3 Women (d. Robert Altman, USA, 1977) A
Altman's dreamlike masterpiece seems to have been a huge influence on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive; at the very least, both movies have overlapping interests in the blurring of identity and the transformative power of sexual desire. 3 Women steams ahead on a wave of propulsive dream logic; more important than narrative causality is how the characters' passions and delusions manifest themselves in amorphous, surreal fashion. Many oneiric films such as this are ultimately hampered by their complete lack of characterization (see Beyond the Black Rainbow below), but 3 Women treats its titular trio respectfully; Millie (Shelley Duvall) and Pinky (Sissy Spacek), and to a lesser extent Willie (Janice Rule), are all fully-fledged characters whose camera-friendly quirks also offer fleeting insight into their veiled psychologies. Benefiting from the sort of unfettered production background that's practically unheard of in Hollywood (Altman reportedly pitched the idea after dreaming it all up while his wife was ill in the hospital; producer Alan Ladd, Jr., provided funding and final cut without a screenplay ever being written), 3 Women transplants Altman's typical roaming camera (the cinematographer here was Chuck Rosher), overlapping soundtrack (enlivened by Gerald Busby's bizarre musical score), and genre-bending narratives to immersive dream territory, and the results are hypnotic.
Shoeshine (d. Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946) B+
Made two years before Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine might be deemed a trial run for De Sica and writer Cesare Zavattini's subsequent collaboration: this film displays the neorealist interest in the everyday lives of lower-class Italians following World War II, yet was shot mostly on studio sets and has a narrative familiar from numerous prison melodramas of the 1930s. (In addition to a prison riot, tyrannical guards, and a climactic escape, even the cellmates are an ensemble of cliches, from the sleazy bully to the bespectacled bookworm.) But it's unfair to compare Shoeshine to De Sica's later, more idiosyncratic films, especially when it's so achingly, humanely sincere. Pasquale and Giuseppe are two young boys eking out a living by shining foreign soldiers' shoes on the streets of Rome; their unbreakable friendship is endangered when they're embroiled in a black market scheme, imprisoned in a jail for juvenile delinquents, and ultimately turned against each other by an indifferent penal system. The story offers an unsettling parallel to Italy's wartime fascism, as young innocents are forced to rat on their loved ones by callous forces of law and order, and the damning processes of greed and xenophobia inure Giuseppe and Pasquale to a world of barbaric cruelty. At times the film is too polished and relies too heavily on cliches to be as emotional as it wants to be, but the ending is an undeniable tearjerker, and the young actors who play the protagonists (Franco Interlenghi and Rinaldo Smordoni) offer an effective portrait of sublime youth tarnished by a bleak world.
Prometheus (d. Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2012) D+
So there are these inscriptions throughout human history that seem to point towards a planet called Prometheus. This may be the same place where, at the start of Prometheus, we see a mysterious creature ingest an oyster-like object that proceeds to tear him apart from the inside. Millennia later, a crew of scientists and space explorers voyage to Prometheus, hoping to find the birthplace of the human race. They're funded by the Weyland Corporation (the same conglomerate that instigated the space missions in the original Alien movies), whose CEO may or may not be dead and who could have started the mission with ulterior motives in mind, and who may have a secret relationship with the Prometheus mission director. With me so far? None of this has anything to do with the original Alien franchise, which is fine in theory; what's unfortunate is that Prometheus sets up a handful of intriguing questions only to ruin them all with inconclusive cliffhangers, overelaborate CGI that begs for your attention, some of the worst dialogue ever spouted by a great cast, and a general visual drabness that provides little distraction from the increasingly by-the-numbers plot. In other words, everything great about the first three (yes, three) Alien movies is missing from this "prequel" (or spinoff, or whatever they're calling it). A self-performed abortion, while as ludicrous as it sounds, at least provides a memorable and thrilling setpiece, but for the most part Prometheus is surprisingly tepid; if only it had had the courage of its initially ambitious convictions.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (d. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1975) A
I finally got around to seeing Akerman's celebrated, meticulously controlled study in gender politics; rather than being underwhelmed due to unrealistic expectations (as sometimes happens when catching up with universally-heralded masterpieces), I ultimately asked myself why I hadn't leapt at the chance to see the movie earlier. Jeanne Dielman's release in 1975 coincided with concurrent waves in durational modernism and overt feminism: Akerman's film uses a rigorous long-take setup (in which the camera's static compositions seem to trap Jeanne as inescapably as her domestic milieu) to eviscerate preconceptions about women's role in society. Drawing upon memories of her mother and grandmother observing precise routines in an observant Jewish household, Akerman plots out Jeanne's menial chores precisely; the first hour of the movie is dedicated to immersing us in her everyday existence, so when things start to unravel (as they do around the 100-minute mark) it unsettles us with unexpected intensity. Given its emphasis on tedium and its 200-minute running time, some may claim that "nothing happens" in Jeanne Dielman; actually, though, we're bearing witness to the unraveling of one woman's sanity, and it's both hypnotic and highly disturbing.
Assault on Precinct 13 (d. John Carpenter, 1976, USA) B–
Carpenter gets my vote for one of the most underappreciated auteurs in mainstream American film (The Fog in particular is about as painterly as horror movies get), but Assault on Precinct 13 demonstrates the director's narrative efficiency without any of his later compositional prowess or offhand surrealism. (True, this was only his second feature after Dark Star, so Carpenter was undoubtedly still honing his skills.) Reportedly given full creative license as long as he stayed within a minuscule budget, Carpenter realized he couldn't carry out his ideal project – a remake of Rio Bravo (which was directed by Carpenter's idol, Howard Hawks) – so he updated the classic Western to a dilapidated, nearly-abandoned police station in a Los Angeles ghetto. A murderous gang bombards the precinct in order to avenge the killing of one of their members; inside, a laconic lieutenant, two female workers, and a handful of prisoners mid-transport try to fend off the assailants. The protagonists are a mix of white, black, male, and female, but it's still baffling that this movie is lauded for its diversity: the murderous gang outside is clearly comprised solely of Hispanics and East Asians. Furthermore, the stock characterizations and pithy one-liners – while amusing in campier Carpenter films, like Big Trouble in Little China and They Live – don't mesh well with the movie's gritty evocation of a racially turbulent war-zone. But Carpenter's ability to make the most of his tiny budgets (at least until the success of his follow-up movie, Halloween) remains impressive (the scenes in which the gang bombards the station, zombie-like, are thrillingly effective) and the movie gets a stranglehold on your attention with an early murder scene that remains one of the most genuinely shocking in film history.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (d. Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012) B
Believe it or not, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is even more preposterous than its title makes it sound: turns out slavery was a massive conspiracy undertaken by vampires who relied upon slaves for fresh meat, and who saw the abolitionists as a threat to their survival. Gleefully rewriting history with the zeal of Tarantino, it's disconcerting (to say the least) how the movie turns the institution of slavery into fodder for Hollywood's next high-concept SFX extravaganza. And yet, it's hard to deny that the movie recognizes how films turn history (and/or reality) into mythology; if we're being kind, we can even find evidence that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter draws intentional correlations between the act of bloodsucking and the development of American "democracy," making the point that this country arose out of the blood of innocents (the animation over the end credits makes this point succinctly; it's worth the price of admission alone). The pleasure may not be all guilty, then...but it mostly is; for better or worse, this is the most brazenly ridiculous Hollywood movie you'll see all year. Thankfully no one involved in the project seemed to realize how absurd it was, or at least didn't let on: there's no ironic Snakes on a Plane-style winking at the audience, which allows the movie to excel in its own bombastic way.
Elena (d. Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2012) B+
With slow-burning intensity a family unravels: a stoic patriarch alters his will, revealing the ruptures and unexpected empathies between himself, his cynical yet emotionally honest daughter, his distant wife, and her deadbeat family. Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev (The Return), who some say is Russia's modern heir to Tarkovsky, Elena is hardly a political treatise but it still works as a sobering depiction of how capitalism's emphasis on greed and self-preservation can turn individuals against each other. The movie doesn't exactly have a bleeding heart – the ensemble is observed with clinical, observational detachment, and the lower-class characters are a bit too simplistically malicious – but that doesn't prevent the film from ending with an emotional wallop. If nothing else, the movie demonstrates what will probably be the best cinematography of the year (courtesy of Mikhail Krichman); the opening and closing shots, which act as subversive bookends, are especially astounding.
Beyond the Black Rainbow (d. Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 2012) C
I actively wanted to like Beyond the Black Rainbow before I even sat down to watch it: the trailer promised something like a bad LSD trip, a surreal, mind-bending pseudo-story that prioritized dreamlike images over narrative cohesion. I usually go for that sort of thing (sometimes against my better judgment), but sadly Beyond the Black Rainbow reminds us that even the trippiest film-as-nightmare needs solid ideas, relatable characters, or at least a sort of ethereal grace to hold our attention. (The Holy Mountain, Mulholland Dr., and Un chien Andalou, for example, are great not just for their surreal imagery but for what else they offer us: beauty, complexity, heartache, tantalizing mystery.) In some ways Cosmatos' debut sustains Canadian film's legacy of forward-thinking innovations that exist somewhere between narrative and experimental cinema, between genre templates and free-flowing dream imagery, between pop and the avant-garde (previously practiced by David Cronenberg and Guy Maddin, among others). Give the movie credit for eschewing filmmaking conventions, and for providing the most horrific and unshakable image I've seen so far in 2012 (as far as I can tell, it involves a man climbing into a vat of oil, witnessing the face of God, and decaying into carrion until his body somehow reassembles itself). But there are only a few such awe-inspiring moments; the bulk of the movie is comprised of monotonous dialogue (conveyed via dead-eyed performances that seem to reaffirm that the characters and whatever they say don't really mean all that much) and contradictory references to both '80s slasher films and more surreal abstractions (including avant-garde masterpieces such as Dog Star Man and The Exquisite Hour). Call it a failed but noble experiment, though it's one that suggests fascinating things to come from Cosmatos.
The Sacrifice (d. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/UK/France, 1986) B–
A lesser film by Tarkovsky is still better than most other directors' works, but there's no denying that The Sacrifice, for all of its magisterial imagery, winds up a bit disappointing. Filmed on the Swedish isle of Fårö (where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked), with Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist and one of his frequent actors, Erland Josephson, The Sacrifice does in fact seem like a middle-ground between the two auteurs: Tarkovsky's austere imagery (comprised of abstract memories and dreams, gracefully-composed long takes, and the employment of numerous planes of action in one shot) and philosophical ambiguities are still in full force, but with lengthier monologues and, perhaps, an earthier fascination with tenuous human relationships, both reminiscent of Bergman. The film's drawn-out dialogue sequences involving Nietzsche, Shakespeare, science, morality, war, and Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi" are as weighty as they sound, but the philosophies they espouse may be less eye-opening than they presume to be: ultimately, the movie's message may be that a faithless, self-centered modern world may already be doomed to apocalypse, a concept that's certainly worth articulating but may not be particularly multifaceted. In any case, Tarkovsky's command of visual language is astounding as always, and certain scenes (such as the apparent onset of World War III and the resulting views of a city street obliterated by nuclear holocaust) are impossible to forget.
