifer will show with the feature Bronx Princess and another short So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away on September 22nd at 10 PM on PBS.

Jennifer from Stewart Copeland on Vimeo.

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Tracking Connections

Then comes the separation...

Starting and ending with a set of winding, never-ending, ever-connected train tracks, Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum, more than anything else, seeks to elide the emotional, physical, and psychical distances between the people and places who establish irreversible connections within their own communities. The problematic distances or connections extend from the smallest kitchen to a dark hallway and flooding into the vibrant streets of an effervescent city. 35 Shots of Rum, at its best, beautifully captures the deeper impact of these subtle, spare moments by providing an equally scant soundtrack that intensifies and underscores the small, yet deeply critical decisions that could have a resounding impact on the challenged interpersonal networks of family, community, and city. While the film is occasionally self-defeating in overstating already excessively literal moments, Denis’ formal control rules the day as it propels a quiet power by displaying the grace and poise so central to the success of the film’s core concepts.


All that love, all that effort in order to rise to the task, to achieve this equilibrium...

35 Shots of Rum follows the lives of Lionel, a metro conductor, and his daughter Josephine, a university student who still lives with him in a small apartment. Also entering the equation are respective love interests – Gabrielle, a longtime neighbor and ex of Lionel’s, and Noe, a neighbor who is interested in Josephine. Just as the train tracks bend and wind in, out, and around the city, so too do the characters move within each other’s lives. Lionel and Josephine have begun to move in different directions, as the role of father and young daughter begins to morph into individual dependency and the need to move...somewhere.


But now you’re leaving me to live your own life, says the father to himself. Allow me, please, allow me to breathe easy a little longer at your side, thinks the daughter.

Clinging to one another, although at a dead lock in the home, exemplified by a battle of home appliances, Lionel and Josephine trouble themselves more by not allowing anyone into their family network. They have become closed off, despite the open space and opportunity around them. Denis plays with this relationship in the screenplay and the formalism by often stuffing the frame with bodies, heads, and...stuff. This visual battle is countered by fractions of light, the splitting of the train tracks, and the literal spaces between the characters in specific moments. As they simultaneously cling to one another and discover the need for separation, 35 Shots of Rum becomes a film about love in all its forms.


The father: I believe my future withered as you grew. And I held firm, I did my best.
The daughter: Will I be loved as much as you love me?

If the warmth and depth of 35 Shots of Rum is any indication, Denis is addressing this question throughout the film and uncovering the answer for all of us: a definitive yes.

B

Quotations part of Claire Denis's Directors Note.

Images courtesy The Cinema Guild.
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Land and See

by James Hansen

Balancing on the precipice between the art house film and observational avant-garde experiments, Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool seems to fit in these widespread traditions and still manages to find a space of its own. If Los Muertos is an older conceptual cousin to The Limits of Control, as I proposed earlier this week, Liverpool feels like a strange mixture of Peter Hutton’s At Sea and Gus Van Sant’s Last Days – at once slow and difficult, but also viscerally absorbing and, strangely enough, intellectually modest. The balance between the worlds and methods that are in play throughout a long 84 minutes underscore a dialectic that Alonso is constantly working through. Liverpool challenges itself, and the audience, with finding new spaces for fulfillment – a space somewhere between home and the sea, art house and avant garde, simplicity and complication, acceptance and denial, persistence and reciprocation – and it succeeds.


Although its formalism may still be challenging and inaccessible to some, Liverpool’s purpose, similar in fashion to Hutton and Van Sant’s films, is hard to miss and more familiar than most give them credit for. Each film can be “explained” with short statements or ideas (the life and times of a ship, the brief life of a trapped rock legend, the life of a lonely seaman) that have been key to a wide array of successful movies. But, of course, the formalism is what makes all of these films “difficult” and perplexing for audiences desiring classification of an accrued “meaning” behind everything that is seen, heard, and felt.

Taking these challenges a step further, Liverpool’s first 82 minutes, which have plenty of beauty on their own, are all arguably a set up for the final shot. The attempts to make short summations of purpose or label Liverpool as a supreme art house film in critical attempts to inform the “intended” audience only end up undercutting Alonso’s continuing attempts to craft a controlled hybrid of difficult simplicity and lucid arduousness which play off of the contradictory relationship between overly modest narratology (a man returning home) and long-take, observational formalism. Liverpool’s ability to nail this delicate balance, illustrated by the incredible pay off of that final shot – perhaps the only shot in the film with much dramatic impetus behind it – is a major accomplishment for the continuing development of Alonso’s work as an artist.

In discussion of the final shot in his 5-star review, Keith Uhlich writes, “Like everything else in this enigmatic masterpiece, the image resonates with myriad metaphorical possibilities. Yet the more we look, the harder its meanings are to pin down.” Just as the Liverpool ends and a clarification process begins to take shape, Alonso opens up the possibilities further, deepening the impact with something that is beautiful, direct, and simple yet bewildering, stirring, and thoughtful. Liverpool is Alonso’s finest achievement to date.

B+
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Tarantino: A Funny Ole Basterd

by Brandon Colvin

Critics, audiences, and QT himself have been locked in a nice, hot argument about Inglourious Basterds for weeks now. Punchy quotes, accusations, and defenses are flying like hurled Nazi scalps. Some of the least eloquent of these come from some of my favorite writers, and even Tarantino seems to dig himself a few holes in professing his love of this 70s revenge film or that unseen Jacques Tourneur WWII flick. Everyone, for better or worse, is chiming in. Few, however, are speaking for me. So, here I go.


Quentin Tarantino is not a fascist. Inglourious Basterds does not amount to Holocaust denial. Though influenced by the likes of Sergio Leone (among MANY others), it is not a self-serious epic in the vein of Once Upon a Time in the West. It is not a theoretical meditation on cinema’s ability to defeat Nazis. It is also not the best or worst film of the year; however, it might be the most controversial (sorry, Lars). One major reason – aside from the violence – for the film’s intense debatability is that it is not quite what was expected. Indeed, the most shocking and apparently befuddling aspect of Basterds is that the film’s closest relatives – cinematically and politically – are Ernst Lubitsch and Shaun of the Dead.

That’s right, it’s a comedy.

When the end credits were rolling for Basterds, my sides were hurting from laughter and my first thought was, “Tarantino must really love Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.” Both Basterds and the 1940s classic comedy are WWII satires centering on a group of individuals practicing in an artistic medium (film in the former, theatre in the latter), and are full of intrigue, espionage, and wit. Both narratives make Nazis – especially Hitler – into laughable buffoons and feature charismatic heroes who endure some seriously genre-bending tense moments en route to memorably chaotic climaxes that take place in elaborate theaters full of Hitler’s finest fascists. Nobody accuses Lubitsch of complicity in political horrors as a result of his irreverent and playful Nazi farce, and if Tarantino’s film were construed by more to be what it is – a light, humorous, post-modern extravaganza – it might be receiving a bit more positive attention from cranky critics determined to paint Basterds into an ideological corner. Undermining Nazis with gags and cartoonish exaggeration doesn’t mean QT is not taking them seriously. It means he is attacking them with one of the most fatal cultural weapons – laughter, a la the likes of Stephen Colbert, whose routine mocking has had more impact on the American political climate than the actions of most senators.


“But the gore! It’s too gross and bloody to be funny! It’s just offensive.” To point out the fallibility of this opinion and to highlight Basterds’ similarly-toned contemporary, I cite a film that QT has repeatedly declared to be one of his favorites, even heralding it as the “greatest British film of the past 20 years”: Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead. Amidst the shootouts, forehead carvings, face smashings, and numerous scalpings, Inglourious Basterds remains stocked with pastiche, physical comedy, zinging one-liners, and all forms of irony, achieving a blend of visceral violence and humor only rivaled by the original “zombedy” and Wright’s other film, Hot Fuzz. Tarantino and Wright are like-minded in their allusion-heavy, cinema-centric approach to intertextual post-modern storytelling and their fusion-based comedies could be grouped into a recent wave of deliberately transgeneric works that refuse to be reined in by conventional approaches to tone and structure – namely homogeneity – replacing them with a difficult-to-taxonomize multitudinous mish mash that hybrids the artful and the exploitative, revealing them both to contain elements of the other (certainly Grindhouse would be included in this group). In creating a film so tonally unusual about a subject typically treated with immense gravity, Tarantino has done something bold and fresh, something in the spirit of two great comedies from Lubitsch and Wright


This is not to say Inglourious Basterds is without flaws. A handful of the scenes seem as if they could benefit from truncation – particularly the protracted finale – and from time to time Tarantino takes risks that fall a little flat (the voiceover narration from Sam Jackson during the Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) interlude). However, in addition to its comic effectiveness, Basterds milks its dramatic possibilities through dialogue that is as intense as it is hysterical and set-ups that allow actors Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, and Michael Fassbender to shine in their respective roles as Nazi Col. Hans Landa a.k.a. “The Jew Hunter,” southern-born Basterds-leader Lt. Aldo Raine, undercover Jew/cinematic terrorist Shosanna Dreyfus, and British spy/former film critic Lt. Archie Cox. Tarantino’s usual cinematic bravado is certainly there and his quirkiness is in full-force. All of these aspects of Basterds have been explored more effectively by others in recent weeks, and, appropriately, gaining an understanding of the movie might require reading all of the diverging opinions and analyses. (I would direct interested readers to Jim Emerson’s Scanners for a more comprehensive overview of the film’s impact, reception, and significance). In lieu of an all-encompassing examination of Inglourious Basterds – something I would love to begin if I had a book to write – I’ll leave this review to mainly serve as another voice, one that sees the funny side.
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(Don't) Walk This Way

by James Hansen

As any avid moviegoer recognizes, it can be frustrating when you sit down for a movie and within ten or fifteen minutes know exactly where its going, what it will do, and the point its going to make. Of course, along the way, things can be subverted and toyed with, which is why genre “weaknesses” and three act script structure alone are never the only vices of a movie, and the movie can give itself some kind of life. Just because you hear Japanese Family Drama shouldn’t mean the movie is a moot point. Unfortunately, this is the case with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s (After Life, Distance, Nobody Knows) new film Still Walking – a film that does plenty of things well, but never comes close to overcoming its transparency and, insodoing, becomes a bore.


Still Walking revolves around the Yokoyama family. Ryota, a recently unemployed art restorer, has recently married a widow, Yukari, who has a ten-year old son. They are making a rare trip home to visit Ryota’s aging parents on the fifteenth anniversary of his eldest brother’s death. Uncomfortable around his father, a retired, very respected local doctor, Ryota is searching for his place in both families, as both a son, husband, and parent.

From the onset, and to its favor, Still Walking’s low-key, classic style addresses its modest expectations, and shows, as Kore-eda says in his director’s statement for the film, that “there are no typhoons in this film.” Taking this subtle approach, Still Walking is playing in the simple, tender territory that Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s uneven Tokyo Sonata powerfully ends on. The hushed, nuanced emotion is played well by each of the actors and actresses. Trouble is, the “subtle” formalism is made significantly less so by the directness with which it deals with issues, such as generational difference (cue the edits from old hands preparing foods to younger people on trains playing on Iphones and handheld video games; line up the hospital coming in to overtake the local doctor struggling to still do his job).


This is one of many instances where the somber attitude is made loud by these instantly recognizable tropes. Moreover, Still Walking ends with a terribly unnecessary, self-defeating coda, announced by the first bit of voice over in the entire film. This divulgence highlights the attempted subtlety of the rest of the film, but also forces one to question where such an overwrought decision came from. All though this misstep may seem from out of nowhere, the small missteps are planted throughout the film which makes the bigger misfire at the end all the more unsurprising. Coming after what was the predictable, if more satisfying, should-be ending of the three generations taking “the walk” together, the actual ending puts the heavy-handed stamp of disapproval all over the rest of the film.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on another near-end-of-life life-affirming film, as some have suggested I have been on a rhetorically similar film yet to be officially released. While Still Walking is still leagues above that film, its so see through everything in it just felt perfunctory. Although it does feature some strong performances, Kore-eda is treading familiar ground for the viewers and himself. Even though this film may be more deeply personal for him (both his parents have passed away in the last few years), there is nothing here cinematically that translates those feelings anyway differently than we’ve seen or felt more strongly before. As life goes on, we all have to keep moving in whichever way life leads us. Check, please.

C+
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