tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78203049271606623392024-02-07T23:55:25.691-06:00Phantom LightningMatt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-29529648894908349152013-08-13T15:31:00.001-05:002013-08-13T15:31:31.162-05:00Screening Log, June & July 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>The Act of Killing </b><i>(d. Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn & Anonymous, Denmark/Norway/UK, 2013) </i><b>A</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Devastating, complex documentary is aesthetically innovative </span>and psychologically haunting: it's one of the rare documentaries as fascinating formally as for its subject matter, and if it doesn't quite supply us with a wealth of contextualizing historical information, that might be because the film is more interested in grappling with the eternal question of genocide than with one of its particular manifestations. Oppenheimer, a London-based filmmaker, collaborates with two Indonesian co-directors (including one who, fearing reprisals from the current government, remains anonymous) in revisiting an unthinkable period in the country's history: the murder of more than half a million “Communists” (often simply labeled as such by their executioners) in 1965-66, after President Sukarno was ousted by his successor, Suharto, in a violent coup. The filmmakers' approach is ingenious: they ask a number of the original executioners (many of whom continue to hold positions of importance in the government) to reenact their genocide in whichever cinematic style they choose, as an attempt to understand how and why they still boast about their brutality with repugnant candor. These “gangsters” from Northern Sumatra profess their love for Hollywood movies, modeling themselves after Marlon Brando and John Wayne and styling their reenactments after their favorite genres: Westerns, musicals, gangster and horror pictures. We predominantly follow Anwar Congo, who murdered close to 1,000 people by strangling them with wire: a seemingly monstrous yet ambiguous character, he cheerfully recounts his sadistic reign and the formation of the corrupt, violent paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila (which continues to extort Chinese expats and induct children into its murderous campaigns), yet he also breaks down when he portrays one of his own victims in a reenactment and (in an unforgettably disturbing scene) dry-heaves interminably while visiting one of his execution sites. How are human beings capable of such unthinkable brutality? And can that overwhelming violence ever be truthfully conveyed onscreen, when cinematic mediation always partially retains an element of dissociation? These are the unanswerable questions the movie tackles, and it does so with astonishing sobriety: never looking away from the atrocities depicted onscreen (whether it's the fictionalized recreations or unsettling documentary footage of children crying during paramilitary demonstrations), it forces us to be sickened by them, and to question our very act of watching itself. Truly groundbreaking in the history of movies, and a documentary on par with <i>Shoah</i> and <i>Hearts and Minds</i> in attempting to come to terms with a historical episode that shockingly proves the horror of which humanity is capable.</div>
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<b>Before Midnight </b><i>(d. Richard Linklater, USA, 2013) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">The third part of Linklater's fertile collaboration with Hawke and </span>Delpy finds the lovers, Jesse and Celine, married and with twin daughters, spending the summer in the Peloponnese; in addition to the difficulties of married life, he's dealing with his distant relationship with his son and ex-wife, and she's struggling with her unfulfilled ambitions and lack of appreciation. With a pitch-perfect screenplay co-written with Hawke and Delpy, Linklater allows these lengthy conversations to convey a humane, complex appreciation for human life in all of its pain, joy, and lengthy confusion. The miseries faced by Jesse and Celine are, at times, brutal to watch, but the movie is ultimately hopeful and aptly ambiguous. A mid-movie lunch shared by a group of lovers, thinkers, and novelists of all ages is actually the film's highlight: it develops with the naturalism of organic conversation, and somehow suggests the sweet confusion of being alive and in love. </div>
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<b>The Bling Ring </b><i>(d. Sofia Coppola, USA/UK/France/Germany/Japan, 2013) </i><b>C+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">What seems like ripe material for Coppola—the based-on-real-events </span>story of the Bling Ring, a group of privileged teenagers who stole more than $3 million of goods from the luxurious homes of celebrities—is surprisingly tepid: the movie is mostly straightforward, doing little to subvert or expound upon the subject in an original or insightful way. The story has its own built-in social commentary, so aside from stylish montages of designer gear and close-ups of ubiquitous Facebook pages, there's little subtext going on here—it's all overt, and not terribly interesting. That said, the cast is fun to watch and there are some sharp one-liners; <i>The Bling Ring</i> works better as a wry comedy than anything else.</div>
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<b>The Comedy </b><i>(d. Rick Alverson, USA, 2012) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Episodic character study about a privileged, asshole hipster who is so </span>detached from reality that every encounter becomes an excuse to provoke and enrage—the more shocking the altercation, the better. The movie seems to ignore the maxim that the essence of drama is character development: apparently Tim Heidecker's repugnant protagonist remains juvenile and hostile throughout, though it's to the movie's credit that its ambiguous naturalism might actually find him self-loathingly grappling with mortality and inadequacy at the end. Heidecker is fantastic: his soulless gaze and the depravity of his attention-grabbing stunts hint towards a stunted desire to feel anything genuine, even if it's hatred and disgust. The movie caustically criticizes his irrational superiority without overtly moralizing—it's a dead-aim attack on the hyperbolic worst of an entire generation. </div>
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<b>The Conjuring </b><i>(d. James Wan, USA, 2013) </i><b>B</b></div>
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<span class="s1">All of the old horror standbys are here—the eerie porcelain doll, the </span>creaking floorboards and slamming doors, levitating objects, Satanically possessed innocents, macabre backstories, and so on—but <i>The Conjuring</i> is a prime example of expert craft enlivening tired material: each scare is perfectly calibrated, each scream well-deserved. I'm admittedly a sucker for well-made, old-fashioned haunted house stories, but there is legitimate skill and satisfaction in how director James Wan crafts his setpieces: like the intermeshing gears on a well-made watch, everything clicks to deliver one of the most solid horror movies in years. Wan still doesn't know how to direct actors when they're not in sheer terror—the movie is pretty awful to begin with, rushing through the obligatory exposition in disappointingly clumsy fashion—but when the real scares start they don't let up. Call it a guilty pleasure—though the few sleepless nights that <i>The Conjuring</i> might provoke can attest to the actual talent on display.</div>
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<b>Elysium </b><i>(d. Neill Blomkamp, USA, 2013) </i><b>D</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Blomkamp's 2009 debut </span><i>District 9</i> may have been heavy-handed and overindulgent, but it was also viscerally exciting and occasionally inspired: its allegory may have been weak but it was emotionally resonant and thematically ambitious in ways that many action movies aren't. For his sophomore feature, Blomkamp is given Hollywood resources for a more blatantly allegorical sci-fi flick: Los Angeles in 2154 has become a poverty-stricken shantytown where Spanish has replaced English as the official language; the wealthy elites all live on a ritzy space station called Elysium orbiting the planet, which resembles any number of gated exurban communities. There's no depth or complexity to the themes here: the poor earthlings are all noble sufferers, banded together in their universal plight; the upper classes are all unanimously villainous, though they're conveniently replaced by a more generic baddie. Superficially, the movie is a progressive critique of class disparity and the vicious lengths to which governments will go to protect a privileged hegemony, but the movie's setup is actually sickeningly conservative: in <i>Elysium</i>'s view of our country's future, we've been overrun by Mexican immigrants, which (ludicrously) turns the nation into a decrepit wasteland. (Like <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>, the movie's hollow, manipulative politics can be construed to appease either liberals or conservatives—the better to avoid offending any of the movie's potential audience members.) Blomkamp has as little confidence in his narrative and characters as in his themes, beating us over the head with lugubrious music (enough with the “ethnic” chanting!), incessant flashbacks, and stereotypes of gruff yet loyal ruffians that were outdated by the mid-20th century. To round out the movie's insufferable flaws, the action scenes themselves are filmed with a dizzying handheld camera and spliced together to emphasize frenzy over clarity, making the sci-fi mayhem more obnoxious than exciting. Here's hoping Blomkamp settles down and trusts his audience a bit more next time. </div>
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<b>Evil Dead</b> <i>(d. Fede Alvarez, USA, 2013) </i><b>C</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Alvarez's remake certainly tops the original in sadistic gore—the </span>highlight (or nadir) being a scene in which a possessed woman slices off her own face—but is inferior in practically every other regard. Hypothetically the remake's attempt to imbue the characters with emotional resonance is admirable, especially with a striking plot device regarding a protagonist's attempt to kick her cocaine addiction; but the performers and script are too weak to really carry off the pathos, and in any case what the remake proves is that the original's campy, acrobatic vibe—like a blood-drenched episode of <i>Looney Tunes</i>—is essential in reprieving the audience from the nonstop brutality. After the twentieth or so time we see a blood-spewing demon impaling its victim with some kind of sharp object, we're craving Bruce Campbell's silent-action-star anachronisms and Sam Raimi's sheer evanescent verve (which reached its acme with <i>Evil Dead II</i>). Ultimately this retread is content to copy countless horror films before it, including (but not limited to) its predecessor; the camerawork is stylish and there are a few decent scares, but this is ultimately just another remake that points towards Hollywood's money-grubbing laziness.</div>
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<b>Germany Year Zero </b><i>(d. Roberto Rossellini, Italy/France/Germany, 1948) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">It's still astounding to see a foreigner try to make an honest, </span>sympathetic film about the plight undergone by the German people during and after World War II, made only three years after the armistice—though Rossellini certainly attempted to evoke the same catharsis for Italians with <i>Rome Open City</i> and <i>Paisan</i>, the kind of postwar reckoning and guilt we see here would not be attempted by the German film industry (obviously in a state of ruins) for many decades. <i>Germany Year Zero</i> shares with <i>A Foreign Affair</i> the distinction of being the first narrative fictional film shot in the devastated rubble of postwar Berlin. Yet where <i>Open City</i> and <i>Paisan</i> succeed, <i>Germany Year Zero</i> sometimes falters: though characteristically using a non-professional cast and local dialects (achieved through a translator, since Rossellini directed them in French), the director still relies too much on simplistic character traits to lionize or vilify (such as the Nazi officers who lecherously paw at young boys' supple flesh at every opportunity) and contrived behavior in order to twist the plot into melodramatic directions (the understated populism of De Sica is generally more convincing). Call the film an unsuccessful yet audacious experiment, and a bleak commentary on the souring of humanity that is still remarkable for its bitter yet sympathetic outrage.</div>
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<b>Gunga Din </b><i>(d. George Stevens, USA, 1939) </i><b>D+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">It's the virile Anglos versus the evil, blackfaced natives in this </span>unabashed celebration of colonialism (based on the Rudyard Kipling poem). It can only flimsily be defended as a product of its time and place, or as a ripsnorting adventure that's not meant to reflect reality; such a claim ignores that the two spheres are never so easily separated. Impressively grand and beautifully photographed, those technical resources are nonetheless devoted to a portrayal of masculinity and Western entitlement that, to modern eyes, gives everything a sour taste.</div>
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<b>The Hunger </b><i>(d. Tony Scott, UK, 1983) </i><b>D</b></div>
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<span class="s1">A ludicrous vampire melodrama that reeks of 1983, </span><i>The Hunger</i> is all post-punk music, soft blue lighting, perfume-ad bombast, and bouffant hairstyles, telling a nonsensical story (edited into incoherency) about an ancient Egyptian vampire (Deneuve) who seeks a new mate—and finds one in a gerontologist (Sarandon) who may have just found an Elixir of Eternal Youth. No moment can exist without self-indulgent pomposity surrounding it, and the sexual conservatism (watch out for those lesbians or you'll get a deadly virus coursing through your veins!) is both tawdry and insensitive.</div>
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<b>I'm So Excited </b><i>(d. Pedro Almodovar, Spain, 2013) </i><b>B</b></div>
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<span class="s1">The tongue-in-cheek opening disclaimer says that </span><i>I'm So Excited</i> is entirely fantasy and bears absolutely no resemblance to reality, but this isn't quite true: the characters include a businessman whose financial swindling has him facing an interminable prison sentence and a Mexican hitman who works for one of the most feared drug lords in troubled Mexico City. But that disclaimer's gist remains true, as the movie is primarily a slight, zippy, candy-colored sexual farce in which most characters are gay or bisexual, preoccupied with carnal desire, and often in some state of inebriation. Raucous and shameless, what really matters is whether the movie's comedy succeeds, and it is genuinely hilarious. Almodovar hardly tries anything new here, but at least the colors evoked by him and his cinematographer (Jose Luis Alcaine) remain brighter than any other modern filmmaker's. It's also undeniably sexy, making for one of the year's best date movies (gay or straight) so far.</div>
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<b>Identity Thief </b><i>(d. Seth Gordon, USA, 2013) </i><b>C–</b></div>
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<span class="s1">By-the-numbers comedy about a financial advisor who becomes the </span>target of a garish Florida-based identity thief. The movie does pay more attention than expected to extreme economic disparities in the U.S., and it's assembled an excellent cast, but the main problem with the film is that it's just not funny: even on the few occasions where McCarthy is unleashed into free improvisatory reign, the results are forced and only slightly amusing. Meanwhile, a cheesy moral lesson about knowing and embracing who you are makes this comedy lifeless and schmaltzy, adding extraneous minutes to a plot that's already an overstuffed, ramshackle mess.</div>
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<b>Johnny Guitar </b><i>(d. Nicholas Ray, USA, 1954) </i><b>A–</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Ray's florid, emphatic allegory for the Red Scare witch hunts of the </span>1950s stars Crawford (who bought the rights to the novel and whose tyrannical behavior onset enraged at least two costars) as brazen saloon-owner Vienna, who is hysterically accused of murder and robbery for affiliating with a gang of petty crooks. The political paranoia that underlay McCarthyism is audaciously repurposed as sexual hysteria, as the primary motivation for Vienna's persecution is another townswoman's carnal jealousy. Along with <i>The Furies</i> and <i>The Outlaw</i>, this is surely one of the most lustfully unhinged Western ever made (though, true to the subversive style of the best 1950s Hollywood cinema, its carnality is suggested through such visual symbolism as the holstering of a revolver). Made on a shoestring (which is evidenced by the surreally artificial sets, most notably Vienna's saloon – check out her piano solo against a rocky outcrop that looks like a Disneyland attraction), <i>Johnny Guitar</i> is marvelously overheated, unique, wild, and intelligent. The dialogue and performances never even attempt to be realistic: modern audiences might find it difficult to accept the bombastic gesticulations and frenzied line readings, unless we view the movie as a sort of abstracted tragedy, removed from any kind of legible historical setting – it's a more timeless evocation of hysteria, lust, and violence, with Mercedes McCambridge's Emma – one of the best villainesses in movie history – ripping into the screen every time she appears.</div>
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<b>La Chinoise </b><i>(d. Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Seen by many as the film (along with </span><i>Weekend</i>) that bifurcated Godard's career into the earlier, jazzier, pop-deconstructive era and his latter-day political agitations, <i>La Chinoise</i> presciently portrays a group of bored and idealistic college students who, occupying a bourgeois apartment for the summer, embrace Maoism and Marxist-Leninism, naively veering towards political terrorism. It remains shocking how prophetic <i>La Chinoise</i> was: released in France in August 1967, it predates both Columbia and Kent State in the US and the May '68 riots in Paris. Awash in blistering primary colors and dogmatic slogans running the gamut from Dostoevsky to Aragon, Lenin to Mao, Godard's crash course in Communist ideology (and anti-American castigation) would be off-putting if it weren't so self-critical and audaciously Brechtian. Employing the visual, aural, and dialogic equivalents of dialectical materialism, Godard espouses one political ideology only to immediately contradict it: paradoxes, contradictions, and self-negations abound, and even though Godard was and is a zealous Communist and truly thought Maoism could resurrect socialism (a political naivete that's somewhat embarrassing in hindsight), his radical intellectualism makes <i>La Chinoise</i> less a piece of political agitprop than lightning-in-a-bottle political theater. To Godard's credit, he allows an extremely lengthy dialogue to question the validity of political terrorism (while some of his influences, namely Sartre, were more unquestioningly supportive of anarchical violence), and while the cruel setpieces of his following film <i>Weekend</i> often stress pedantic aesthetics over genuine political insight, <i>La Chinoise</i> is easily as intelligent as it is stylistically flamboyant. </div>
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<b>The Magnificent Ambersons </b><i>(d. Orson Welles, USA, 1942) </i><b>A</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Perhaps the most notorious instance of studio meddling disastrously </span>overhauling the director's original vision—with Welles in Brazil shooting <i>It's All True</i>, RKO, after a disastrous preview screening held only months after Pearl Harbor, chopped 50 minutes off of the movie and tacked on a happy ending—<i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i> remains a masterpiece as troubling for what it doesn't show as what it does. Welles was, of course, right to be indignant about the drastic reedit (he claimed it appeared to have been edited by a lawnmower), but we still have 85 minutes (out of 88) that comprise one of the most darkly beautiful, ambitious, and caustic portrayals of American progress and class inequality ever made by a Hollywood studio. If watching the movie now offers its own unavoidable conjectures—though Welles' memos to RKO meticulously delineate his original vision, we are still left to ponder exactly what visual form these scenes would have taken (including an uninterrupted tracking shot through the Amberson mansion that RKO reedited arbitrarily)—the film still teems with troubling undercurrents (repressed lust and one of the most extreme Oedipal complexes ever portrayed among them) and a shadowy visual palette that's much darker than even the blackest film noir, with much of the Gothic sets often bathed in silhouette, as though the opulent Amberson mansion is condemned to misery from its very inception. The mobility of the camerawork and Welles' insistence on uncommonly long takes in some ways add to and retroactively complicate Gregg Toland's masterful work on <i>Citizen Kane</i>—it's fascinating to see how the aesthetic differs here, with Welles forced to work with a new (yet, arguably, equally great) cameraman, Stanley Cortez—emphasizing how each character truly seems trapped within emotional and social straitjackets, either of their own design or passed down by a ruthless American culture in the throes of relentless progressivism. This may not be the grand, operatic, somber vision that Welles originally had, but we can still detect the bold style and emotional depth of a master, its brilliance obscured but hardly smothered by crass, commercialistic concerns.</div>
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<b>Monsters University </b><i>(d. Dan Scanlon, USA, 2013) </i><b>C</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Prequel to </span><i>Monsters, Inc.</i>—one of my favorite Pixar movies—is too blatantly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the first. This time, Mike and Sully are tendentious roommates at college, embracing (maybe futilely) their dreams of becoming top scarers. The rampant sight gags, infectious wit, and humane tenderness of the first film are mostly missing, though it's entertaining throughout and the studio's visual splendor remains (predictably) intact.</div>
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<b>Only God Forgives </b><i>(d. Nicolas Winding Refn, France/Thailand/USA/Sweden, 2013) </i><b>A–</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Refn's nasty, heavily abstract phantasmagoria resembles a particularly </span>bloodstained Hieronymus Bosch painting: we seem to descend through all seven circles of Hell, bearing witness to the awful interpenetration of sexuality, violence, and transcendence. The director of another of 2013's best movies – <i>Post Tenebras Lux</i>'s Carlos Reygadas – claimed that narratives are simply formulae to raise funding for what remains, at heart, formalist constructions of sights and sounds, and <i>Only God Forgives </i>demonstrates that perfectly (and unsettlingly): Refn and his cast seem to realize that the story is ludicrous and almost perfunctory, as the film is an excuse to patch together a series of overwhelming symbolic and visceral imagery. This is not a criticism: you only need to watch the first five minutes of the film – a series of lateral tracking shots interspersed with static compositions, timed and pitched to perfectly correspond with the droning music – to realize how brazenly Refn tries to make the film an expressionist, baroque patchwork (the unnerving synchrony of image and audio brings to mind Eisenstein's stylized visuals in <i>Ivan the Terrible</i>, which were meant to visually manifest Sergei Prokofiev's sheet music). While the narrative construct is a simple revenge fantasy, the images astoundingly evoke Freudian sexuality and violent abstraction: the two culminate in an image of a character splitting open his dead mother's stomach and inserting his hand into her bowels, in an outrageous but undeniably singular expression of returning to the womb. Not a pleasant movie, clearly, but it's less hypocritical and self-satisfied than <i>Drive</i> (not to mention a hell of a lot weirder and more provocative); it hardly seems accidental that the only gratuitously gory image in <i>Only God Forgives</i> – an extreme close-up of an eyeball being punctured by a knife – inevitably brings to mind the eye mutilation in <i>Un chien Andalou</i>, another film known for its aggressively surreal evocation of male sexual violence.</div>
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<b>Pacific Rim </b><i>(d. Guillermo del Toro, USA, 2013) </i><b>C+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">This special effects orgy takes a basically foolproof concept—human </span>pilots commandeer robot Jagers to wage hand-to-hand combat with gargantuan monsters named Kaiju, who emerge from an alternate universe through a portal hidden deep in the Pacific Ocean—and imbues it with as much ravishing detail and childlike astonishment as possible, allowing del Toro to elaborate on his trademark blend of small-scale creativity and huge-scale bombast. If only the storyline exhibited the same originality: the plot is strictly by-the-numbers, with character arcs you can see coming from a mile away, an ensemble of cliches, even a sappy climax involving everyone applauding in unison and a cutaway to an adorable dog. But even if the movie's blockbuster DNA is a bit too blatant at times, the movie excels at what you really want to see—badass monster-vs.-robot fights that will make your inner six-year-old euphoric—and likable performers are able to carry off the generic story with charm and sweetness.</div>
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<b>Room 237 </b><i>(d. Rodney Ascher, USA, 2013) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">A series of interviews regarding elaborate, fairly outlandish </span>interpretations of Kubrick's classic <i>The Shining</i>, exploring subtexts ranging from the Holocaust to the genocide of American Indians to the faking of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Some of these readings are more convincing than others (the theme of massacred Native Americans is the only one that seems fairly incontrovertible), but more interesting is the movie's evocation of postmodern film theory: the fact that authorial intent is not always as significant as individual viewers' emotional and intellectual relationships with films, and that art's labyrinthine complexity really comes alive when it enters an organic cultural discourse. While the movie's sound design is flawed and its themes eventually become redundant, its interest in interpretive agility and the visual creativity with which it espouses these ideas (the film consists entirely of archival footage and scenes from cinematic history, with no mundane talking heads to speak of) remain compelling.</div>
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<b>Stories We Tell </b><i>(d. Sarah Polley, Canada, 2013) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Polley's heartfelt, ardent documentary recalls the films of Ross </span>McElwee; while it is more focused on a single linear narrative, it is just as attuned to the personal and cultural ramifications of storytelling. What starts off as a multivalent portrait of Sarah's mother, a dynamic singer/actress in Toronto, becomes an intimate family history that is both disarmingly ordinary and overwhelmingly dramatic. Along with the idea that each lived life and family dynamic is an artful story in itself, Polley emphasizes that every memory—like every film—is an untrustworthy, subjective recollection, though no less emotional for it. In fact, Polley oversells this last point in an overlong conclusion, and she's a little too ready to let spoken monologues convey ideas that might have been more interesting if they were solely visual—but these are quibbles for a movie as intriguing and poignant as this one.</div>
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<b>The Suitor (Le soupirant) </b><i>(d. Pierre Etaix, France, 1963) </i><b>B</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Charming comedy—the feature debut from beloved (if relatively </span>unheralded) actor/director/comedian/illustrator Etaix—borrows the stonefaced sight gags of Buster Keaton and the formal audacity of Jacques Tati in its agreeable story of an introverted loner whose parents force him to find a wife and settle down. The narrative is predominantly a structure around which to lace Etaix's episodic sight gags, but themes of loneliness, cultural miscommunication, even the allure of pop culture all make fleeting yet thought-provoking appearances. The comedic sequences are all beautifully performed and shot (the highlight is probably a foray into the woods for a picnic, from which the Suitor desperately tries to escape from a harping paramour), and the film (at only 85 minutes) wisely ends before it wears out its welcome.</div>
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<b>This Is the End </b><i>(d. Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg, USA, 2013) </i><b>B</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Rogen and Baruchel show up at James Franco's swanky Beverly Hills </span>mansion, where a bevy of self-absorbed, over-the-top celebrities are soon annihilated by a fire-and-brimstone apocalypse. The movie itself is self-absorbed and over-the-top – those tired of the whole Judd Apatow gross-out man-child dick-paranoia brand of comedy should stay as far away as possible – but the performers' natural charisma and skill with absurdist improvisation shines through all the cock-and-balls swagger. Rogen and Goldberg display a likable fondness for horror cinema (a nod to <i>Rosemary's Baby</i> is especially hilarious), and all of the narcissism is tempered by a robust strain of self-deprecation. It's the kind of movie that throws everything at the wall to see what sticks, but thankfully much of it does, and the film's built-in defense for its own petty boorishness – the fact that those are the very traits which may lead to the characters' eternal hellfire banishment – is a clever (though only half-successful) apologia for this entire brand of sophomoric comedy (which I'd be lying if I said I wasn't amused by).</div>
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<b>The Tin Drum </b><i>(d. Volker Schlöndorff, West Germany/France/Poland/Yugoslavia, 1979) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Oskar Mazerath is a young German boy in the eastern region of </span>Danzig; his mother is a tempestuous Kashubian, his “uncle” (or maybe father) is a proud Pole, and his mother's husband an overzealous German who jumps at the chance to join the Nazi Party. Amidst the torrid family affairs of his parents (which he observes, quietly traumatized, from a distance), his fractured country devolves into genocide and barbarism; as a response to this deluge of inhumanity, Oskar—at only three years old in 1927—vows to willfully stop growing, remaining forever childlike and self-obsessed while the adult world goes to hell around him. Casual absurdism meshes with a horrific depiction of war (much like the 1985 Soviet film <i>Come and See</i>), painting an unforgettable, haunting portrait of a childhood pitched (as Oskar's opening voiceover opines) somewhere between wonder and disillusion. Schl<span class="s1">öndorff's adaptation of Gunther Grass' novel utilizes a brightly colored landscape, making brilliant use of Germany's architecture and natural beauty, to accentuate the brutality of humanity; clocks feature prominently in the film, emphasizing the cyclicality of overwhelming violence (namely the World Wars taking place within three decades of each other, yet also the fact that America was deploying ballistic missiles throughout contested parts of Europe at the time of the film's release while the Cold War intensified). At times Oskar's dual storylines—the historical centrality of the Holocaust and the Oedipal undercurrent of Oskar's infatuation with both his mother and a young maid who has an affair with his father—do not mesh well, and the film can be too allegorically on-the-nose (especially with a traveling troupe of midgets, the leader of which informs Oskar that little people cannot simply sit in the audience, watching while “the big people” stampede over the innocents). Yet despite its unevenness, the movie is visually ravishing (the opening scene and Oskar's birth, filmed from his perspective as he emerges from his mother's womb, are probably the standouts) and its sickened commentary on the evil of humanity remains (sadly) forever prescient.</span></div>
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<b>Touki Bouki </b><i>(d. Djibril Diop Mambety, Senegal, 1973) </i><b>A–</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Made in the artistically fertile late '60s/early '70s period of </span>Senegalese independence, Djibril Diop Mambety's audacious experiment melds Eisensteinian montage, Godardian jump cuts and voiceover techniques, and distinctly Senegalese aspects such as the use of a griot and juxtapositional depictions of Christianity, Islam, the lower and upper classes, and Europeans and Senegalese in order to suggest the simultaneous vibrancy and destitution of modern urban life in Dakar. Opening with a grisly contrast between free-roaming cattle and those being slaughtered in an abattoir, Touki Bouki primarily functions through such contradistinctions, ultimately conveying Mambety's ambivalent attitude towards postcolonial Senegal. If the writer/director's philosophy can sometimes be too caricatured—whether depicting a foppish upper-class gay man or piggish, racist French tourists—his bold cultural pride and aesthetic experimentation remain abrasively powerful.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ud6xg-cWS38" width="560"></iframe>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-24484085335082079872013-06-07T12:58:00.000-05:002013-06-07T12:58:43.463-05:00Screening Log, May 2013<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>The Docks of New York </b><i>(d. Josef von Sternberg, USA, 1928) </i><b>A–</b><br />
Two years before his first collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, von Sternberg was already turning studio sets (here awe-inspiringly designed by Hans Dreier) into sparkling snowglobes in which Hollywood fables play out. Here, a stalwart coal stoker on an ocean liner (George Bancroft) saves a despondent prostitute (Betty Compson) from a suicide attempt, then proceeds to marry her in a fit of drunken whimsy. Bancroft and Compson deliver a pair of silent performances for the ages, exemplifying how silent Hollywood cinema (at its finest in 1928) achieved an emotive splendor that turned seemingly generic plots into something transcendent. Arguably more powerful than many of von Sternberg's later films with Dietrich, <i>The Docks of New York</i> literally seems to radiate off the screen: the meticulous lighting and dazzling camerawork are a wonder to behold.<br />
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<b>The Gang's All Here </b><i>(d. Busby Berkeley, USA, 1943) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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Berkeley (on loan to 20th Century Fox from MGM) at his most eye-poppingly bizarre: there will be elaborate musical numbers involving enormous bananas, black-draped dancers wielding neon <i>Tron</i>-like hula hoops, and a climax involving a plethora of dismembered heads flying at the audience in order to perform "The Polka Dot Polka." Oh, and Carmen Miranda at her most cheekily vivacious, and Benny Goodman perpetually looking like he'd rather be anywhere but on camera. It must be seen to be believed, and is never less than entertaining, but the songs themselves are pretty atrocious (hence, Benny Goodman) and the characterizations do not age well: the movie's profoundest mystery is why two women would fight over the same cardboard, casually sexist cad. (Well, aside from the fact that he's a GI – don't forget to buy your war bonds!)</div>
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<b>Star Trek Into Darkness </b><i>(d. J.J. Abrams, USA, 2013) </i><b>B</b></div>
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Reliably satisfying genre work from Abrams, proving he's the right man to take over the reins on the (interminably) continuing <i>Star Wars</i> series: he's injected some postmodern self-reflexivity, opulent glitz, and shameless brawn into his <i>Star Trek </i>reboot. The movie often moves too quickly for its emotional interludes to truly register, but it may be futile to criticize a summer blockbuster for being too fast-paced: it's definitely wiser to be viscerally in the moment when watching <i>Into Darkness</i> (dwelling too long on its convoluted story will expose vortex-sized plot holes). Ultimately Abrams cannot elevate above mere craftsmanship (and, despite Benedict Cumberbatch's sinister charm as Khan, the movie's villain can't compete with the sheer terror of Eric Bana's Nero from the first film), but at least Abrams knows how to give his audience what it wants. Bonus: you get to see Peter Weller back on the big screen.</div>
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<b>Upstream Color </b><i>(d. Shane Carruth, USA, 2013) </i><b>C+</b></div>
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If Shane Carruth's 2004 debut <i>Primer</i> treated the mind-boggling metaphysics of time travel as the subject for aching human drama, his newest film, <i>Upstream Color</i>, treats human relationships like an abstract cypher for its participants (and the audience) to unpack – which might explain why the new film is, surprisingly, much colder and emotionally distant. Despite its numerous allusions to Thoreau, its Malick-inspired whispered voiceovers, and metaphorical imagery of animals, ultimately <i>Upstream Color</i> comes off as lugubrious and numbingly symbolic – especially with a godlike character who records sounds from the natural world and releases them as New Age soundtracks, while apparently peddling a mind-melding drug harvested from maggot-like worms. Carruth's ideas and freewheeling plot are certainly original, but he doesn't achieve a distinct form to match his striking conceits: handheld cinematography, brief snippets of scenes edited together into a nervy patchwork, and actors bedecked in pullover sweaters intoning their lines in a self-serious mumble all start to resemble 90% of American indie movies by the end. This is one of the most acclaimed movies of the year so far, so I'm in the minority, but it's difficult to see what has wowed the majority of critics.</div>
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<b>Possession </b><i>(d. Andrzej Zulawski, France/West Germany, 1981) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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Zulawski's mad, bitter, indescribable horror show must be seen to believed, but I'll attempt a synopsis anyway: described elsewhere as a mixture of Bergman psychodrama, Polanski surrealism, and Cronenberg body horror (with a little Fassbinder mindfuck and Godardian political subtext thrown in), <i>Possession </i>details the gruesome fallout of a spectacularly bad divorce in West Berlin. The woman, beset by guilt and self-loathing, apparently gives birth to two divine twins, Good and Evil – one of whom miscarries, the other of which mutates into a hideous creature who needs the flesh of men to survive. There's also a coke-addled womanizer named Henrich, several doppelgangers, and a toddler who may or may not commit suicide. Fresh off of a brutal divorce, Zulawski (not unlike Cronenberg with 1979's <i>The Brood</i>) lets his spurned hostility fester into the nightmarish film we see here: clearly not a sensitive depiction of womanhood or female sexuality, <i>Possession</i> nonetheless powerfully conveys the intense, desperate emotion of divorce, lust, parenthood, and jealousy. Unquestionably one of the most disturbing movies I've seen, although its dialogue and performances are pitched at the level of hyperbolized hysteria: like everything else in the film, its drama eschews realism in order to achieve a kind of heightened revulsion, making for an unforgettable experience. </div>
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<b>To the Wonder </b><i>(d. Terrence Malick, USA, 2013) </i><b>B–</b></div>
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There's much to embrace about <i>To the Wonder</i>: its mostly dialogue-free emphasis on impressionistic and atmospheric visuals, its analogy between the void left by both long-gone romantic partners and an absent God whose seeming non-existence forever torments us, its juxtaposition of transcendental places on earth with those that have been ruined by human meddling, and (maybe most of all) the possibility that it's really a <a href="http://ebiri.blogspot.com/2013/01/to-wonder-i-write-on-water-things-i.html" target="_blank">dance movie</a>, with its performers' languid motions coming closer to ballet than characterization. But for all of its earnestness and thought-provoking philosophy, there's no getting around the fact that the people we see (and obliquely hear) come nowhere close to relatable characters: by the halfway point (at the latest), we've become frustrated with Ben Affleck's stoic pensiveness, with Olga Kurylenko's angelic whimsicality, with Rachel McAdams' saintly suffering – or, more generally, with Malick's eternal contrast between the stern emotionlessness of men and the angelic tenderness of women. Malick's aesthetic seems, at times, to go in new directions, but more likely it's just the most uninhibited expression of his stylistic obsessions: the whispered, faux-spiritual voiceovers, waltzing camera, and cutaways to symbolic imagery come dangerously close to self-parody. If <i>The Tree of Life</i> approached divinity through appropriately grandiose terms (flashing back to the beginnings of time and the furthest reaches of the cosmos), <i>To the Wonder</i> approaches it through the mundane: bland suburban homes, Oklahoma sunsets, environments assailed by pollution and oil-drilling. Narrowing his milieu while maintaining his ambitious scope might be Malick's most brazen risk here, but it doesn't quite pay off: <i>To the Wonder</i> too often seems like poetic imagery in search of a legitimate conduit, populated by people who never register as legitimate human beings.</div>
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<b>Gertrud </b><i>(d. Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark, 1964) </i><b>A</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Dreyer's disarmingly austere study of a woman with unattainable </span>ideals regarding love and human existence might be the epitome of a cryptic rebus whose seemingly simple surface masks a tantalizingly puzzling inner life: <i>Gertrud</i> is a natural counterpart to Resnais' <i>Last Year at Marienbad</i> (1961), though it's much less overtly oneiric. As Gertrud holds a throng of suitors at arms' length, claiming they could never match her romantic ideals of men who give everything for a transcendent ideal of love, the actors offer blank-eyed line recitations amid minimalist compositions rife with multiple shades of gray. All of this has led to the movie's reputation as the ultimate arthouse dirge, but there's much more going on than meets the eye: for one thing, Gertrud's refusal to accept any of the men in her life for their perceived stolidity (a contrast of male impassivity and female emotionalism that reappears in Terrence Malick's films) amounts to a willful solitude, making the film not so much about the impossibility of love as about the importance of free will and living life according to one's own credo. For another, a number of bewildering aesthetic decisions – hazy overexposure in a number of scenes, a symmetrical (non-)narrative structure, voiceover narrations that shuffle between a number of characters, a dynamic use of mobile and still camerawork – suggests that the entire film might be a dream, perhaps projected by Gertrud in the waning years of her life (as the constant allusions to the past, youth, and the irretrievability of history suggest). Finally, as <a href="http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=15649" target="_blank">Jonathan Rosenbaum</a>'s excellent analysis in <i>Sight & Sound</i> points out, the movie might be most accurately read as a guarded autobiography by Dreyer, obliquely alluding to the biological mother he never knew and his own cruel foster mother – a life story that points towards the theme that no identity can ever be truly fathomed, that every individual necessarily lives within themselves, unable to completely connect with another soul (one of Abbas Kiarostami's favorite subtexts). So while <i>Gertrud</i> might not be as emotional and character-driven as its preoccupation with romance might suggest, it may be more gratifying to read the movie as a willfully misleading cypher: a personal statement whose implicit form spins its explicit subject matter in a number of fascinating directions.</div>
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<b>If... </b><i>(d. Lindsay Anderson, UK, 1968) </i><b>B–</b></div>
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<span class="s1">A haunting yet morbidly funny allegory for the wave of revolution and </span>violent activism that seemed to pervade the globe in the late 1960's and early '70s, with a draconic boarding school in the English countryside acting as a microcosm for worldwide oppression and retribution. Images of Lenin, Che, and Geronimo, prominently placed in the mise-en-scene, emphasize the movie's focus on the nature of insurgency itself, though the sadistic glee with which the students rebel in the final ten minutes complicate the movie's anti-establishment agenda. This is the kind of movie that Pauline Kael, circa “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties” essay, would have hated: loose plotting, self-important formalism (with constant switches between black-and-white and color, only vaguely motivated), and a modish investigation of the nature of tyranny and rebellion. Yet unlike the other movies Kael critiqued in that essay (<i>La Dolce Vita</i> and <i>La Notte</i> most notably), <i>If...</i> may not have enough political insight or ingenuity to justify its confrontational air. The ultimate theme of the movie seems to be that a tyrannical status quo will breed an outraged revolutionary youth – a fairly obvious conclusion that plays much too lazily into the hands of the progressive culture that made the movie a hit. The movie's occasional dabbling in absurdism fares best.</div>
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<b>The Great Gatsby </b><i>(d. Baz Luhrmann, Australia/USA, 2013) </i><b>C+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Luhrmann's up to his usual tricks here – orgiastic style, relentlessly </span>mobile camerawork, opulent CGI, and storylines that emphasize tragic, doomed romance – so if you're looking for a subtle, understated adaptation of Fitzgerald's classic, look elsewhere. (Then again, no good adaptation has ever been made of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>, so you're probably better off sticking with the book.) Overlong, syrupy, and sledgehammer-obvious where Fitzgerald's prose is lithe and agile, this reworking is undoubtedly an MTV-Cliff's Notes simplification for modern audiences devoid of attention spans; that said, the movie does ably convey the book's primary underlying theme (that Daisy is Jay Gatsby's Rosebud, an emblem of unattainable happiness shrouded amongst all of his material possessions), and the eye-popping glitz can at least be defended as an implicit critique of the spectacular wealth to which Gatsby disastrously aspires. (Of course, Luhrmman's aesthetic glorifies that spectacle as much as it critiques it.) DiCaprio is reliably powerful, but Gatsby's elegiac life story, compressed as it is into a brief flashback, can't compare to the original's power. Most interesting might be the suggestion that this is really a story about New York itself: a symbol of exorbitant wealth that disguises all of the pain, backstabbing, and self-absorption that propels its richness. </div>
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<b>Spring Breakers </b><i>(d. Harmony Korine, USA, 2013) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Korine's hallucinatory, gleefully deconstructive experiment in genre and pop sensationalism </span>casts four starlets – three of them pop idols, made famous by the tween audiences of the Disney Channel and <i>High School Musical</i> – and proceeds to both fetishize and subvert their sexuality during a Spring Break from demented hell. Willingly toppling into an amoral void of automatic weapons, hard drugs, and murder (with the help of a cornrowed James Franco, a little too self-reflexive as a Florida rapper), the girls obliviously breeze through a candy-colored Fantasyland, only fleetingly recognizing the peril and insanity of their descent. An implicit analogy is made between sensationalized sex, glorified violence, and the reckless love of money and possession, suggesting the three as inextricable corners of an outsized capitalistic triangle. What might appear to be Korine's most mainstream venture on the surface is a sly subversion of both genre form and glitzy entertainment; it's always fascinating, though the characterizations tend to suffer in the shadow of all the postmodern absurdity. </div>
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<b>Behind the Candelabra </b><i>(d. Steven Soderbergh, USA, 2013) </i><b>B</b></div>
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<span class="s1">This Liberace biography starts out close to kitsch but ends with all-out </span>tragedy, powerfully conveying a shallow culture whose emphasis on wealth and appearance makes happiness and personal connection nearly impossible. Douglas' performance as the legendary showman excels at reveling in fantastic glamour while simultaneously suggesting the underlying loneliness and fear of aging; Damon's performance, while it falters in some of the later drug-addiction scenes, is touchingly vulnerable. At times the editing is a little scattershot, as the movie becomes more episodic as it goes on and misses a number of chances to tease out thematic and emotional connections between scenes, but the digital cinematography is gorgeous and impeccably glitzy throughout.</div>
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<b>Re-Animator </b><i>(d. Stuart Gordon, USA, 1985) </i><b>B</b></div>
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<span class="s1">A one-of-a-kind mix of sleazy B-grade horror, liquescent gore effects, </span>outrageous camp, and respectful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation – and it all somehow works, flying along on its singularly weird vibe. The goofy tone is infectious and most of the cast gives surprisingly effective performances (especially Barbara Crampton). </div>
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<b>The Place Beyond the Pines </b><i>(d. Derek Cianfrance, USA, 2013) </i><b>B–</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Cianfrance is obviously going for an epic of mythic, almost biblical </span>proportions, but the results are scattershot and only occasionally powerful. The tripartite structure (in which the sins of fathers come to bear upon their sons) is intriguing, offering a narrative that's more conceptually driven than most, but audience engagement and characterizations suffer: motivations are poorly developed or inscrutable. That said, the middle portion (focusing on Cooper's character) is the most powerful and thematically complex, darkly portraying class animosity in America, and Cianfrance's control over moody visual and aural atmospherics provides some shudder-inducing moments. </div>
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<b>Post Tenebras Lux </b><i>(d. Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Netherlands/Germany, 2013) </i><b>B+</b></div>
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<span class="s1">Leaping through space and time with only loose metaphysical and </span>thematic connections, <i>Post Tenebras Lux</i> is Reygadas' most non-narrative, impressionistic film yet (which is saying something). Essentially the story of Juan and his wealthy family – a product of modern Mexican urbanity, conspicuously out of place in a primal countryside – the movie includes baffling diversions such as a red-rotoscoped Devil figure, a muddy rugby match that seems to feature none of the movie's recurring characters, a visit to an orgiastic bathhouse with rooms named after Hegel and Duchamp, and a distraught character tearing off his own head in destitution. The emphasis on the sensorial nature of remembrance and the complexity of a fully-lived life recalls Proust, but the style is more reminiscent of Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i>: a parade of signifiers without a signified, immersed in its author's singular headspace, yet amounting to a sensorial fabric for the (often bewildered) audience. Best viewed as a sort of psychedelic quasi-autobiography, the movie succeeds in spite of its dissociative coldness: the sounds and images are so ravishing that we can still sense the heartache and passion underneath.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/G62rN_mFfFw" width="420"></iframe>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-8507042296949850202013-02-15T13:49:00.000-06:002013-02-15T20:08:11.515-06:002012: The Year in Film<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If 2011 was one of the best cinematic years in the 28 years I've been alive (or, at least, the 14 or so years I've been semi-seriously paying attention to movies), then 2012 was its underwhelming denouement – a year in which many of the most heralded films lacked the creativity, vitality, or emotional power for which they were acclaimed. Two years ago, a roster of international filmmakers, both established auteurs (Kiarostami, Scorsese, Reichardt, Apichatpong, Ruiz, Kaurismäki, von Trier, Wenders, Malick, Herzog, Cronenberg, et al.) and relative newcomers (Andrew Haigh, Sean Durkin), stepped up to the plate with impressively vigorous, visceral, stimulating works. In 2012, though, while superstar directors like the two Andersons (Paul Thomas and Wes) and Leos Carax were excessively lauded and breakouts like Benh Zeitlin and Alex Ross Perry were deemed momentous discoveries, few such works actually pushed at the boundaries of filmmaking as we know it, or even attempted to. (Not that every great film has to revolutionize the art form, but they should at least resist the temptation to trace genres, styles, and narratives that have been drummed into audiences' heads to a mind-numbing extent.) <br />
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I don't pretend that this has anything to do with some kind of zeitgeist: some years are overwhelmingly strong, some less so (such is the capricious nature of art). It's not like the digital revolution had anything to do with 2012's lukewarm offerings, as the switchover from celluloid to digital production and exhibition was already in full swing as of 2011 (and inspired stellar ruminations, made on both formats, on the nature of nostalgia and cinematic perception).<br />
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I also don't mean to sound like a dour curmudgeon, one of those film writers who, year after year, decry the state of modern moviemaking because "they don't make 'em like they used to" (whatever that means). I have no doubt that movies will continue to provoke excitement and controversy, and even continue to occupy a significant discursive place in modern society, though the actual forms of spectatorship will inevitably change. In other words, if this year was less-than-stellar cinematically, it's not because the art of cinema is in its death throes; in some ways, it has more democratic, do-it-yourself potential than it's ever had before.<br />
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All of the movies on this list received at least a limited US release date during the calendar year of 2012. This means that a few films considered by some critics to be 2011 releases (such as <i>Once Upon a Time in Anatolia</i>) are 2012 movies in my book; it also means that other festival showings during 2012 (<i>Leviathan</i>, <i>Beyond the Hills</i>) will count as 2013 releases once they finally receive a limited stateside release. Such is the convoluted nature of international release dates.<br />
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Finally, while I usually only write about my top twenty films of the year, I've decided this time to include a complete checklist of every new 2012 release I saw, with a brief capsule review for some of them. This is precisely because many of the most acclaimed movies of the year – notably <i>Beasts of the Southern Wild</i>, <i>Django Unchained</i>, and <i>Silver Linings Playbook</i> – are nowhere near as vital or insightful as some critics proclaim them to be.<br />
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<b>THE TOP TEN FILMS OF 2012</b><br />
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<b>1. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia</b> <i>(d. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Turkey/Bosnia and Herzegovina)</i><br />
If Tarkovsky had tackled the murder-mystery genre – or if Dostoevsky, working a century later, had funneled his inspirations for <i>Crime and Punishment</i> into cinema instead – the result might look something like <i>Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.</i> This is all the more remarkable considering the mystery at the heart of the film – the murder of a seemingly ordinary gas-station owner and the disappearance of his corpse – is never clearly unravelled. In a sense, the audience is asked to play detective themselves: Ceylan (director of <i>Distant</i> and <i>Climates</i>, both acclaimed festival standouts) stays away from extravagant reveals, littering clues and fleeting insights into both the narrative and these characters throughout the chilly aesthetic of the film. It's as though he respects these people (the investigators, victims, and suspects) so much that he doesn't want to sensationalize their misery with a worn-out crime thriller; as in Chantal Akerman's <i>Jeanne Dielman</i>, the chilly, long-take style, while on the surface inhumane or pedantic, is in fact achingly sincere, a way of treating the characters with the distanced complexity they deserve.<br />
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A number of fascinating supporting characters revolve around the central narrative maelstrom, a plurality of voices which constitutes one of several similarities with Dostoevsky; another is a metaphorical analysis of the nature of good and evil, memorably evoked in one dialogue sequence which culminates in an astounding tracking shot of some apples rolling down a hill, ultimately carried away in the current of a stream. It's a sign of Ceylan's prowess as filmmaker that a traveling shot of some apples might be the most breathtaking cinematic moment of the year. But there's tragic substance and real-world complexity beneath the meticulous form – for example, in the revealing depiction of these Turkish villages as straddled tensely between the European and Arab worlds, an insight which foregrounds the characters' personal intrigues against a similarly fraught geopolitical backdrop. In other words, though <i>Once Upon a Time in Anatolia</i> is cerebral and hyperreal, it also recognizably takes place in our own turbulent world.<br />
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<b>2. This Is Not a Film</b> <i>(d. Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Iran)</i><br />
The production backstory is well known: after he was nebulously convicted of conspiring against the state by the Iranian government, Jafar Panahi was forbidden from making another film or giving interviews to the press for 20 years, and sentenced to indefinite house arrest (which has since been lifted). It was during this house arrest that Panahi – and <i>This Is Not a Film</i>'s "official" director, Panahi's friend and fellow filmmaker Mirtahmasb (one of many ways that the movie skirts the restrictions passed down by Panahi's sentence) – wielded a digital camera and his own iPhone to record his artistic quarantine. Their collaboration made its way to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival (where it had its premiere) on a zip drive hidden inside of a cake.<br />
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This context might suggest an impassioned though narrowly-focused diatribe against government-sanctioned censorship, noble in intention yet limited in impact. Thankfully, <i>This Is Not a Film</i> turns out to be closer to Chris Marker's cine-essays than the first-person narratives of, say, Ross McElwee (no disrespect to the latter). Reviewing scenes from his previous films on DVD or carrying out the pre-production process of a project he knows he might never be able to make, Panahi is able to deconstruct the very act of making and perceiving art, questioning what the process of "directing" actually entails. (His point: filmmaking never really begins until you're on set or on location with a cast and crew, which is why his activities in <i>This Is Not a Film</i> abide by the ban on directing passed down to him.) As Fireworks Wednesday (a pre-Islamic Iranian holiday which has morphed into a collective demonstration against the restrictive regime) rages on outside, Panahi encounters a few sympathetic bystanders; their compassionate warnings accompany his tentative steps outside his home at the end of the movie. <i>This Is Not a Film</i>, like Panahi's similarly impassioned <i>Offside</i>, thus ends on a note of hope, as artistic freedom is equated with political activism – both tactics for counteracting a strict government that hopes to rule through hegemony and oppression.<br />
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<b>3. The Deep Blue Sea</b> <i>(d. Terence Davies, USA/UK)</i><br />
Terence Davies' depictions of historical settings – especially in his semi-autobiographical pair of masterpieces, <i>Distant Voices, Still Lives</i> (1988) and <i>The Long Day Closes</i> (1992) – are somehow both radiant with nostalgia and grittily immersive: immaculate set design and finely-tuned performances achieve the difficult task of making us believe we're actually contemporaries of these historical characters, with the movie screen acting as a time-travel portal into the past. With <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i>, this journey into history takes on an operatically tragic tone, as we witness one woman's dissolution into all-consuming despair. In postwar London, Hester (Rachel Weisz), the wife of a mild-mannered judge many years older, stumbles into a passionate affair with a self-absorbed RAF pilot. An early montage, nearly wordless, of the initiation of their affair is as warmly vivid as the end of their affair is violently inevitable.<br />
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The movie is flooded with melancholia and tragedy (after all, it opens with one of Hester's suicide attempts), but that suffused ambience of despair remains compelling in the manner of the best melodramas; why should Davies resort to levity when Hester has no such reprieve? The relationship between the director and Rachel Weisz seems mutually inspirational: Weisz, despite her many magnetic performances, is still revelatory in an extremely precarious role (how easy it would have been to overplay Hester's misery), and Davies has found an elegant, plaintive face perfectly suited to his bittersweet portrayal of the past. Even more fascinating: the specter of World War II makes an unexpectedly phantasmal appearance here, especially in an unforgettable closing shot that brings the audience closer to a gaping chasm surrounded by rubble – a black hole that might symbolize either rebirth or annihilation.<br />
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<b>4. The Kid with a Bike</b> <i>(d. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium/France/Italy)</i><br />
Modern cinema's masters of vérité humanism, Belgium's Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, shift their empathetic focus to a tempestuous redheaded orphan: dropped off by his deadbeat dad at a boys' home in the deceptively picturesque town of Seraing, young Cyril simply will not accept his father's abandonment, resorting to whirlwinds of ceaseless motion in order to vent his pent-up frustration. (The father is played by Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier, who played a similarly volatile youth in the writer-directors' debut <i>La Promesse</i> – a self-reference that subtly suggests the extent to which abhorrent parenting can tragically trickle down into future generations, perpetuating the same behavior.) Ultimately, Cyril finds potential parental figures in both a compassionate hairdresser who guardedly agrees to take him in, and a teenage thug who embroils Cyril in his petty criminal plans. In other words, we are thrust into Cyril's life at a point in time when his path might lead to either love or violence.<br />
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The story might sound sentimental, but the Dardennes avoid melodrama at all costs, instead observing their characters' behavior with compassionate remove and aching naturalism. Alain Marcoen's camerawork is as mobile as Cyril, though the handheld camerawork here is in fact meticulously controlled, utilizing the corners of the frame in responding to and accommodating the characters' motions. The precision of the cinematography and editing helps to explain why the Dardennes' films, for all their no-frills succinctness, are often breathtakingly thrilling, yielding something close to vérité action. This is why a brawl at a gas station and a freefall from a tree in <i>The Kid with a Bike</i> whip us into an emotional frenzy despite their apparent simplicity: the drama of real life is more exciting to the Dardennes than the machinations of narrative filmmaking, and the emotional payoff is overwhelming even as it takes on the unassuming form of everyday existence.<br />
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<b>5. Anna Karenina</b> <i>(d. Joe Wright, UK)</i><br />
The question of whether Joe Wright's adaptation of <i>Anna Karenina</i> rivals Leo Tolstoy's original novel is almost wholly irrelevant: some people might still assume that movie adaptations should slavishly follow the words that inspired them, but I'm more impressed by <i>Anna Karenina</i>'s ability to use the original as a springboard, catapulting it into its own heightened realm of melodrama and formal experimentation.<br />
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The theatricality of Wright's adaptation – the fact that much of it visibly takes place (and was shot) in an immense, dilapidated theater, with characters crossing the stage to segue between scenes and models of dollhouses and railroad tracks standing in for actual locations – may be the movie's distinguishing gimmick, but it's also surprisingly purposeful: life is a stage for the Russian aristocracy in the 1870s. The histrionics of the storyline carry a more muted elegance in Tolstoy's original, but here, they're intentionally made as vivid and hyperbolic as possible. The overstated style of it all should remind us that late 19th-century Russia and modern America aren't very far apart in this respect, given modern media's infatuation with the carnivalesque dramas of the rich and famous. Apart from its self-reflective play with the melodrama genre, <i>Anna Karenina</i> is also visually ravishing, with each impeccable widescreen composition and dazzling use of color reminding us how little most movies actually embrace the fact that cinema is a visual art form. In other words, if the movie's achievement is predominantly visual, that emphasis on opulence should be considered a surprisingly rare achievement in modern movies; it's one of the few films in recent memory that harkens back to the Technicolor sheen of Powell/Pressburger and Douglas Sirk. Amidst its artifice, <i>Anna Karenina</i>'s indulgence in hyper-tragedy remains surprisingly effective, with Keira Knightley's porcelain beauty meshing perfectly with the film's style (she wears a mannequin mask to conceal the depression raging within).<br />
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<b>6. Neighboring Sounds</b> <i>(d. Kleber Mendonça Filho, Brazil)</i><br />
A series of black-and-white still photographs: rotting fences, defiant faces, homes in the countryside. We're then thrust into motion in modern-day Recife, following a young girl riding her tricycle. Her mother smokes weed and achieves sexual gratification with a vibrating dryer; the dog next door won't stop barking, so she feeds it tranquilizers. Another woman's car is burgled on the same street; her boyfriend's father almost literally owns the block, and wants to accept her into the family business. Another man pitches a neighborhood watch that's closer to a three-man militia, but the direst threats against this community appear to be already festering within it.<br />
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These concurrent storylines parallel each other, making room at times for surreal, sometimes horrifying intrusions; modern life is an eerie creature in <i>Neighboring Sounds</i>, in which the uncomfortably close proximity of turbulent lives is evoked through the collage-like soundtrack (ambient noises float in on top of each other, heightening the dreamlike power of most scenes). And in the end those still photographs make a circuitous, implicit reappearance, brilliantly injecting sociopolitical commentary into the enigmas at hand. Fireworks have rarely been so unsettling, so cataclysmic.<br />
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<b>7. Zero Dark Thirty</b> <i>(d. Kathryn Bigelow, USA)</i><br />
Does <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> condone torture? In many ways it's unfortunate that this question is all people talk about in regards to the movie, which also provides a disturbingly ambivalent observation of American militarism and the destructive extent to which political machination and personal vendetta intermingle (among other things). But it would also be foolish to ignore the elephant in the room, since the movie's complex view of state-sanctioned retaliation, neither liberal nor conservative, hinges on its intentionally sickening scenes of torture. Portrayal is not endorsement, Bigelow has claimed in interviews, but there are also lines of dialogue which regard the U.S. detainee program somewhat fondly; engaged viewers should be able to conclude that these words are the subjective voices of flawed individuals representing a wide political spectrum, but others (including those who have condemned the film) might conclude that these words are the ideology that the film espouses.<br />
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The movie walks a dangerous tightrope, in other words – but should we fault a film for being problematically complex? The smattering of <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/zero-dark-thirty-is-a-gut-punch-to-our-concepts-of-justice-and-revenge-20130110">articles</a>, <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/martin-sheen-ed-asner-join-411733">statements</a>, even <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/339062/washington-vs-izero-dark-thirtyi-rich-lowry">government directives</a> responding to the film have made the ethical nature of torture as well as terrorism and push-button warfare a central concern in American social discourse, something which didn't happen to the same extent after 9/11 or public images of Abu Ghraib (nor during the eight years of the Iraq War). In addition to pointing out the inextricable linkages between mass media and political discourse (a connective tissue which usually remains concealed in the United States), <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> offers a fascinating (though fleeting) depiction of modern Kuwaiti and Pakistani life, as well as a disturbing reminder that international diplomacy depends on individual, sometimes misguided, often flawed decisions. One thing's for sure: <i>Argo</i> is infinitely more xenophobic and disrespectful than <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i>.<br />
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<b>8. The Turin Horse</b> <i>(d. Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, Hungary/France/Germany/Switzerland/USA)</i><br />
The prologue relates a story about Friedrich Nietzsche: in 1889 Turin, the nihilist philosopher (and progenitor of existentialism) desperately shielded a horse being whipped with his own body, then fell into madness and spent the remaining 11 years of his life mute and insane. We know what happened to Nietzsche, the film's onscreen text muses; but what happened to the horse?<br />
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There is in fact a horse that plays a recurring role throughout the rest of the film (indeed, it's the starring player in the awe-inspiring opening shot: the camera tracks dizzyingly alongside a horse and carriage, conveying – like the beginning of <i>Sátántangó</i> – the beastliness of man through the movement of animals). But the connections between the opening anecdote and the rest of the film may just as easily be allegorical. <i>The Turin Horse</i> departs, with extremely intense focus, from this simplest of all narrative conceits, wielding simplicity in order to suggest the looming apocalypse and the nature of humanity in confronting extreme devastation. Granted, all of this is insinuated through slow, graceful camera movements and extremely austere subject matter: the peeling of potatoes, the retrieval of water from a well. Yet the gorgeously spare cinematography, multilayered sound design, and unexpectedly precise plotting (meant to obliquely suggest the Book of Genesis) all serve to pare human existence down to its mundane essence – labor, doubt, unfulfilled hope. If this is Béla Tarr's last film (as he has claimed), then at least it is appropriately portentous, honest and rigorous in a way that few filmmakers (e.g., Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Tarr) have ever been able to accomplish.<br />
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<b>9. Amour</b> <i>(d. Michael Haneke, France/Germany/Austria)</i><br />
Michael Haneke suppresses some of the more confrontational tendencies we might have seen in <i>Funny Games</i> or <i>The Piano Teacher</i> – a softening-of-the-edges that partially explains the semi-absurd sight of Haneke winning a Golden Globe award – but that quiet solemnity does not prevent <i>Amour</i> from being one of the director's most emotionally devastating films (which is saying something). With a sobering directness untypical from Haneke (his trademark cryptic ambiguity is scarce here), the film simply observes an aging couple after the wife succumbs to a vicious stroke and begins to lose control over her mind and body. It's both as simple as it sounds and unsettlingly more so; the questions regarding love and death that the movie asks us are only suggested, forcing us to do the dirty work of moral interpretation ourselves.<br />
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Haneke is known for his chilly austereness, but there's nothing ironic about <i>Amour</i>'s title: this is a story about the inflexible bonds of love as much as about the fragility of life. And despite the disturbing complexities folded into the movie's DNA – a frightening dream sequence; a morbid, dancelike episode with a trapped pigeon; the expected but no less unfathomable end to their ordeal, which poses one of those unanswerable questions that will forever torment humanity – this is ultimately a work of humanism, bearing mute witness to a shattering experience most of us would rather look away from. This makes sense, considering the film was based in part on the death of Haneke's own aunt from a degenerative disease. This intimate emotional connection might also explain why Haneke abstains from subversively deconstructing his characters this time around, though Georges and Anna in <i>Amour</i> clearly belong to the same elitist, bourgeois culture that spawned such destructive enigmas as Georges in <i>Caché</i> or Erika in <i>The Piano Teacher</i>. Maybe more important: class has little bearing on <i>Amour</i>, the story of two people divorced from ethnographic categories, confronting the tyranny of death with their own desperate love. The question of which is triumphant in the end remains unanswered, gnawing violently at the viewer long after the movie is over.<br />
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<b>10. Kill List</b> <i>(d. Ben Wheatley, UK)</i><br />
Something happened in Kiev: something horrifying, barbaric, unpronounceable. Something terrible enough to erode a man's soul – as happens to Jay, a hitman and veteran of the Iraq War, who has been sleepwalking through life for the past eight months in a shellshocked daze. Whatever happened in Kiev, its skin-crawling effect on us, the audience, is as overwhelming as the footage that Jay and his partner, Gal, discover in the basement of a pornography warehouse – footage which, though it remains offscreen for us, causes two tough Yorkshire assassins to break down in tears. <i>Kill List</i>, though extraordinarily violent and gruesomely explicit at times, also recognizes the horror-movie maxim that what remains unseen (and unseeable) carries the most dread.<br />
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<i>Kill List</i> is not a horror movie about "found footage," vampires, J-horror ghosts, serial killers, or any of the other cliches we'd expect to see in modern-day horror; like many of the best horror movies, it is about pure evil itself, the capacity for humanity to devolve into demonic barbarism. There is a shadowy cabal at the center of <i>Kill List</i>, but we never learn its true nature: It is a Satan-worshipping cult? An empire of crime? The minions of the Devil himself? Whatever it is, they have recognized that Jay is only moments from snapping into pure bloodlust, and they orchestrate a climactic of violence that is jaw-droppingly cruel and disturbing. Not a pleasant movie, clearly, but <i>Kill List</i> is able to walk a treacherous tightrope upon which few movies successfully balance: it shows us unflinchingly violent images not to titillate us, but to make us experience all of its traumatic horror, the suffering it creates (<i>I Saw the Devil</i> and <i>The Devil's Rejects</i>, on the other hand, fail when they attempt this balancing act). Jay has served in the military and long held a job in which he's compensated for mindless brutality, so if he is pushed into the black hole of evil, that descent stems not only from Jay's corrupted soul, but from a demonic world that brought him to the brink in the first place. Few thoughts are more horrifying than that.<br />
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<b>THE NEXT TEN</b><br />
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<b>Looper</b> presents classical entertainment at its finest: plot-driven, loaded with subtext, with form and content so intuitively interfused that it seems impossible to separate the two. As such, the characters are key to conveying the film's themes in inconspicuous, believable ways, and they're flawlessly conceived by a strong cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, muddying his typically elegant veneer of honor and innocence, as a "Looper" (an assassin circa 2044, tasked with offing the unknown targets that have been tossed back to him from thirty years in the future); Bruce Willis, nicely subverting his macho prototype as Levitt's older self; and Emily Blunt as the woman who plays an unexpectedly integral role in deflecting the path of time: the future (and whether or not it will be a blood-soaked wasteland devoid of morality) depends on her and her son. A wealth of narrative and thematic information is stuffed into the two-hour running time, but it never feels forced or hurried; the movie achieves the difficult task of infusing its plot with mind-bending ideas so thoroughly that it doesn't need to explicate them overtly. A lesser movie would either underestimate or overindulge the audience's intelligence; <i>Looper</i> is so confident that we're wrapped up in the plot that it simply assumes we'll be able to follow the narrative to its logical, unsettling undercurrents.<br />
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Like <i>The Turin Horse</i>, Julia Loktev's <b>The Loneliest Planet</b> employs radical minimalism (long periods of minimal narrative activity and aesthetic austerity) to achieve a hyperreal intensity of emotion. An engaged couple (Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) hire a native Georgian guide to lead them on a hike through the Caucasus Mountains; the first hour of the film, essentially, involves the trio traipsing through gorgeous scenery, with the cracks in their relationship only barely noticeable beneath the exoticism. Around the midway point, a traumatic encounter – disturbing in its matter-of-fact simplicity – casts a shadow on everything that's come beforehand, and those emotional fault lines begin to spread. The movie's technique is dangerous – this kind of slow-moving, intensely focused, tightly-wound minimalism can easily oversell its own importance, achieving pretentiousness rather than depth – but in <i>The Loneliest Planet</i> it turns the three main protagonists into disarmingly <i>real</i> characters, and suggests the devastating emotional effect of real-life trauma more ably (and hauntingly) than a flashier aesthetic could hope to do.<br />
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<b>4:44 Last Day on Earth</b> must be the least extravagant end-of-the-world movie in history, which appears to be the point: faced with their impending doom (the entire world has been made aware that its existence will end on a certain day at exactly 4:44), a bohemian couple in New York's Lower East Side wiles away their final hours. They drink, fuck, struggle to abstain from drugs; more importantly, they Skype with their distant loved ones, suggesting modern digital communication as a bridge for communication rather than a hindrance. These characters are powerless to thwart the apocalypse and, rather than making grandiloquent gestures on their last day, they struggle to reach out to other people any way they can (even offering their laptop to a Chinese food deliverer so he can Skype with his family back home). <i>4:44 Last Day on Earth</i> – helmed by the provocative, unpredictable Abel Ferrara, whose unexpected simplicity here is practically a transgression in itself – is thus a humanistic subversion of such somber (though excellent) apocalyptic dirges as <i>Melancholia</i> and <i>The Turin Horse</i>.<br />
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<b>Take This Waltz</b> has a few too many cliched rom-com moments (including, tragically, a dramatic race down a city sidewalk while a pseudo-uplifting emo song plays on the soundtrack), but ultimately those cliches are used to contradict the movie itself, to remind us that fairy-tale love doesn't happen in reality the way it does in the movies. The last twenty minutes of the movie are what clinches it: this is meant to be an ardent rebuttal to most happily-ever-after tributes to monogamy, and it goes about making this point with surprisingly bold plot construction. The movie is ultimately soberingly cynical, but that adamant bleakness is a refreshing departure from genre form. <i>Take This Waltz</i> also offers (1) an incredibly erotic depiction of lust, both consummated and unconsummated, which even the most sexually frank movies have difficulty doing; and (2) another spellbinding Michelle Williams performance, crucial in conveying a character whose reckless naivete could easily infuriate us.<br />
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It's ludicrous to criticize a movie for being too ambitious, but that honestly seems to be the main hindrance with <b>The Master</b> – a movie which attempts to do no less than encapsulate the overwhelming confusion and anxiety that proliferated through America in the postwar years. This moral imbalance, this headlong rush towards reckless capitalism, is refracted through the two main characters, both of whom remain enigmas: the movie spends its time tracing the erratic behavior of an alcoholic Navy veteran and the mentor-slash-cult-leader who takes him under his narcissistic wing, but those characters remain unknowable to us, their inner turmoil so messy as to remain invisible to the camera's eye. I'm spending so much time noting what's wrong with the movie because everything else seems so incredibly right: the dreamy cinematography (with Paul Thomas Anderson working for the first time with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr.), Jonny Greenwood's ephemeral score, the vitriolic performances. Ultimately, <i>The Master</i> can only remain an enigma to the audience, but it's a ravishing, mind-boggling enigma.<br />
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Empire, cinema, lost love, youth itself – the past is a melancholy paradise in <b>Tabu</b>, a seductively bizarre subversion of F.W. Murnau's 1931 classic <i>Tabu: A Story of the South Seas</i>. Miguel Gomes' 2012 film begins in modern-day Portugal ("Paradise Lost") and flashes back to an unnamed African country (it was shot in Mozambique) where a forbidden romance between two Europeans transpires. The latter half of the film is conveyed without dialogue and only a smattering of disorienting sound effects, concocting a dreamy modern-day version of silent cinema (though it's hardly content to merely regurgitate the period's form, unlike <i>The Artist</i>). Some have accused the movie of offering a rosy, nostalgia-hewn recount of European colonialism in Africa, but it should be remembered that the second half of the movie is the narration of an old man in modern-day Lisbon, grasping at the love and hope he had felt decades ago, in the shadow of Mount Tabu. The fact that he reexperiences his youth in the heightened style of silent cinema transmutes empire into cinema, suggesting the recklessness with which colonizers viewed Africa as their own personal fantasy, their paradise to attain. Even the man who narrates the second part of the film recognizes his oversight in mistaking colonialist life for a European playground, as the devastating tragedy in which he's embroiled is ultimately explained as a rebellious uprising against the colonizers by the indigenous population. The metaphors and analogies continue from there, insightfully complicating the violent legacy of colonialism and its disastrous fallout for both native and colonizing populations.<br />
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Richard Linklater's pseudo-documentary <b>Bernie</b> blurs the line between fact and fiction as cannily as the non-fiction films of Werner Herzog or Ross McElwee. In the small East Texas town of Carthage (close to where Linklater grew up and currently owns a summer house), the universally beloved Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) struck up an unlikely relationship with Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), an elderly widow reviled by the entire community for her stinginess and acerbic vitriol towards everyone around her. Both characters are fascinating puzzles who we are only partially able to decipher; part of the point of <i>Bernie</i> is that the truth is never entirely knowable, that those around us portray a character in public, their inner nature innately hidden. Flitting back and forth between dramatic reenactments performed by an expert cast (Black has never been better) and talking-heads interviews with Carthage's actual residents (who also reappear in many of the staged scenes), <i>Bernie</i> deftly and complexly portrays an entire community as its own unique character; the movie combines sophisticated self-reflexion and compelling entertainment with incredible dexterity.<br />
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David Cronenberg's <b>Cosmopolis</b> is a fascinating complement to his earlier take on radical alienation, 1995's <i>Crash</i>: if, in the latter movie, characters resort to gruesomely staged reenactments of violent car crashes in order to feel any kind of emotional response, then <i>Cosmopolis</i>' protagonist – a 28-year-old billionaire named Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) – similarly finds it impossible to interact with the world around him, although in this case that impenetrable buffer is built by his obscene riches. Essentially a series of surreal, Brechtian encounters that convey Packer's increasing dislocation from humanity as we know it, <i>Cosmopolis</i> is boldly artificial, even intentionally off-putting, forcing us to see the world as its discombobulated "hero" does. The robotic dialogue readings and skewed, CGI-warped environs comprise an audacious deterioration of reality; if we accept that Cronenberg is <i>trying</i> to estrange us from the film, we might recognize that it is in fact a shockingly unique, highly disturbing portrait of the demigod alienation bestowed by excessive wealth.<br />
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A chilly, slow-build analysis of class structure and family dynamics in modern-day Russia, <b>Elena</b> convincingly introduces us to a tense extended family, only to watch it come apart at the seams thanks to the allure of money. Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev – whose first two features, <i>The Return</i> (2003) and <i>The Banishment</i> (2007) have led some to proclaim him the modern heir to Tarkovsky – <i>Elena</i> is ultimately less shattering and hypnotic than those two masterworks, but it has its own unsettling power. Though hardly a Marxist statement, the film reveals the potentially devastating push-and-pull between love and materialism, condemning a modern society that values monetary gain above all else. Thanks to gorgeous cinematography by Mikhail Krichman, a moody score by Philip Glass, and ingenious plot construction, this heady drama never loses touch with its tragic human element.<br />
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The lack of a strong narrative in many kung-fu movies has an implicit potential: unconstrained by a slavish attention to telling a story, we might be reminded that movies are primarily colors, lines, and shapes in motion, a formal entity at its foundation if not in its very essence. It's absurd, of course, to call <b>The Raid: Redemption</b> the best avant-garde movie of the year, but what other film was so consistently awe-inspiring purely in its formal arrangements? The premise is something you'd see in the most puerile first-person-shooter video game (a SWAT team has to make its way to the top floor of a Jakartan high-rise in order to eliminate a sadistic gang leader), yet its clocklike precision and morbid beauty transcend the juvenile action mayhem this might suggest.<br />
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<b>...AND THE REST</b><br />
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<i>B (Good)</i><br />
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<b>21. Samsara</b> <i>(d. Ron Fricke, USA)</i> <i>Samsara</i> borrows heavily from the template already established by Godfrey Reggio's <i>Qatsi</i> trilogy, and furthermore relies on some dubious coffee-table exoticism and cliched symbolic imagery (a geisha shedding a single tear? really?). But there's still no denying the fact that Ron Fricke's spellbinding visual poem, which was shot on crystalline 70mm film and globetrots through 25 countries, shows us things we would presumably never see outside of this film, which is one of the most valuable things that cinema can offer us. The movie also has a surreal episode in which a deskman in a high-rise slathers clay and make-up all over his face, performs a monstrous pseudo-dance, gouges out his fake eyes, and repeats the process incessantly – a scene which is even more batshit crazy and horrifying than it sounds.<br />
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<b>22. Holy Motors</b> <i>(d. Leos Carax, France/Germany)</i> To be honest, some of the film's ardent, surreal cinephilia wears out its welcome: this is most definitely a movie whose parts are superior to the whole. But when those parts include a a CGI foray involving dazzling light display, modern dance, and dragon sex; a hideous troll absconding with ludicrously beautiful Eva Mendes into a Parisian sewer, draping her in a makeshift burka and exhibiting his relentless erection; and a poignant homecoming involving a family of chimpanzees, it's hard to complain. Ultimately, it may amount to little more than a bizarre eulogy for the death of celluloid, but that being the case, it's hard to think of a more fittingly visceral and oneiric ode than this one.<br />
<b>23. The Five-Year Engagement</b> <i>(d. Nicholas Stoller, USA)</i> Sophisticated comedy (no gross-out gags or pop-culture parody here) that marvelously buoys its compassion for its characters with its laughs.<br />
<b>24. Moonrise Kingdom</b> <i>(d. Wes Anderson, USA)</i> It would be nice if Wes Anderson started breaking out of his mold a little bit (the pitfall of a director with enough clout to do whatever he wants is that self-repetition becomes the name of the game), but when the results are as sweet and engaging as <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i>, I'll take whatever he gives us.<br />
<b>25. The Cabin in the Woods</b> <i>(d. Drew Goddard, USA)</i> Postmodern gimmickry at its cleverest and most enjoyable, with a climax that's designed to give fanboys a unanimous orgasm.<br />
<b>26. Attenberg</b> <i>(d. Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece)</i> Possible incest and sexual infantilism in a modern-day Greek industrial wasteland; never less than thought-provoking, but its self-serious arthouse dialogue (including lots of talk about erect phalli and mating rituals) becomes tiresome.<br />
<b>27. Killer Joe</b> <i>(d. William Friedkin, USA)</i> Friedkin's second collaboration (after the superior <i>Bug</i>) with playwright/screenwriter Tracy Letts is in the worst possible taste (its depiction of Texans as repugnant hicks offers no depth, and the last 20 minutes provide an onslaught of sexual humiliation and extreme violence), but it's so off-the-walls insane that it warrants at least one viewing. Matthew McConaughey is chillingly excellent, and the movie does have some ideas on its mind (namely, a new and hideous revision of the nuclear family, hyperbolized for a sensationalistic tabloid age).<br />
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<b>28. The Dark Knight Rises</b> <i>(d. Christopher Nolan, USA/UK)</i> Nolan knows how to film and edit an action scene better than anyone, but the movie's politics are insultingly hollow (both a conservative celebration of insular wealth and a liberal condemnation of a police state, with heavy emphasis on the former) and the ending is laughably simplistic.<br />
<b>29. The Miners' Hymns</b> <i>(d. Bill Morrison, UK)</i><br />
<b>30. The Avengers</b> <i>(d. Joss Whedon, USA)</i> Overlong and uneven – and further proof that American audiences love to see our metropolises eviscerated onscreen about as much as we hate any kind of social criticism in real life – but it's still impressive how ably this superhero epic manages to please a vast constituency of disparate fans, introducing characters and plot in a minimal amount of time with maximal impact.<br />
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<i>B– (Above Average)</i><br />
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<b>31. Skyfall</b> <i>(d. Sam Mendes, UK/USA)</i> A noble attempt at deepening the characters of both James Bond and M, with action scenes that are thankfully cohesive (as opposed to its atrocious predecessor, <i>Quantum of Solace</i>), but I'm not in the camp that thinks this is one of the best Bond movies ever. (My affinities lie with <i>Casino Royale</i>.) Many characters (especially Javier Bardem's villainous Silva, strangely shrouded in homophobia) remain cliches, but at least the cinematography and scenery are gorgeous.<br />
<b>32. Lincoln</b> <i>(d. Steven Spielberg, USA/India)</i> Strangely schizophrenic: the movie wants to be both a complex historical document and a generic crowdpleaser, and it also wants to celebrate American democracy at the same time it reminds us that liberalism relied upon corruption and coercion from the very start. (It's even possible that the movie argues that manipulation and bribery are acceptable as long as they have virtuous ends – a dubious proposition, to say the least.) In any case, Daniel Day-Lewis' performance and Tony Kushner's script are worthy of the numerous commendations they've received.<br />
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<b>33. Life of Pi</b> <i>(d. Ang Lee, USA/China/Taiwan)</i> Visually spellbinding, but otherwise its treatment of religious faith and dogmatic squabbling remains pretty trite. Much of the dialogue sounds like it's lifted from a <i>Chicken Soup for the Soul</i> book. The thinness of the characters is surprising, considering that's usually Ang Lee's strength.<br />
<b>34. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter</b> <i>(d. Timur Bekmambetov, USA)</i> I'm apparently one of the few people who thinks that this proudly ludicrous fantasia deconstructs history, myth, storytelling, and the insidious legacy of slavery and American colonialism more ably than <i>Django Unchained</i> (see below). The closing credits sequence (which is alone worth the price of admission) clearly illustrates that the building of this country was drenched in the blood and exploitation of innocents, which seems a more interesting subversion than Quentin Tarantino's celebration of hyperviolent retribution.<br />
<b>35. The Color Wheel</b> <i>(d. Alex Ross Perry, USA)</i> The Mumblecore subgenre gets a slight twist here, but only very slight, and only at the very end. Otherwise, we're asked to spend an hour and a half with two of the most unlikeable people imaginable. (Character studies of horrible human beings are only compelling if the characters have depth – a lesson many writer/directors seem to forget.)<br />
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<i>C+ (So-So)</i><br />
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<b>36. Beyond the Black Rainbow</b> <i>(d. Panos Cosmatos, Canada)</i> I ardently wanted to like this movie more than I did; its compendium of hypnotic, surreal, highly formalist imagery (with a commendable resistance to narrative cohesion) seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, Cosmatos' promising debut reminds us that some complexity, unity of vision, or at least graceful aesthetic mastery is what makes such hallucinatory enigmas work. That said, it has one of the best scenes of the year (which I think involves a man climbing into a vat of oil, witnessing the face of God, decomposing, and then reanimating himself) and is worth at least one viewing (probably more).<br />
<b>37. Haywire</b> <i>(d. Steven Soderbergh, USA/Ireland)</i> The fight scenes are terrific, the cast impressive, but the story so slight that it's practically nonexistent. Whereas <i>The Limey</i> (Soderbergh's previous collaboration with screenwriter Lem Dobbs) was impressively lean and tough, <i>Haywire</i> simply seems like it has nothing on its mind.<br />
<b>38. Damsels in Distress</b> <i>(d. Whit Stillman, USA)</i> Stillman's verbose, high-spirited follow-up to <i>The Last Days of Disco</i> (1998) is a sun-dappled musical comedy set at a satirically ripe liberal arts college where suicide is an epidemic issue. Stillman seems to be going for some Sirkian subversion here: the movie ends with a parade of happy romantic unions, but the "damsels" we meet are all infinitely superior (more intelligent, eloquent, compassionate, charming) than their suitors. The sprightly tone is at odds with the unfortunate couplings on display. But if Stillman is trying to deflate both the artifice of romantic comedies and the pomposity of upper-class colleges, it's shrouded in the dull trappings of a mediocre comedy, and any self-reflexive subtext that may exist does little to enliven the proceedings.<br />
<b>39. Red Hook Summer</b> <i>(d. Spike Lee, USA)</i> Lee's semi-sequel to <i>Do the Right Thing</i> was intentionally shot on a digital camera with a shoestring budget on a very condensed schedule. This time, the setting is another Brooklyn neighborhood (the rapidly-gentrifying area of Red Hook), but the focus is shifted to an iPad-wielding vegan adolescent from the suburbs of Atlanta spending the summer with his uncle. Lee's attempt to confront a bewildering array of sociopolitical issues is admirable, but (aside from Clarke Peters' and Thomas Byrd's performances) the acting is uniformly atrocious, and although the experiment was to write a rapid-fire, semi-intuitive screenplay, the plot is a self-destructive mess.<br />
<b>40. The Bourne Legacy</b> <i>(d. Tony Gilroy, USA)</i> Surprisingly dull; this reboot to the franchise is about 80% exposition and 20% action, though Jeremy Renner is reliably charismatic.<br />
<b>41. The Innkeepers</b> <i>(d. Ti West, USA)</i> An old-fashioned ghost story with a charmingly laid-back air, but ultimately it's too laid-back: the story is patched together from a number of reliable tropes, and the fleeting instances of visual wit are too few and far between.<br />
<b>42. Wanderlust</b> <i>(d. David Wain, USA)</i><br />
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<i>C (Problematic)</i><br />
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<b>43. Django Unchained</b> <i>(d. Quentin Tarantino, USA)</i> My thoughts about Tarantino's latest are more fully fleshed out <a href="http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/2013/02/01/smash-cuts-django-unchained/">here</a> (in a back-and-forth blog post I wrote with Jeremy Meckler on the Walker Art Center website), but I'll summarize: if <i>Inglourious Basterds</i> was a clever but precarious comment on how mass media ultimately entrench popular opinions of history (thus replacing fact with fiction), <i>Django Unchained</i> devolves even further into the postmodern void, positing slavery as a mere excuse for the director to indulge his fanboy inclinations. Placing brutal scenes (albeit mostly offscreen) of slaves being ripped apart by guard dogs and Mandingo fighters gouging out each others' eyes next to juvenile, cartoonish violence (gunshots to genitalia, one villainess blasted out of a scene with a shotgun, etc.) does not provide a comment on history or racial antagonism or mediation; it's just vacuous and irritating. Tarantino's simplistic infatuation with gory retribution has never been more facile: when the climactic massacre is followed by two of the movie's heroes reveling in the carnage, we get the impression that nothing matters anymore in reality (or history) so we might as well embrace artifice. Maybe more important: Tarantino has also started ripping off himself; there's nothing in <i>Django Unchained</i> that we haven't already seen in at least one of his previous movies.<br />
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<i>C– (Aggravating)</i><br />
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<b>44. Prometheus</b> <i>(d. Ridley Scott, USA/UK)</i> A stellar cast marooned with an abysmal screenplay; the appeal of the original <i>Alien</i> trilogy (we'll forget <i>Alien: Resurrection</i>) was mostly its tough, pared-back simplicity, while this "reboot" overloads the portentous mythology. The setup is admittedly tantalizing, but there's no payoff, and it gets more and more ridiculous as it goes on (though the self-performed abortion is at least insane enough to be memorable).<br />
<b>45. Intruders</b> <i>(d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, USA/UK/Spain)</i><br />
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<b>46. Beasts of the Southern Wild</b> <i>(d. Benh Zeitlin, USA)</i> <a href="http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2012/09/bell-hooks-no-love-in-wild.html">bell hooks</a> said it better than I could: "There is nothing radical about the age-old politics of domination the movie espouses – insisting that only the strong survive, that disease weeds out the weak (i.e. the slaughter of Native Americans), that nature chooses excluding and including. If Wink represents the dying untamed primitive then what does Hushpuppy represent?" It's the stereotypical noble savage all over again, only this time it's contextualized against the traumatic backdrop of Hurricane Katrina (a tragedy which proved all too painfully that racial inequalities – whether among the rich or the poor, in the north or the south – are still very much present in modern America). The movie's unique opening half-hour makes it easy (too easy) to brush past its offensive cliches, but as the plot settles down into the usual depiction of primitive, plucky savages, it's impossible to ignore its casual racism.<br />
<b>47. Rust and Bone</b> <i>(d. Jacques Audiard, France/Belgium)</i> Audiard's macho melodrama is a parade of ridiculous behavior and symbolic characterizations: Marion Cotillard is the former orca trainer and double-amputee forced to ponder whether humans are merely animals at heart; Matthias Schoenaerts is the reckless bare-knuckle boxer whose pent-up rage ultimately saves the day, in a laughably melodramatic contrivance. The director's previous <i>A Prophet</i> was accused of glorifying violence, but it's <i>Rust and Bone</i> that glorifies both violence and idiocy.<br />
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<i>D+ (Bad)</i><br />
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<b>48. Silver Linings Playbook</b> <i>(d. David O. Russell, USA)</i> Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence suffer from mental illness, but it's the kind of Hollywood crazy-sexy that ensues when attractive people simply behave slightly out of the ordinary. And anyway, everything will be okay and they can triumph over their "insanity" if they can only win the big dance competition! (They have Chris Tucker to provide them with some "soul.") Oscar voters are never the most perceptive bunch, but they deserve special castigation for lauding this offensive cartoon.<br />
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<i>D (Abysmal)</i><br />
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<b>49. Argo</b> <i>(d. Ben Affleck, USA)</i> I didn't think the prospect of Ben Affleck (possibly) running for senator was appalling until I saw this jingoistic travesty: yet another xenophobic story about Americans stranded in a "hellish" overseas land, unable to understand why anyone would want to hurt God-blessed, patriotic Americans. The movie has absolutely no sensitivity to or interest in the plight Iranians actually suffered during the 1979 hostage crisis: it treats them the same way Jimmy Carter did during his presidency, labeling them as terrorists and anarchists despite the fact that their support for the Iranian Revolution was a response to a CIA-backed coup that replaced Iran's democratically-elected president, Mohammad Mosaddegh, with the American-friendly puppet regime of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In other words, the CIA had also staged a coup at the American embassy in Iran 26 years earlier – but <i>Argo</i> only has time to vilify those bloodthirsty Arabs, not the American bureaucrats and officials who were initially responsible. It's astonishing how clearly you can see the movie's propagandistic tunnel-vision: despite onscreen text at the end which states that none of the American hostages were tortured or killed, the movie constantly asserts (through numerous characters) that the Iranian militants are torturing their captives; apparently an ambiguous portrayal of American torture (when it actually happened) in <i>Zero Dark Thirty</i> is unacceptable, but constantly suggesting that the Iranian militants tortured Americans (when it never actually happened) in <i>Argo</i> is totally okay. Even the cleverest part of the movie – the juxtaposition of Hollywood artifice and real-world political intrigue – becomes offensive when a storyboarded scene of space explorers fleeing a hostile planet is intercut with scenes of the American hostages being flown out of Tehran, positing Iran as a Hoth-like deathtrap from which the American heroes must escape. So yes, critics, you're right that the movie is well-made – but if critics stopped only paying attention to the craftsmanship on the surface and started realizing that movies play a complicated political and social role in cultural discourse, that esteem would likely (hopefully) become muted very quickly.<br />
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<i>D– (Unforgivable)</i><br />
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<b>50. Headhunters</b> <i>(d. Morten Tyldum, Norway/Germany)</i> Honestly I remember practically nothing about seeing this cliched crime movie about seven months ago, except for thinking it would have made a bad <i>Law and Order</i> episode.<br />
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<b>51. V/H/S</b> <i>(various directors, USA)</i> According to <i>V/H/S</i>, women are: (a) wan vampires eager to castrate jock morons; (b) vindictive new wives who will slit your throat and steal your money; (c) fertile testing grounds for some kind of para-human hybrid natal experiments; or (d) the Devil herself. True, the men in this movie are all equally horrible (though less demonic), which means <i>no one</i> is deserving of our sympathy or engagement. Like spending two hours with a sadistic fratboy who's just shotgunned a Schlitz.<br />
<b>52. Darling Companion</b> <i>(d. Lawrence Kasdan, USA)</i> Offensive in a completely different way: if <i>V/H/S</i> shows a callous disregard for humanity, <i>Darling Companion</i> flounders in a callous disregard for any kind of filmmaking proficiency. How to compose a shot, how to edit together sequences, how to craft a compelling plot, how to light a scene without making it seem flat and lifeless – these are all facets in which Lawrence Kasdan is not remotely interested. And to offer so few reenforcements to such a great cast (Kevin Kline, Diane Keaton, Elisabeth Moss, Mark Duplass, Richard Jenkins) is its own kind of cruelty.<br />
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<i>F (Crime Against Humanity)</i><br />
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<b>53. The Dictator</b> <i>(d. Larry Charles, USA)</i> The worst thing to happen to America's global image since George W. Bush. Middle Easterners are goat-rapists, pedophiles, uniformly genocidal, and throw their female infants out with the trash – these are the kinds of xenophobic jokes we're supposed to laugh at mindlessly. But the offenses expand beyond mere cultural stereotypes: there are also shit-missiles storming a New York City street, the severed head of a black activist standing in as a ventriloquist dummy, and two characters searching around a pregnant woman's womb for a lost cell phone. The movie bursts at the seams with hatred, condescension, juvenility, nationalism, and a kind of willful stupidity; it has no reason to exist.
Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-54807977293244193372013-02-05T14:45:00.000-06:002013-02-06T21:52:05.723-06:00My Canon: "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (Martin Scorsese, 1974)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> begins with a musical number – an homage to <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, drenched in Technicolor red and filmed on a set that could only have been built in Hollywoodland. A young Alice belts out a showtune on a ranch somewhere in proverbial Kansas; she declares she can outperform Alice Faye, thus expositing her dream of becoming an elegant singer. Then a sudden smash cut thrusts us into the opening credits, and also into Scorsese territory, as the titles (written in semi-ironic, <i>Blue Velvet</i>-style cursive script) appear over a speeding tracking shot that races over the rooftops of Socorro, New Mexico, 27 years later. The sleek fantasia of classic Hollywood musicals is violently jarred with the fast-paced, no-frills, rough-edged, happy-sad milieu of 1970s New American cinema, a movement of which Scorsese was one of the foremost progenitors. The rapid-fire, profanity-laced dialogue enlivens what could have been a syrupy soap opera, ultimately creating what might be best described as hyper-naturalism.</div>
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Still halfway through shooting <i>The Exorcist</i>, Ellen Burstyn was offered the tantalizing opportunity to put another project into production at Warner Bros., with relatively unfettered creative control. As the actress is quoted in Peter Biskind's <i>Easy Riders, Raging Bulls</i>, Robert Getchell's script for <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> found its way to Burstyn, albeit in slightly rosier, sleeker tones ("in a kind of Doris Day-Rock Hudson kind of way," she explained). She immediately began searching for a rougher-edged director who might inject some much-needed grit and despair into the proceedings; a viewing of <i>Mean Streets</i> convinced her that Scorsese was the right man for the job, though (by his own admission) he knew nothing about women.<br />
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Emerging in the middle years of American second-wave feminism, <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> was both celebrated and decried upon its release for endorsing (or failing to) women's agency in modern American life. Burstyn and Scorsese agreed that they wanted to portray a newly strong and independent woman who came to the realization that she doesn't need the companionship of a man for security and happiness. A powerful indictment of the entitlement and domestic violence perpetrated by men (an indictment all the more sobering because it shares screen time with poignant humanism and breakneck comedy), <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> follows its titular character after she and her son Tommy abandon their hometown, following the accidental death of her husband – a gruff, emotionally pent-up man who provides money and little else for the family (though it's a sign of the movie's compassion that even he, while unlikeably morose and distant, is hardly the violent monster that a more simplistic movie would have presented him as). Hoping to achieve her dreams of becoming a singer in Monterey, California (a dream she abandoned upon getting pregnant and marrying), the duo's limited funds only get them as far as Phoenix, where Alice stumbles into an affair with the movie's only truly horrible character: Harvey Keitel's Ben, who mercilessly beats his wife in front of Alice when she finds out he's having an affair. Fearfully protecting Tommy from Ben's violence, Alice and her son move on to Tucson, where she lands a job as a diner waitress and reluctantly falls in love with David, the strong-silent type who's given considerable depth and sensitivity by Kris Kristofferson's performance. Having experienced only violence and alienation from the men in her life (aside from Tommy, with whom she has a jokey, intimate, completely naturalistic relationship), Alice holds any kind of relationship with David at arm's length – but, as often happens, their mutual attraction defuses any kind of self-professed insularity.<br />
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Certainly <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> is no <i>Jeanne Dielman</i> or <i>Riddles of the Sphinx</i>, and its allegiance to feminism is shaky in some ways: it was, of course, directed by a man (although apparently the right man for the job, and the director whom Burstyn enlisted), but more debatable is the movie's happy ending. Rather than eschewing any kind of romantic relationship, David decides to follow Alice and Tommy to Monterey, where she can embark on her singing career. (A gorgeous performance she offers at a tiny nightclub in Phoenix reveals how promising her ambition actually is.) In fact, the original ending had Alice abandoning David, embracing her individuality and self-reliance; but Warner Bros., seeking a more satisfying resolution, pleaded for a happy-ending compromise. Though Alice and Tommy's trek to Monterey in some kind of stoic solidarity would have proclaimed a stronger endorsement of feminism, the ending as it currently stands is more humanistic than ideological, asking the equally difficult question of whether those victimized in relationships can or should still find love in the world. <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> does provide a romantic union between man and woman, but this seems more because Scorsese and his cast care so deeply for these characters, not out of any kind of capitulation to a patriarchal insistence on heteronormative relationships.<br />
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Scorsese is typically known for his immersive portrayals of criminal communities and his deconstruction of violent masculinity, yet I've always felt that his non-crime pictures – particularly <i>After Hours</i>, <i>The King of Comedy</i>, <i>The Age of Innocence</i>, <i>Hugo</i>, and of course <i>Alice</i> – are his most interesting. While Scorsese's aesthetic prowess is always on display in <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> (the mobility of the camera in both the frenetic restaurant scenes and during Alice's nightclub performances are astonishing), even more impressive is his work with this incredible ensemble cast (which also features Diane Ladd as Alice's outspoken coworker and Jodie Foster, in one of her first film roles, as Tommy's cynical, wine-guzzling young companion). Ellen Burstyn achieves a deft balancing act between wisecracking resilience and veiled vulnerability, and her seemingly effortless believability in both this and <i>The Exorcist</i> (which are, of course, completely disparate roles), and her rapport with Alfred Lutter as Tommy (who was cast after auditioning 300-some young actors) has an acrobatic intensity.<br />
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If the movie had decided to devote its energies to either bleak working-class suffocation or zippy familial sitcom, it may have been an interesting time-capsule document (the movie's portrayal of southwest America in the mid-1970s is always a wonder to behold); but by deftly infusing its energetic comedy with unflinching portrayals of gender politics and domestic violence, <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> becomes an overwhelming happy-sad combustion, in the manner of the best Billy Wilder or Ernst Lubitsch. Its methodology is vaguely postmodern: the stylized opening, an homage to classic musicals, reminds us that relationships in real life do not operate according to cinematic fairy-tale splendor. But the movie is too sincere, too compassionate, too in love with the unexpected turns that life takes, to completely deprive its characters of the happiness they so clearly deserve. An unheralded masterpiece in both Scorsese's and Burstyn's filmographies, <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> is one of the most dazzling and humanistic treasures of 1970s American cinema.<br />
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<i>"My Canon" is a series in which I analyze my 100 favorite films in detail, in alphabetical order. Here is my <a href="http://phantomlightning.blogspot.com/2013/02/my-canon-introduction.html">introduction</a>.</i>
Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-37328848647198231212013-02-05T12:57:00.000-06:002013-02-06T21:57:57.038-06:00My Canon: Introduction<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The list is itself a collection, a sublimated collection. One does not actually have to own the things. To know is to have (luckily, for those without great means). It is already a claim, a species of possession, to think about them in this form, the form of a list: which is to value them, to rank them, to say they are worth remembering or desiring.</blockquote>
– Susan Sontag, <i>The Volcano Lover</i><br />
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Do I have a favorite movie?... More important, <i>should </i>I have a favorite movie? The question provokes resistance in me even though I recognize it to be intellectually respectable in a way that a similar but (I assume) distinguishable question – What is the greatest movie ever made? – is not. And yet, in some ways, the silly question would be the easier to answer. </blockquote>
– William S. Pechter, "These Are a Few of My Favorite Things"<br />
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In August of last year, when the British Film Institute (through their publication <i>Sight & Sound</i>) released their seventh once-a-decade <a href="http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012">Greatest Films poll</a>, it instigated a flurry of articles and responses ranging from the fanboy-enthusiastic to the tactfully dubious. The former camp sees the <i>Sight & Sound</i> poll as an invaluable way of charting and cherishing the most treasured works in the history of cinema; Roger Ebert, for example, has described it as by "far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies – the only one most serious movie people take seriously." The latter camp, on the other hand – exemplified by such critics as Raymond Durgnat and David Thomson – see the poll as elitist, unfairly limiting, or a pointless "children's game" that may be momentary fun but hardly establishes an "official" canon of the best movies ever made, a task which may be impossible from the start. Each worthy selection suggests an equally tragic omission, as the polling is always at least somewhat prone to cultural zeitgeists and viewing availability.<br />
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The truth, as it often does, lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, polls of this kind are inevitably exclusionary: advising audiences which 50 (or even 250) films should be their viewing priorities unfairly sequesters other titles that might, in fact, end up being those viewers' favorites. On the other hand, semi-official canons are a valuable way to conceive of the entire history of an art form in a synoptic view, offering a shorthand guide to the most culturally vital, artistically innovative, emotionally powerful, and thematically complex works of cinematic art that have been made throughout history. When the majority of mainstream criticism today treats its vocation as a sort of Consumer Reports for moviegoers – judging movies based on the satisfaction they provide to audiences who are merely looking for a good story, as commodities which provide entertainment – this kind of well-intentioned, perspicacious critical overview is incredibly valuable. Furthermore, as <i>Sight & Sound</i> explains, the 2012 poll expanded its breadth to include 846 responses from 73 different countries entailing 2,045 films listed; if you're going to attempt a semi-official canon, it would be difficult to achieve one that's more eclectic and far-reaching than this one.<br />
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Which isn't to say there aren't problems: the results are still predominantly Anglocentric, with few female directors listed. Furthermore, as Michael Atkinson <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/listomania">points out</a>, the ability to seriously judge every movie in history by our own well-intentioned criteria is becoming increasingly difficult in a digital age, inundated with critical opinion: "As our digital intercourse about all things continues to grow like kudzu, threatening to involve practically every human being on Earth in open conversation, the feedback loops surrounding cultural investigation and appraisal of all kinds will get so pervasive that it may well become impossible, some day soon, to arrive at a truly singular and independent perspective on a film – much less hope that that perspective is attained by others independently as well, and might therefore constitute a valuable consensus about what that film <i>is</i> and how good it actually might be. Is such a questionable thing even possible, or are our poll-taking endeavours destined, in a fondly Camusian way, to long for a singular ‘truth’ that we know cannot exist, under any conditions?"<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Sarris' "ballot" for the 1962 <i>Sight & Sound </i>poll</td></tr>
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This being the case, one might assume that it's more valuable to attempt a personal canon – in other words, a list of "favorite" movies rather than "greatest" movies. As William Pechter suggests in one of the epigraphs above, the "favorite" question is more intellectually sound (though difficult to answer) than the "greatest" question, precisely because it depends on one's subjective response rather than a semi-objective range of established criteria. If forming and elucidating a subjective response is increasingly difficult (nigh impossible) given a digital discourse that provides critical and public opinion before many moviegoers even have a chance to see the movie, it becomes all the more valuable to formulate an idiosyncratic canon.<br />
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An even more pertinent question: why write about this six months after the poll was released? Am I not entering the fray a little too late? The answer is yes, but in my defense: before starting to build my personal canon, I wanted a little critical distance from the <i>Sight & Sound</i> poll, a little time to ponder its inclusions and exclusions, and needed a while to decide what <i>are</i> my favorite films of all time. This lengthy deliberation process may seem self-defeating: shouldn't a list of favorites be somewhat spontaneous, without an excessive amount of reconsideration? Yes, but the opposite pitfall is also dangerous: selecting films impulsively may reflect a little too strongly the cultural opinions of the critical tastemakers who cobbled together the <i>Sight & Sound</i> poll in the first place.<br />
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Hereby, then, is the beginning of a new project: My Canon, or my 100 favorite movies, analyzed one-by-one in alphabetical order. It should be noted that some of these movies I haven't seen in a matter of years, so it's conceivable that, after rewatching them for this project, I might in fact revise my original opinion and regard them with diminished esteem this time around. So be it: if this happens, it will merely prove the point that any kind of subjective list-making is prone to impulse and reformed opinions. At the end of the project, I may have a slightly recalibrated Top 100, and will be able to whittle it down to a Top Ten with more decisiveness (presumably, at least, though Top Tens are even more unfair and impossibly exclusionary than Top 100s). It should also be noted that, while I am attempting to establish my own personal canon, there will be considerable overlap with the <i>Sight & Sound</i> poll; while I don't want to merely regurgitate critical favorites, it's undeniable that some of those titles reappear frequently because they do hold seemingly inexhaustible narrative, aesthetic, emotional, and thematic rewards.<br />
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To return, finally, to the first epigraph above: Sontag's insightful remark about list-making seems absolutely appropriate – critics and art-lovers enjoy making lists because it offers an ardent way to "possess" the memories we have of our favorite films. To rank these movies is to remember <i>and</i> desire them, to travel back in time to the overwhelming initial experience I had with them. This might be the significant difference between favorite films and greatest films: favorites continue to exert a resonant hold over our memories, sometimes exuding an emotional power equivalent to our own real-life remembrances. Making a canon like this is, in other words, a way to possess (maybe meekly, desperately) the feelings we initially had about the movies we include.
Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-91452138786160883032012-11-16T19:03:00.001-06:002012-11-16T19:03:41.428-06:00Screening Log, September & October<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Material </b><i>(d. Thomas Heise, Germany, 2009) </i><b>A–</b><br />
What is the relationship between history and memory? Can we understand one without the other? And how does either appear to us: as linearity, as narrative, or as a jumbled heap that suddenly appears, daunting in its messiness? These are the beguiling questions that documentarian Thomas Heise poses to us with <i>Material</i>, albeit implicitly: the nearly-three-hour documentary/essay is comprised of archival footage, spontaneous imagery shot by Heise while living in East Berlin in the late 1980s and early '90s, and material leftover from Heise's 35mm productions and excised from the final films. The diversity of sources from which the footage is culled results in an eclectic visual palette – from grainy black-and-white digital video, to the vivid images from news programs distorted through magnification, to pristine color film – yet this sometimes-jarring combination of styles is itself a fascinating portrayal of the various guises in which memories and past events appear to us, as though their passage through time has colored them in unforeseen ways. While theoretical notions of historical analysis remain under the surface, the movie explicitly illustrates an East German society in the midst of drastic transformation: every figure we see onscreen (from esteemed theatrical directors to former Stasi bureaucrats, from imprisoned murderers to opinionated grandmothers) responds to their sociopolitical climate with rhetorical fervor, collectively weaving a bewildering tapestry of a particular time and place. To add to the chaos, Heise offers little to no explanation for the events we see onscreen: a forced eviction early in the movie and a riot that breaks out in a small movie theater, for example, simply play out before our eyes with overwhelming immediacy, removed from their immediate context. Thus estranging itself from typical political documentaries, <i>Material</i> draws a further correlation between historical events and the visceral spontaneity of memories, as though East Germany itself is desperately referring to the memories and histories that brought about its downfall. Those looking for a document of East Germany in its waning years will probably be disappointed, but by questioning the nature of history and documentary itself, <i>Material</i> transforms into something infinitely more troubling and thought-provoking.<br /><br />
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<b>A Grin without a Cat</b> <i>(d. Chris Marker, France, 1977)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
<i>A Grin without a Cat</i> would actually make a fine double-feature with <i>Material</i>, though seven hours of dizzying political history presented in a rush of archival imagery would be tough going for even the staunchest cinephile. The late, great Chris Marker's four-hour compilation of turbulent world events throughout the 1960s and early '70s is comprised mostly of on-the-ground, spontaneous footage captured by everyday witnesses who happened to be present (with some televised news programs and excerpts from other films thrown in). Marker's whirlwind, globetrotting breadth – we leap from Vietnam to France to Cuba to China to the U.S. to Bolivia, making some detours along the way – is made even more overwhelming thanks to Marker's unwillingness to clearly explicate the sociopolitical context of these scenes. (Some considerable knowledge of mid-20th century world history is practically a requirement here.) The benefit of this lack of talking-heads explication is that <i>A Grin without a Cat</i> offers a visceral, baffling document of a tempestuous turning point in global events: we really do feel like the world is teetering on the brink of either rejuvenation or collapse, with each shaky handheld viewpoint immersing us in this raging torrent of history. The movie also offers us the opportunity to witness compelling political characters like Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende addressing their constituents. It's no coincidence that Marker begins by citing <i>Battleship Potemkin</i>: throughout the documentary, Marker uses montage editing (in the purest Soviet sense) to pose juxtapositions and correlations between geographically distant events, suggesting the forces of dialectical materialism with characteristic intellectual agility. At times his connecting tissue can be pretty flimsy, but then aren't we always at the mercy of a flippant, capricious history?<br />
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<b>Interiors</b> <i>(d. Woody Allen, USA, 1978)</i> <b>A–</b><br />
I had been intending to check out Woody's first all-out dramatic film (an homage to Ingmar Bergman, one of the director's idols) for a long time; happily, Allen reveals himself as sure-footed with drama as with comedy (at least during this fertile mid-to-late '70's period. Three sisters' lives are unsettled after the divorce of their parents, a demanding matriarch and an aloof father who wants to make the most of his remaining years. As Eve, the mother who is at once frail and volatile, Geraldine Page (who garnered a slew of awards for her performance) commands every scene she's in: a study in restrained anger and insecurity, her character (even, or especially, through her absence) catalyzes the rest of the ensemble. (Allen originally wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the part, but she was committed to shooting <i>Autumn Sonata</i> with Ingmar Bergman; the casting switch may have actually benefited <i>Interiors</i> in the long run, as Ingrid's effortless poise would have innately altered the character.) Shot in muted browns, blues, and grays by Gordon Willis, <i>Interiors</i> extends its central thematic motif (characters who feel the need to tyrannically control their external worlds to make up for the turbulence of their inner psyches) to its close, suffocating compositions: the lack of distanced establishing shots and the tendency to edit abruptly between brief snippets of scenes (a dangerous technique that works better here than in practically any other instance I've seen) powerfully conveys the tense relationships between a number of compellingly troubled characters. Some other Allen movies are off-putting in their middle-upper-class insularity, but that privileged milieu actually acts as a nice counterpoint to these characters' messy lives (and in any case, the character of Pearl, the father's new wife, acts as an implicit critique of bourgeois arrogance).<br /><br />
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<b>Caravaggio</b> <i>(d. Derek Jarman, UK, 1986)</i> <b>B</b><br />
Jarman's biography of the controversial 17th century painter treads a fine line between kitsch and tragedy, a balancing act that succeeds to varying degrees throughout the film. Jarman envisions Caravaggio as a bisexual blaspheme, a drunken brawler revisiting his scandalous life from his deathbed, as the sound of foghorns (and, occasionally, automobiles and trains) filter through the open window. Ripe with pederasty and homoeroticism, the movie paints an extravagant portrait of a painter whose beauty was inseparable from his sacrilege; his religious iconography typically used ruffians and prostitutes as models, a duality that's also reflected in the movie's numerous anachronisms (from the aforementioned cars and trains, to calculators, typewriters, and electric lighting). Jarman and his crew get around the difficulty of believably conveying 17th century exteriors by containing all of the action to interiors shot on studio sets, which makes for a bold, colorful, occasionally surreal visual palette, but which also makes the movie seem at times like an intentional curio, sardonically exploiting its barebones budget. That kind of thing works well in <i>Flaming Creatures</i> or George Kuchar movies, for example, but is trickier when the movie also contains portentous proclamations and extravagant portrayals of lust, jealousy, murder, and revenge. In any case, Jarman's artistry is invigoratingly unique, and the movie is never less than thought-provoking.<br /><br />
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<b>Looper</b> <i>(d. Rian Johnson, USA/China, 2012)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
Despite cribbing from both <i>La jetée</i> and that masterpiece's own "remake," <i>12 Monkeys</i>, <i>Looper</i> still manages to be refreshingly original and, at least so far, the most exciting Hollywood movie of the year. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Joe, an assassin in 2044 who is tasked with offing victims sent back in time from 30 years in the future. Inevitably, one of those targets ends up being his older self (Bruce Willis), whose escape leads to an especially fraught game of cat-and-mouse (not to mention a grappling with morality and sacrifice). The background of this peculiar time-scrambling enterprise is surprisingly well thought-out, and the portrayal of this near-future is as immersively thorough as those in <i>A.I. Artificial Intelligence</i> or <i>Blade Runner</i>. That careful verisimilitude in a fanciful world extends to the characters, who sometimes function only as cogs in the narrative machine but who are nonetheless offered fleeting moments of personality and empathy. (This is thanks mostly to a stellar supporting cast; Paul Dano, Noah Segan, and Garret Dillahunt all bring uniqueness to what could have been stock B-movie roles.) Ultimately the movie can't transcend its genre trappings to be anything more than an exceptionally well-told story, but in this case that's enough. <i>Looper</i>'s most impressive miracle: yet another eerie little kid who has supernatural powers, yet who never quite descends into the morass of syrupy cliche (though he comes dangerously close at times).<br /><br />
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<b>The Master</b> <i>(d. Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2012)</i> <b>B</b><br />
We shouldn't be surprised that Anderson's newest film is a sprawling, ambitious, cryptic, and unsettling account of postwar America and the ease with which people can be coerced into faith; nor should we be surprised that the writer/director concocts an episodic, open-ended, disquieting story to parallel the sense of confusion felt by both a single man and an entire nation in the immediate postwar years. Call it aimlessness by design, then, but this aimlessness is still what prevents <i>The Master</i>'s characters from feeling real and compelling, and what prevents the movie's larger themes from cohering into a complex expression of societal cancer; I can't say it better than Roger Ebert, who wrote, "<i>The Master</i> is fabulously well-acted and crafted, but when I reach for it, my hand closes on air." Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, a withered and rage-fueled veteran of WWII; he drunkenly stumbles onto the yacht of Lancaster Dodd, the charismatic yet manipulative leader of a cultish religion called "the Cause," who sees in Freddie's twisted desperation a wounded man in need of recuperation. The Cause is famously reminiscent of Scientology, and it's true that <i>The Master</i> offers some subtle allusions to L. Ron Hubbard's New Age delusion (Dodd's "processing" technique most of all), but the movie should be read as a broader snapshot of how drastically World War II imploded modern society (whether in America or Japan, Germany, France, Britain, etc.). That snapshot was filmed (mostly) on pristine 65mm, and projected on larger-than-life 70mm in some areas (not mine, unfortunately), meaning <i>The Master</i> is as visually awe-inspiring and technically immaculate as we'd expect from Anderson and his crew (with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare, Jr. replacing Robert Elswit, Anderson's usual collaborator). But, if the movie powerfully evokes a troubled and alien environment (only sixty years removed in actuality, yet metaphorically eons away from us), what about the people within it? Quell and Dodd are clearly discombobulated, lonely souls, but by stranding them amid their confusion and alienation, <i>The Master</i> fails to say anything significant about their lives or their world. (The movie's finest scene is the one that most effectively conveys the two men's desperation, which they try to alleviate in disparate ways: Freddie paces furiously in front of an audience of observers, unable to transport himself to the distant, metaphysical realm that Dodd paternalistically demands of him.) Narrative elusiveness is not in itself a detractor, but Anderson is not aiming for the same amorphousness that Claire Denis or Apichatpong Weerasethakul achieve so well; it's clear that <i>The Master</i> has something (too much?) to say, yet is as confused as its protagonists in trying to articulate what that might be. Should we fault a movie for trying to tackle too much? Probably not – but it still keeps <i>The Master</i> from the level of greatness.<br /><br />
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<b>Night Train to Munich</b> <i>(d. Carol Reed, UK, 1940)</i> <b>A–</b><br />
A rollicking early actioner from Carol Reed (who would go on to direct <i>Odd Man Out</i>, <i>The Fallen Idol</i>, and <i>The Third Man</i>). In the thick of World War II, a dapper British spy (Rex Harrison, at his least aggravating) poses as a Nazi major in order to rescue a Czechoslovakian scientist and his alluring daughter from the clutches of the S.S. The movie is clearly propaganda (especially given the introduction of two supporting characters, Charters and Caldicott: jovial Brits who decide to band together to help their endangered countryman and defeat the Germans), and its scenes set in a concentration camp inevitably take on the perverse sheen of escapist entertainment, but if we think of the setting into which this movie released (that is, a beleaguered country in the thick of war, in need of uplift and unification) its more lightweight aspects aren't necessarily flaws. Technically the film is charmingly ingenious: the model sets (like the still above, or the numerous rail-travel scenes obviously achieved with a toy train set) and rear-projection effects aren't exactly convincing, but they're grandly immersive in the larger-than-life way that only cinema can accomplish.<br /><br />
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<b>Samsara</b> <i>(d. Ron Fricke, USA, 2012)</i> <b>B</b><br />
The director of <i>Baraka</i> (and cinematographer of Godfrey Reggio's <i>Koyaanisqatsi</i>) returns to similar territory with this plotless, nearly wordless visual poem centering on spirituality and materiality (or, as the press notes claim, offering us "a guided meditation"). There's little originality in its concept or even its broad thematic structuring (sequences about religious zealotry, modern life in the metropolis, the commodification of sex, the wonders of a decaying natural landscape, and so on are practically ripped straight out of <i>Baraka</i> and <i>Koyaanisqatsi</i>), but the images themselves are astonishingly unique and overwhelmingly beautiful. (No offense to <i>The Master</i>, but <i>Samsara</i> is actually the first film to be shot entirely on 65mm since Kenneth Branagh's <i>Hamlet</i> [1996], since parts of <i>The Master</i> were shot on 35mm.) Some stretches in <i>Samsara</i> are obnoxiously heavy-handed: a shot of a geisha crying, or of Indonesian strippers dancing for the camera, are as cheap and pretentious as they sound. But other scenes are jaw-dropping: a high-angle extreme long shot of pilgrims at Mecca, Saudi Arabia; ethereal helicopter shots of rustic temples shrouded in fog; and, most of all, a surreal and horrific scene in which a man in a skyscraper's lobby slathers clay on his face, smears on disturbing make-up, gouges out his artificial eyes, then repeats the process. (It's as insane as it sounds.) Ethnographically, then, the movie may be hollow and even condescending, and its overarching theme is offensively shallow for anyone who's thought even remotely about the stampede of modernization. As cinema, though – as pure, immediate visual spectacle – <i>Samsara</i> offers us sights we would never otherwise see, in an oneiric alternate world that's as awe-inspiring as the religious rites it ambivalently documents. True, I had to force myself to ignore the movie's witless themes (and occasionally block out the cliched musical score), but if you're able to do this, <i>Samsara</i> will be one of the most breathtaking movie experiences you'll have this year (or for years afterwards), though it must be seen on the big screen to be fully experienced.<br /><br />
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<b>Intruders</b> <i>(d. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, USA/UK/Spain, 2011)</i> <b>C–</b><br />
Fresnadillo made the excellent sequel <i>28 Weeks Later</i> (and the acclaimed <i>Intacto</i>, which I haven't seen), but <i>Intruders</i> mostly falters as narrative, as horror movie, and as aesthetic enterprise. Two children – one in Spain, one in Britain – begin having nightmares about faceless creatures who want to steal their senses (beginning with speech, then vision, and so on). Of course their parents (tormented by their own demons) initially chalk it up to childhood whimsy, but gradually come to realize that their nightmares are more real than they thought. The twist? The kids give life to these creatures by writing about them, turning illusion into reality – a meta-cinematic concept that horror directors should have realized a long time ago is not even remotely scary. The movie is too clever for its own good, but it's also annoyingly over the top (the awful musical score reliably dilutes scares rather than enhancing them; here's for an embargo against all string instruments in future horror-movie soundtracks) and relies on cheap CGI to create its supposedly terrifying monsters (which look more like the poor man's version of the Dementors from the Harry Potter movies). A few interesting ideas are folded into the overstuffed narrative (such as the unexpected suggestion of an incestuous Elektra complex between Clive Owen's character and his daughter), and there's one chilling scene in which a woman sees a religious icon in a Barcelona church turn into a menacing demon before her eyes, but mostly this is a flimsy horror concept, and a poorly-told one at that.<br /><br />
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<b>The Age of Innocence</b> <i>(d. Martin Scorsese, USA, 1993)</i> <b>A</b><br />
To my eyes, Scorsese is one of the few directors who makes the most of his historical settings, fleshing out distant periods of time with fleeting gestures as well as sweeping verisimilitude, realizing cinema's potential to make immediate life both immersively real and viscerally hyperreal. This may be less true of <i>The Aviator</i> and <i>Gangs of New York</i> than of <i>Hugo</i> or, especially, <i>The Age of Innocence</i>. Using Edith Wharton's 1920 novel as a springboard to indulge a dizzying play with modes of address and the interweaving of art and society (Scorsese indulges his literary, theatrical, musical, and painterly tendencies along with his cinematic one), Scorsese slyly infuses Wharton's satire of upper-class mores in 1870s New York City with a surprisingly metacinematic emphasis on how art reflects, or refracts, broader movements in society (the best example: an opulent tracking shot through a mansion's hallways festooned with classic paintings, all of which say something about the aristocrats who argue over them). I may be biased – late 19th century America may be the historical setting that fascinates me the most – but this is the most vivid examination I've seen of how a still-nascent American upper-class defined itself in contrast to its European forebears. There's also a tragic love story, brought to fervent life by Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, all of whom lend aching gravity to the emotional hoops they're forced to jump through. (Scorsese called this his "most violent" picture, but it's violent precisely because each character sublimates their desires and passions in favor of social decorum – a semblance of "innocence" more maddening than anything else.) Staggeringly complex and visually dazzling, this is one of the most undervalued works in the director's esteemed career, revealing (along with <i>Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore</i> and <i>The King of Comedy</i>) how eclectic and sure-footed Scorsese truly is.<br /><br />
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<b>Dark Days</b> <i>(d. Marc Singer, USA, 2000)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
The production circumstances of <i>Dark Days</i> practically beg for your sympathy: shot amongst a homeless community living in New York City's abandoned subway tunnels, the film was shot on black-and-white 16mm film by Marc Singer, who knew the onscreen subjects and had never shot a film before. The community collaborated on the project, rigging together lighting setups and dollies for camera movement, and the general intention of the project was to improve the living condition of the people we see onscreen (which it does, as Singer's lobbying led to housing vouchers from the city of New York for all of the people living below-ground). It's a noble work of social activism, obviously, but as a film it's problematic. The movie seems to be at odds with itself, precisely through its attempt to sympathize with the homeless community: initially the point is made that they have forged a legitimate world for themselves (complete with electricity, running water, comforts like television and music, etc.) in order to escape from life's cruel realities; yet when the storyline shifts gears to portray their new above-ground apartments, the air of triumphant reintegration seems forced, as though the film craved a happy ending while dismissing some lingering, unsettling concerns. (How long will they be able to afford their housing? Will they actually be able to readjust to life "above ground"? Some of the climactic interviews seem to suggest a feeling of discomfort and doubt on the part of the subjects, though the movie itself seems to skim past these uncertainties.) It's strange how legitimately unique the film is in production background and audio-visual style, yet how closely it still adheres to a conventional story arc, even when that plot progression seems to contradict what's taking place beneath the surface. The emotional power of <i>Dark Days</i> might be diluted, then, but it's still overwhelming at times: ultimately, the movie reminds us how extreme and uncompromising human life can be, and casts an eye on the kind of sobering underground community that typically remains concealed.<br /><br />
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<b>House of Pleasures</b> <i>(d. Bertrand Bonello, France, 2011)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
At once opulent and morose, <i>House of Pleasures</i> is set in a stately Parisian brothel at the turn of the 20th century (literally, in the months directly preceding and succeeding 1900). On the surface, all is luxury and hedonism: certainly for the men who have the money and the power (and who loll about gazing at the merchandise, exploiting them with various degrees of cruelty), and occasionally for the prostitutes who are aware that there is no escape from their servitude, yet whittle away the hours with champagne and fantasy. At times, though, disturbing visions intrude upon the elegance: a vicious knife attack that transforms one of the ladies into "The Woman Who Laughs," or a nightmare vision of a prostitute weeping semen. A wispy surrealism is achieved by musical anachronisms (James Brown and The Moody Blues are included on the soundtrack), a dizzy shuffling of time and space, and the confinement of almost all the film to its <i>maison</i> interiors. Ultimately, the dominance of money, implicit throughout the entire film, becomes a bleak omen casting its shadow upon the twentieth century to come. At times, <i>House of Pleasures</i> comes off as self-consciously clever, but uniformly graceful performances more often enmesh comfortably with Bonello's bold, hyperstylized vision. The movie is undeniably sexy, yet primarily to make the point that even (or especially) sex has become a commodity in a nascent modern world ruled by capital.<br /><br />
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<b>The Innkeepers</b> <i>(d. Ti West, USA, 2011)</i> <b>C+</b><br />
So slight it's constantly in danger of vanishing into nothing, <i>The Innkeepers</i> is an old-fashioned ghost story that coasts by mostly on atmosphere and dread, strategically spacing its scares at about 25-minute intervals. (The still above is one of the few outright "boo" moments in the entire movie.) This is the kind of thing I typically love (and which was outstanding in Ti West's previous effort, <i>The House of the Devil</i>), but here it simply seems like a by-the-numbers rehash (though the numbers are traced particularly well). At the Yankee Pedlar, a New England inn that would be at home in a Stephen King story (and which is imminently going out of business), two bored desk clerks investigate rumors of ghostly hauntings. Is there something unknown lurking in the basement? Does the mysterious guest who's shut himself up in an ominous hotel room have anything to do with the poltergeists? You probably already know the answers; to be fair, there is some fun in following the generic story to its inevitable conclusion, but there doesn't seem much point to the paint-by-numbers setup. What made <i>The House of the Devil</i> so strikingly unique was precisely its bold setup and staggering payoff (practically nothing happens for the first hour, then <i>everything</i> happens in a ghastly rush); <i>The Innkeepers</i> may be charming, but in this case that's not enough.<br /><br />
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<b>Haywire</b> <i>(d. Steven Soderbergh, USA/Ireland, 2011)</i> <b>C+</b><br />
Put this in the "by-the-numbers" category mentioned above: assemble an all-star cast, paste together a lame crime story about double-crosses between stoic assassins, throw in a David Holmes score that tries too hard to be suave, and you've got your next Steven Soderbergh movie. That all-star cast does enliven the proceedings, and the fight scenes (sans music, with every blow landing with tremendous dull force on the soundtrack) are undeniably exciting; too bad that appeal wears off after a while (around the time that it becomes clear that there's absolutely <i>nothing</i> going on in this plot). Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs had previously collaborated on <i>The Limey</i> (1999); at least that dreamlike thriller was able to disguise its familiar storyline with dazzling construction and unexpected poignancy. In the lead, Gina Carano proves she could be a striking action star in the future; but, stranded in the middle of a vacuous plot and hollow characters, she can only provide fleeting glimpses of her potential here.<br /><br />
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Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-7944741493008667642012-09-10T12:23:00.001-05:002012-09-10T12:23:22.685-05:00Screening Log, September 1 - September 7<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Utamaro and His Five Women</b> <i>(d. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1946)</i> <b>B</b><br />
Mizoguchi's biography of the celebrated 18th-century woodblock artist Utamaro Kitagawa is more accurately a plaintive portrait of the numerous women who orbit around him. Numerous critics have drawn analogies between the Tokugawa Era in which the film is set – with its rigid class hierarchies and patriarchal sexual politics – and the immediate postwar period in Japan, during which American occupiers strictly censored the subject matter of Japanese films. This analogy is most powerfully suggested once Utamaro is literally handcuffed after using one of the shogunate's courtesans as a model; it's a potent symbol for artistic suppression. <i>Utamaro and His Five Women</i> (like most of Mizoguchi's films) epitomizes <i>mono no aware</i>, a term in Japanese culture for a wistful sadness at the transience of human lives; at times this film can seem <i>too</i> gentle in its melancholy (it's not as emotionally devastating as <i>Osaka Elegy</i> or <i>Ugetsu</i>), but it's still an ethereally beautiful depiction of the artist's perceptivity in observing the lives of those around him. Maybe most interesting is the claim (offered by the movie's screenwriter himself, Yoshikata Yoda) that Utamaro is a stand-in for Mizoguchi, particularly in his emphasis on subtle emotion exhibited by women in traumatic circumstances.<br />
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<b>Life of Oharu</b> <i>(d. Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1952)</i> <b>A–</b><br />
The tragic life of a beautiful samurai's daughter doomed to eternal subjugation: Oharu is a saintly martyr for the suffering of women in Mizoguchi's magisterial adaptation of Saikaku Ihara's 1686 novel <i>Life of an Amorous Woman</i>. In adapting the book, however, Mizoguchi retained Saikaku's criticism of a draconic society stifled by unjust customs and restrictive moral codes, while avoiding the novelist's depiction of Oharu as an "amorous woman" whose downfall was partially the result of her own sexual self-liberation. <i>Life of Oharu</i> may be Mizoguchi's most characteristic movie not only in its gorgeous, long-take "picture scroll" tracking shots, but also in its bleeding-heart sympathy for the lives of tormented women (a sympathy which stemmed, according to most accounts of the director, from his family's selling of his sister into geishadom when Mizoguchi was only a young boy). The film is unmistakably heavy going: Oharu's life truly is a marathon of cruelty and misery, as she's sent on a downward spiral due to her love for a lowly page; chosen to be the mother to a powerful shogunate's heir (then spitefully cast out by the lord's barren wife); sold by her father into a brothel, then again cast out due to her hatred for a money-obsessed client; mercifully taken in by a middle-class family, then sexually exploited and again cast out once they find out about her scandalous past; and on and on. (We become inured to this pattern quickly: even when episodes begin with hope and anticipation, we know another misery is right around the corner.) But what saves the movie from unbearable bleakness is its prominent sociocultural commentary – the film is about how obedience to cruel and arbitrary patriarchal customs can torment people within that society, not about the innate awfulness of human beings – and of course Mizoguchi's poetic visuals (thanks especially to cinematographers Yoshimi Hirano and Yoshimi Kono, who had to work in an abandoned warehouse with severely limited funds), which effortlessly infuses the tragedy with ghostly grace. Oharu's fleeting, distant reunion with her lordly son (with whom she can no longer have any contact) must count as one of Mizoguchi's most incredible directorial moments.<br />
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<b>The Dark Knight Rises</b> <i>(d. Christopher Nolan, USA/UK, 2012)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
It's too bad Christopher Nolan doesn't make silent movies: his films are striking, magisterial, at times awe-inspiring...at least until somebody starts talking. Thankfully, though, Nolan's propensity for having characters blatantly voice the themes of his movies (or for having them spout pithy one-liners in the midst of ostensibly serious-minded subjects) is less ruinous than in <i>The Dark Knight</i> or <i>Inception</i>. Love it or hate it, <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i> is some kind of achievement: an operatic blockbuster that attempts (with only half-successful results) to encapsulate our turbulent modern society, particularly its vitriolic class divisions. But, as <a href="http://www.filmquarterly.org/2012/09/the-politics-of-the-dark-knight-rises-a-discussion/">this <i>Film Quarterly</i> article</a> points out, the movie's politics are muddled at best: it obviously recognizes the class warfare endemic to modern capitalism and the tyrannical control that the 1% have over American society, yet that hegemony is never viewed through the eyes of the disenfranchised who are supposedly the subject of the movie's (and Bane's/Selina Kyle's/Bruce Wayne's) sympathies. A reformation of our current economic and political system is seen as solely cataclysmic and horrific in the movie, which takes recent Occupy protests and disfigures them into a shocking French Revolution-style Reign of Terror, complete with the Scarecrow acting as a modern-day Robespierre. <i>The Dark Knight Rises</i>' essentially conservative agenda is clinched with the ridiculous final image of the movie, which offers a happy ending in the form of several characters luxuriously drinking aperitifs on a Venetian plaza. (Apparently the movie couldn't care less about the hordes of impoverished Americans as long as Bruce Wayne can reclaim his fortune.) In any case, the fact that the movie can be construed as both politically subversive and simplistically reactionary suggests that the movie has no genuine politics whatsoever: it's just trying to cash in on fashionably hot-button issues. (At least <i>The Dark Knight</i> has a cohesive theme, even if it's conveyed too often through mundane dialogue.) Politics aside, the movie is visually awe-inspiring: Nolan's dexterity in juggling numerous simultaneous plotlines while maintaining clarity and impact is more impressive than ever.<br />
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<b>The Dictator</b> <i>(d. Larry Charles, USA, 2012)</i> <b>F</b><br />
Lowest-common denominator comedy that assumes the more shocking and hate-filled its humor is, the more "radical" it will seem. Whatever was amusing about Borat or genuinely daring about Brüno has completely vanished from Sacha Baron Cohen's General Aladeen, a dictator from the fictional country of Wadiya who discovers a plot to instill democracy in his native country and attempts to stymie it at all costs. Of course the democratic coup is just a ploy to make the country's oil reserves available to American corporate interests, which suggests an all-inclusive attack on what's wrong with modern diplomacy. In fact, <i>The Dictator</i>'s humor is shockingly xenophobic and hate-mongering: the only glimmer of American self-criticism arrives in a climactic speech during which Aladeen lauds the merits of dictatorship, telling Americans they'll finally know what it means to have 1% of the populace control society, to have media outlets that seem unbiased but promote a particular agenda, to have leaders who are clearly in the pockets of large corporations, to have a military that can serve despots' misguided interests, and so on. Aside from these 90 seconds of half-assed political commentary, the movie's comedy would seem embarrassing in the fifth <i>American Pie</i> movie, much less in a supposedly "intelligent" political comedy. Middle Eastern people rape young boys, prefer sex with goats, throw female newborns in the garbage, and torture for amusement – these are the noxious stereotypes the movie thinks are fair game to perpetuate. (Yes, genocidal dictators are prime targets for ridicule, but only if that satire makes any attempt at all to direct its animosity at real-world atrocities.) <i>The Dictator</i>'s allusions to the Israel-Palestine conflict are even more pathetic: apologists claim that Cohen's usage of Hebrew to stand in for Arabic <i>means</i> something significant, but doesn't it just mean that Cohen (who speaks Hebrew anyway) assumes that we're too stupid or presumptuous to care which language is actually being spoken? (Either way, we're meant to laugh at the guttural syllables Aladeen coughs up whenever he's enraged or agitated.) The only other inclusion of the devastating conflict in the Middle East has a Wadiyan imbecile accidentally spilling his own urine on an Israeli diplomat, an idiocy which is emblematic of both the movie's juvenile sense of humor and its one-sided analogies to real-world conflicts. (This movie would have us believe that Israel is completely ethical and blameless in the ongoing violence waged between itself and surrounding nations.) There are also jokes involving shit missiles rained down upon Manhattan streets, the severed head of a black activist used as a ventriloquist dummy, and two characters digging around in a pregnant woman's womb for a lost cell phone – if this is your idea of good comedy, enjoy. The fact that <i>The Dictator</i> has been distributed throughout the world as representing American humor offers a convincing explanation as to why we're so universally reviled. (If you're unfortunate enough to sit through this movie, I suggest rewatching <i>Team America: World Police</i> as soon as possible afterwards to see how this sort of thing should actually be done.)<br />
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<b>Naked</b> <i>(d. Mike Leigh, UK, 1993)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
A volcanic eruption of rage, hopelessness, desperation, and abuse, <i>Naked</i> is bearable almost entirely because of its incredible performances, especially that of David Thewlis as Johnny, a charismatic yet misogynistic, hate-filled drifter whose various interactions in Thatcher-era London simply degrade his view of humanity even further. Yet the entire cast is incredible: Katrin Cartlidge, as drug-and-alcohol fueled, desperately lonely Sophie, makes a torrent of horrible decisions heartbreaking rather than infuriating; Lesley Sharp, as maybe the most intelligent and compassionate character in the movie (Johnny's ex, Louise), provides a glimmer of much-needed decency; Peter Wight, as a security guard with too much time on his hands, enacts a virtuoso dialogue with Johnny about the impending apocalypse and the entirety of the evolution of life on this planet; and so on. As this description might suggest the movie is incredibly smart and never less than fascinating, yet its view of humanity is ultimately aphoristic: we're nothing more than toys for God to laugh at, a despicable culmination of biological life that will ultimately cause our own downfall. (Evolution is mentioned repeatedly in the movie, almost always in an ironic way.) The movie has been accused often of misogyny, but misanthropy is more like it: Johnny (and, maybe by extension, writer/director Mike Leigh) abhors men and women with equal vitriol. This may be too harsh – Leigh is a great, subtle, multi-faceted director (especially in movies such as <i>Secrets and Lies</i> and <i>Topsy-Turvy</i>) – but judging by the evidence in <i>Naked</i>, we can only detect an all-encompassing hopelessness. (Some reviews link the movie's bleak view of human relationships with the turbulent climate of Margaret Thatcher's England, but there's absolutely nothing in the movie to suggest this sociopolitical analogy.) The character of Jeremy, an upper-class rapist and sadist who allows us to see that at least Johnny is not as awful as he <i>could</i> be, offers a key to unlocking the movie's philosophy, yet also reveals what keeps it from greatness: with no emotional shading or psychological sensitivity, he (and the movie) come off as simplistically, stubbornly outraged.<br />
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<b>Cosmopolis</b> <i>(d. David Cronenberg, France/Canada/Portugal/Italy, 2012)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
A natural companion piece to Cronenberg's <i>Crash</i> (1996), <i>Cosmopolis</i> is also about a radical alienation from the modern world: if, in <i>Crash</i>, characters have become so inured to rampant mediation that they require extreme violence to feel genuine human and sexual emotions, the main character in <i>Cosmopolis</i> – Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire on a cross-Manhattan quest to get a haircut – has built a buffer between himself and the world with money. He's even lost the ability to have a genuine conversation with anybody, which suggests why the dialogue in the film (like the dialogue from the Don DeLillo novel on which it's based) is so wildly artificial. The Brechtian motivation of both <i>Crash</i> and <i>Cosmopolis</i> is to distance the audience radically from the story and the characters, allowing us to observe them with clinical exactitude. Yet at times this works better in theory than in practice: both films are easier to admire than they are to actually become involved with. That said, the episodic, rambling nature of <i>Cosmopolis</i> provides plenty of meat to dissect (particularly fascinating are Eric's dense conversation with a political theorist while an Occupy-style protest rages outside of his limo, and a lengthy climax in which Eric is possibly killed by a disgruntled former employee), and the actors do an admirable job giving bizarrely detached life to Cronenberg's and DeLillo's philosophical ruminations. Love it or hate it, you have to respect Cronenberg's brazen originality and his obedience to his own overarching themes, even at the risk of sacrificing his audience's engagement. I can't remember ever seeing a more potent depiction of how exorbitant wealth allows the rich to build up a hermetic shield around themselves.<br />
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<b>House of Bamboo</b> <i>(d. Samuel Fuller, USA, 1955)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
Fuller's square-jawed actioner, set and shot entirely in Japan (Tokyo and Yokohama particularly), mixes pulp and sociopolitical commentary with typical aplomb. Army detective Eddie Spanier (Robert Stack) storms through the movie's exotic locales with American bullishness: he interrupts ceremonies and rituals to demand answers (in terse English, of course) from uncomprehending Japanese folks; his typical entrance has him shoving hoodlums through sliding screen doors, with absolutely no regard for the foreign world he's demolishing. Spanier is investigating a gang of American thieves, most of them ex-soldiers, led by the merciless Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan), who runs his network with the exactitude of a wartime general. The notion of a postwar action noir set in Japan is often as thrilling as it sounds, thanks to Fuller's and cinematographer Joe MacDonald's vivid colors and emphatic widescreen compositions; the story also offers plenty of allusions to the American occupation of Japan (an infiltration continued, at least metaphorically, long after U.S. troops officially left the country) and the moral corruption of individuals who served in World War II. That said, the movie's sexual politics are unfortunate (Spanier relies upon the meek devotion of a Japanese woman, Mariko, who exists only to provide him with information, home-cooked meals, and undying love) and its stoic tough-guy characterizations don't date well. (As Spanier, Robert Stack is almost a self-parody – the sort of B-movie archetype that would practically be outdated by the 1960s.) If you don't mind a dose of ridiculousness with your action, <i>House of Bamboo</i> is an occasionally thought-provoking blast, with an incredible climax that cannily symbolizes the topsy-turvy nature of modern global relations.<br /><br />
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Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-61004533369741335772012-08-28T17:31:00.002-05:002012-08-28T17:34:08.231-05:00Screening Log, July & August<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>3 Women</b> <i>(d. Robert Altman, USA, 1977)</i> <b>A</b><br />
Altman's dreamlike masterpiece seems to have been a huge influence on David Lynch's <i>Mulholland Drive</i>; at the very least, both movies have overlapping interests in the blurring of identity and the transformative power of sexual desire. <i>3 Women</i> 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 <i>Beyond the Black Rainbow</i> below), but <i>3 Women</i> 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), <i>3 Women</i> 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.<br /><br />
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<b>Shoeshine</b> <i>(d. Vittorio De Sica, Italy, 1946)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
Made two years before <i>Bicycle Thieves</i>, <i>Shoeshine</i> 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 <i>Shoeshine</i> 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.<br /><br />
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<b>Prometheus</b> <i>(d. Ridley Scott, USA/UK, 2012)</i> <b>D+</b><br />
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 <i>Prometheus</i>, 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 <i>Alien</i> movies), whose CEO may or may not be dead and who could have started the mission with ulterior motives in mind, <i>and</i> 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 <i>Alien</i> franchise, which is fine in theory; what's unfortunate is that <i>Prometheus</i> 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) <i>Alien</i> 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 <i>Prometheus</i> is surprisingly tepid; if only it had had the courage of its initially ambitious convictions. <br /><br />
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<b>Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles</b> <i>(d. Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1975)</i> <b>A</b><br />
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. <i>Jeanne Dielman</i>'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 <i>Jeanne Dielman</i>; actually, though, we're bearing witness to the unraveling of one woman's sanity, and it's both hypnotic and highly disturbing.<br /><br />
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<b>Assault on Precinct 13</b> <i>(d. John Carpenter, 1976, USA)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
Carpenter gets my vote for one of the most underappreciated auteurs in mainstream American film (<i>The Fog</i> in particular is about as painterly as horror movies get), but <i>Assault on Precinct 13</i> demonstrates the director's narrative efficiency without any of his later compositional prowess or offhand surrealism. (True, this was only his second feature after <i>Dark Star</i>, 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 <i>Rio Bravo</i> (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 <i>Big Trouble in Little China</i> and <i>They Live</i> – 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, <i>Halloween</i>) 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.<br /><br />
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<b>Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter</b> <i>(d. Timur Bekmambetov, USA, 2012)</i> <b>B</b><br />
Believe it or not, <i>Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter</i> 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 <i>Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter</i> 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 <i>Snakes on a Plane</i>-style winking at the audience, which allows the movie to excel in its own bombastic way.<br /><br />
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<b>Elena</b> <i>(d. Andrei Zvyagintsev, Russia, 2012)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
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 (<i>The Return</i>), who some say is Russia's modern heir to Tarkovsky, <i>Elena</i> 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.<br /><br />
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<b>Beyond the Black Rainbow</b> <i>(d. Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 2012)</i> <b>C</b><br />
I actively wanted to like <i>Beyond the Black Rainbow</i> before I even sat down to watch it: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ertVYn750">the trailer</a> 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 <i>Beyond the Black Rainbow</i> 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. (<i>The Holy Mountain, Mulholland Dr.,</i> and <i>Un chien Andalou</i>, 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 <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTGdGgQtZic">Dog Star Man</a></i> and <i>The Exquisite Hour</i>). Call it a failed but noble experiment, though it's one that suggests fascinating things to come from Cosmatos.<br /><br />
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<b>The Sacrifice</b> <i>(d. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sweden/UK/France, 1986)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
A lesser film by Tarkovsky is still better than most other directors' works, but there's no denying that <i>The Sacrifice</i>, 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, <i>The Sacrifice</i> 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.<br /><br />
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Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-14421595742269134182012-06-30T14:03:00.002-05:002012-06-30T14:03:36.970-05:00The Lubitsch Touch: "The Merry Jail" and "The Eyes of the Mummy"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What is "the Lubitsch Touch"? A phrase beloved by Hollywood marketers, the Lubitsch Touch was meant to denote sophisticated comedy, sparkling dialogue (an impression even conveyed, somehow, by his silent movies), urbane treatment of sex and desire, and a seemingly effortless grace that could convey complex jokes and punchlines in a single camera movement. Lubitsch was arguably the most famous emigre director in 1930s Hollywood, as gradually the Lubitsch Touch transformed into its own brand name: a near-guarantee of reliable craftsmanship and elegance. Only Hitchcock's "Master of Suspense" moniker rivaled the Lubitsch Touch for most well-known directorial catchphrase (reportedly, Billy Wilder struggled to find a similar slogan for himself in the 1940s and '50s, and eventually gave up). In Ephraim Katz's estimation, the Lubitsch Touch "was characterized by a parsimonious compression of ideas and situations into single shots or brief scenes that provided an ironic key to the characters and to the meaning of the entire film."<br />
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Irony, subtlety, elegance – these descriptors offer an impression of what the Lubitsch Touch might have been, but it's something more than that, too. Some aspects of the film image can't be put into words (that's what makes them cinematic), and in danger of sounding too hyperbolic, this ineffable visual quality seems to subsume Lubitsch's movies. Since I've become a fan of the director (which is basically since I first saw <i>Trouble in Paradise</i> eight years ago) I've suspected that the Lubitsch Touch is more of a fleeting aura than a quantifiable stylistic trait. Hopefully, if visual evidence of the master's touch can be parsed out, I'll be able to do so by charting his filmography, in chronological order, as fully as possible (which unfortunately is not as full as one might hope: many of Lubitsch's films, including most of his silents, are now lost).<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK9i6GxTkPIxqvXFENBeg-fD7QXu3JotXFEAOjwE3iyVHMJsta_X0u6grb32HdgAdrBIGy0RnI9m62AYpk2O2xmOXVVDK6SUhASvu5iM82e2SG5CjtNpZXPzDhwyjJd9T4luY6cisIHww/s1600/YoungMrLubitsch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK9i6GxTkPIxqvXFENBeg-fD7QXu3JotXFEAOjwE3iyVHMJsta_X0u6grb32HdgAdrBIGy0RnI9m62AYpk2O2xmOXVVDK6SUhASvu5iM82e2SG5CjtNpZXPzDhwyjJd9T4luY6cisIHww/s400/YoungMrLubitsch.jpg" width="272" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A young Mr. Lubitsch</td></tr>
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Lubitsch was born in 1892 Berlin to a Jewish family. His father was a tailor (a profession that features prominently in some of Lubitsch's films, notably <i>The Shop Around the Corner</i>) and Ernst, drawn to acting but encouraged to continue the family business, led a double life, serving as bookkeeper for his father by day and acting in cabarets and music halls at night. In 1911, he joined Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater; a year later, he was hired as the handyman for Bioscope Film Studios, and in 1913 began acting in a series of film comedies as a character named Meyer, who represented a then-popular brand of ethnic Jewish humor. (This is according to Lubitsch's biography; these films are now lost, so it's hard to know exactly what this "ethnic Jewish humor" constituted.)<br />
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Gradually turning his attention to directing, Lubitsch garnered acclaim in Germany for his tragic fantasy <i>The Eyes of the Mummy</i> in 1918, but it wasn't until 1921 that he found success in the US. In that year, three of his dramas – <i>Madame du Barry</i>, aka <i>Passion</i>, 1919; <i>Anna Boleyn</i>, aka <i>Deception</i>, 1920; and <i>Carmen</i>, aka <i>Gypsy Blood</i>, 1921 – were released stateside and chosen by <i>The New York Times</i> as three of the most "important" movies of 1921. (His 1919 comedy <i>The Oyster Princess</i>, though now seen as his first masterpiece, was less famous at the time.) Lubitsch left Germany for Hollywood in 1922, and it was there that he solidified his legendary status.<br />
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Yet if it was his historical epics and dramas that first brought him esteem, it's his sophisticated comedies that eventually revealed him as a master of the craft. Whether in elaborate musicals or smaller-scale comedies, he seems to display a bemused fondness for his characters and their sexual hangups and desires. Indeed, some of his movies, joyous as they are, were scandalous upon their release: as Michael Wilmington writes, his films were "at once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound. They were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well." Another of Lubitsch's favorite satirical targets was money, specifically the kind of excessive wealth that carries a semi-automatic excuse for horrible behavior. Both sex and money were touchy subjects for American audiences, but Lubitsch's elegance and wit turned self-ridicule into a gentle diversion (particularly during the Great Depression, when Lubitsch was arguably at his peak).<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Merry Jail </i>(1917)</td></tr>
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But let's flash back to Berlin, 1917, when Lubitsch made his earliest surviving film: <i>The Merry Jail</i>. It's surprising how much this early effort encapsulates and foreshadows Lubitsch's later comedic style: a movie about shameless carnality, both spirited and subtle, <i>The Merry Jail</i> lampoons a wartime Berlin in which wealthy aristocrats entertain themselves by initiating torrid affairs and getting obscenely drunk. The gravity of the Great War doesn't seem to affect these characters at all. If the interwar Weimar period of Germany was known for its amoral hedonism and the disastrous simultaneity of lavish spending and severe poverty (a social unrest ridiculed by Fritz Lang's <i>Metropolis</i>, among other films), that period seems to have its origins in the freewheeling culture portrayed here. Lubitsch, though, doesn't judge his characters or this society, perhaps seeing moral conservatism as a restrictive force. <br />
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The plot is a familiar one (it was actually adapted from Strauss' operetta <i>Die Fledermaus</i>): Frau von Reizenstein, an aristocratic wife well aware of her husband's adulterous affairs, attends the same costume ball as he does one night, unbeknownst to him; they end up flirting unabashedly, with Herr von Reizenstein unwittingly attempting to initiate an "extramarital" tryst with his own wife. There are other dalliances transpiring: between the Reizensteins' maid and a doddering aristocrat (Mizi the maid is clearly enjoying her sexual liberty: upon tripping on a staircase while entering the costume ball, she turns to the gentleman escorting her inside and flirtatiously says, "That was my <i>first</i> bad move of the day"); or between Frau von Reizenstein and an overzealous suitor named Egon Storch. Basically every relationship is a potentially sexual one, with a passionate affair always lurking in wait. The sexual openness is summed up by a piece of advice given to Mizi by her sister: "If someone tries to kiss you, don't giggle. That's not chic."<br />
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There's also the merry jail of the title, a jail that Herr von Reizenstein is supposed to occupy: given his "scandalous behavior" one drunken evening, the police have issued a warrant for his arrest and one-day imprisonment (a warrant he ignores in order to attend the costume ball). The jailer at the prison, Quabbe, is at least as sexually frank (and as drunkenly lecherous) as the rest of the ensemble, and his homosexuality is displayed brazenly: he continually strokes one prisoner's arm, kisses another on the lips, tells another one that he <i>really</i> likes him. (Quabbe is played by Emil Jannings, who would become famous for complex dramatic roles in later classics such as F.W. Murnau's <i>The Last Laugh</i> and Josef von Sternberg's <i>Der Blaue Engel</i>. Here, outfitted with a gnarly mustache, Jannings demonstrates devious lunacy in one of his rare comedic roles.) Lubitsch's pre-Code Hollywood movies are known for their sexual openness, but the jailer's homosexuality is a liberty that would be unavailable to him later on in his career – a surprising indication of movies' licentiousness before the strictures of social censorship clamped down.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDN8dlxxVkUMiIm9FNSa03anosRAug4941jgtYoRlaC1VNDbBVBa4hnq2bUVJ7p0SV96HUXbc09savhRyfd0pQDkWQRyQAe_0sK48vG_TzHGWmySzq1QyCOTaB2JBtKh0vRAI0FJZ0QHU/s1600/merry+jail+%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDN8dlxxVkUMiIm9FNSa03anosRAug4941jgtYoRlaC1VNDbBVBa4hnq2bUVJ7p0SV96HUXbc09savhRyfd0pQDkWQRyQAe_0sK48vG_TzHGWmySzq1QyCOTaB2JBtKh0vRAI0FJZ0QHU/s400/merry+jail+%25284%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Merry Jail</i></td></tr>
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While most film comedies in 1917 were essentially vaudeville acts performed in front of the camera (which isn't necessarily a criticism – Chaplin made poetry out of such a setup), Lubitsch here shows an early flair for using the camera and montage editing to deliver the punchline of a joke. The film opens, for example, with Frau von Reizenstein searching throughout the house for her absent husband; when she retreats to the den and reads the arrest warrant that's been issued for him, the camera slowly tilts down to reveal the presumably-still-drunk husband passed out underneath the desk. The joke's not quite over yet: feeling something brushing against her legs, Frau von Reizenstein agitatedly informs Mizi that the house has mice. In response, the maid offers her an elaborate mousetrap, unexpectedly conveyed to us via a close-up insert. Throughout this sequence, Lubitsch reveals himself as a master joke-teller through purely visual means (camera movement, varying shot scales and edits) as the scene culminates in what might be the visual equivalent of the punchline: a close-up.<br />
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Sometimes, on the other hand, Lubitsch's jokes are so subtle you're not even sure if they're jokes at all. At the end of the aforementioned sequence, for example, the besotted husband gingerly gives the maid his cane and top hat. As he extends his overturned top hat to her, he seems to look inside and come perilously close to vomiting into it; when the maid takes it, she glances into it, recoils in disgust, and holds the hat at arm's length while she exits the scene. Lubitsch doesn't offer us a closer angle so it's impossible to know for sure, but the suggestion is that this callow aristocrat lives a life of privileged luxury while overdrinking so heavily that he throws up into his accoutrements – itself a sly and subtle conflation of elegance and vulgarity.<br />
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Herr von Reizenstein is undeniably a shallow cad who inflates his self-worth by racking up adulterous affairs – in a modern romantic comedy, he'd be the smug asshole competing with the sensitive hero for a woman's affections. But all ends well in <i>The Merry Jail</i>: the following morning, as the whole ensemble is deliriously hungover, Frau and Herr von Reizenstein make up after she reveals she was the masked paramour from the night before, Mizi and her aristocrat drive off together, and Quabbe the jailer admits his suppressed feelings for the unreciprocating prison warden. Sexuality is an amusing riddle here: Lubitsch doesn't judge Herr von Reizenstein's adulteries or Quabbe's homoerotic longings. Most mainstream romantic comedies are obliged to supply a happy ending which takes the form of a man-woman romantic union; <i>The Merry Jail</i> suggests a more chameleonic sexuality, which doesn't abide by the rigid contours of a cinematic genre.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Eyes of the Mummy </i>(1918)</td></tr>
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Unfortunately, there's a lot less to say about <i>The Eyes of the Mummy</i>, which Lubitsch made a year later (1918) for the UFA film studio. To modern viewers, it may seem strange that Lubitsch first found success and acclaim thanks to large-scale dramas like this; even the visual style of <i>Eyes of the Mummy</i> seems less exuberant than in his comedies, and the narrative is patched together from a number of outworn Gothic horror and melodramatic cliches.<br />
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<i>The Eyes of the Mummy</i> was the first film collaboration between Lubitsch (graduating to feature-length drama) and Pola Negri, who would be invited to Hollywood (along with Lubitsch) by Paramount in 1922. Negri would go on to become one of Hollywood's most adored stars (especially in her roles as Rudolph Valentino's love interest) and the first in a long line of "exotic" actresses imported to the US from Europe (Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc.). Here, she plays "Queen Ma" – actually not a queen at all (much less a mummy), but a young Egyptian country girl kidnapped by the villainous Radu many years ago and imprisoned in a tomb located in a pyramid somewhere outside of Cairo. (Emil Jannings, in semi-blackface, appears once again as Radu.) When Ma is rescued by a German painter on vacation and returns with him to Berlin, Radu follows soon after (now the servant to a nobleman named Prince Hohenfels) and vengefully searches Berlin for his "queen." Firmly placed in the genre of tragic melodrama, <i>Eyes of the Mummy</i> proceeds to its inevitably bleak conclusion; there's not much in the way of horror (and, as many critics have pointed, nothing at all in the way of mummies), so we're basically left with a lugubrious drama about starcrossed lovers.<br />
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Both Negri and Jannings belong to the emotive, theatrically-based style of silent-film acting that puts off most modern viewers; while their performances here can be enjoyed in a markedly distinct, almost abstract time-capsule way, they do little to draw us emotionally into the movie. The problem is compounded by the fact that the story is riddled with irrational holes (who exactly is Radu? why does he seem supernatural at times and powerless at others? what were the painter and Prince Hohenfels doing in Cairo?) that demonstrate a reliance on secondhand genre tropes and plot structures. Quite obviously shot on a low budget (the interiors of the "mummy's" tomb especially emphasize the barebones nature of the production), <i>The Eyes of the Mummy</i> today seems like little more than a curio in the director's early career, although there is one shot that nearly makes it worth watching: a reverse tracking shot during the climax that retreats in horror as Radu approaches menacingly. It's a sequence of visual intensity and narrative engagement that most of the film is sorely lacking.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjabvm2Do6bllKxzfhiJif10zELhuNvDSnCpC7xlkZ3mOzLQE4_TnUUBik8_PXd-6j8GqUvvKSM3EliniNt9m3cypxDyOTtoyKKCHYKISCVm1tg_Qd8KSOsr1-V3M3CX_H3x31ZUjpYohY/s1600/pola+negri+eyes+of+the+mummy+movie+poster+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjabvm2Do6bllKxzfhiJif10zELhuNvDSnCpC7xlkZ3mOzLQE4_TnUUBik8_PXd-6j8GqUvvKSM3EliniNt9m3cypxDyOTtoyKKCHYKISCVm1tg_Qd8KSOsr1-V3M3CX_H3x31ZUjpYohY/s400/pola+negri+eyes+of+the+mummy+movie+poster+2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An UFA advertisement for <i>Die Augen der Mumie Ma </i>(<i>The Eyes of the Mummy Ma</i>), 1918</td></tr>
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<b>NEXT UP:</b> Another blithe sex comedy, the cross-dressing <i>I Don't Want to Be a Man</i> (1918); and another exotic melodrama with Pola Negri, <i>Carmen</i> (aka <i>Gypsy Blood</i>), 1918.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-69968308613899249222012-06-12T13:36:00.002-05:002012-06-13T14:26:46.310-05:00Screening Log, May 30 - June 5<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Moonrise Kingdom</b> <i>(d. Wes Anderson, USA, 2012)</i> <b>B</b></div>
As you can probably tell from the still above, <i>Moonrise Kingdom</i> has Anderson continuing to preserve his hermetically-sealed diorama of the world, this time telling the story of two young lovers, Sam and Suzy, who run away (from their Scout Camp and their crumbling home, respectively) to live together in a secluded cove on the island of New Penzance in 1965. You know whether or not you'll like the movie depending on your existing opinion of Anderson. As a fan, it's always a pleasure to spend some time in the director's meticulous playground (he also wrote the screenplay, with Roman Coppola), but those pleasures seem to be diminishing each time Anderson returns to the well. (At least <i>Fantastic Mr. Fox</i> departed from the template a bit.) The stellar cast brings droll life to the characters, but they're not given a chance to turn them into flesh-and-blood people: there are some melancholy undercurrents to the story (failing marriages, extramarital affairs, self-loathing), but Anderson oddly mutes and rushes past their suffering, whereas in his best movies (<i>The Royal Tenenbaums</i>, <i>The Life Aquatic</i>) he would have respected and fully conveyed their heartache. The movie ends up being pleasant, spry, and (it almost goes without saying) visually intoxicating, but it's also completely inconsequential: the pitfall of an auteur being able to do whatever he wants is that his characters and sets gradually come to seem like toys shuffled around for the director's own amusement.<br />
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<b>Pépé le Moko</b> <i>(d. Julien Duvivier, France, 1937)</i> <b>A</b><br />
In many ways the French prototype for <i>Casablanca</i> (made five years later in Hollywood), <i>Pépé le Moko</i> shimmers with a tragic beauty; it attains the kind of cinematic poetry that American and French studios managed occasionally in the 1930s. French gangster movies are a lot like the American <i>films noir</i> made a decade later (which they themselves influenced): unassuming genre pictures that smuggle great beauty and despair into their seemingly simple bloodlines. The inimitable Jean Gabin plays Pépé, a gentleman's thief more elegant than Thomas Crown and Danny Ocean put together: a Parisian transplant stuck in the Casbah of Algiers, he's a jewel thief and bank robber who remains outside the grasp of the French and Algerian police, thanks to the shady cohorts who sequester him in the Casbah's alleyways and terraces. He's already imprisoned, in other words: all he wants is to return to grand Paris, a desire that burns even brighter after he meets Gaby, a beautiful Frenchwoman staying in Algiers with her rich husband; her sparkling diamonds tempt Pépé less than her dazzling beauty and bona fide Parisian elegance. Like most heroes in French crime movies from the '30s, Pépé steps headlong towards a doomed fate, and he seems to know it: he considers death for the sake of freedom and love more honorable than his slum notoriety. The movie achieves an effortless grace and overflows with one astonishing sequence after another: an early montage of the Casbah's labyrinthine exoticism, a hyperreal murder scene in which a dying hood guns down the man who betrayed him, the simmering chemistry between Gabin and Mireille Balin as Gaby, and most of all a climactic series of rear-projections that foreground Pépé against a dreamy vision of death-soaked Algiers. You want to criticize the movie for its complete indifference to the actual city and people of Algiers (the movie is practically an apologia for colonialism), but it so obviously takes place in a realm of heightened visceral poetry that real-world political quibbles hardly seem to apply.<br />
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<b>Persepolis</b> <i>(d. Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France/USA, 2007)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
Satrapi's series of graphic novels, which detail her childhood in Tehran and ambivalent feelings towards postrevolutionary Iranian culture (the overthrow of the Shah, the Iran-Iraq war, and so on), are condensed into a film that employs deceptively complex black-and-white compositions to magnify her tempestuous emotions. As headstrong young Marjane listens to Western punk and rock-and-roll and defies the men who, thanks to the paternalism of her culture, treat her with callous entitlement, the movie becomes both flippantly entertaining and harrowingly tense: her youth is built off of the carefree verve she wants to embrace and the oppressive regime that won't let her have it. <i>Persepolis</i> is eye-opening and engaging at the same time, but it also moves so quickly that certain images and emotional traumas don't have the chance to register, and some of the stylistic tricks are too self-conscious for their own good. (The anarchic spirit of Satrapi's illustrations work better in still images than moving ones.) But it's hard to disparage the turbulent history undergone by both Marjane and her country, even if this movie only offers us a hasty Cliff's Notes version of it.<br />
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<b>Monkey Business</b> <i>(d. Howard Hawks, USA, 1952)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
There's an incredible wealth of talent at work on <i>Monkey Business</i> – Howard Hawks behind the camera (with Milton Krasner his cinematographer), Ben Hecht and I.A.L. Diamond as writers, Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe onscreen – so this amiable screwball comedy inevitably disappoints a little bit. It's nowhere close to the freewheeling lunacy of Hawks' better comedies (<i>Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</i>), and the humor dates more awkwardly than in many of Hawks', Grant's, or Rogers' finest hours. (Today's audiences probably won't find jokes about early-50s clothing and automobile fashions particularly hilarious.) At its best, screwball comedy is pure anarchic zeal, but the subgenre has a tendency to try too hard, screaming its jokes at us and hoping that its sheer bombast will cover up the weaker spots. For the most part, <i>Monkey Business</i> is best at its quieter moments: the sweet and witty interplay between Grant and Rogers (when they're <i>not</i> under the effects of Grant's disastrous youth serum), some chimpanzee actors who threaten to upstage their human counterparts, and a ludicrous but laugh-out-loud gag with an infant that Rogers assumes is her husband, reverted to his newborn years. Monroe, unfortunately, has little to do but look astounding (which of course she does).<br />
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<b>4:44 Last Day on Earth</b> <i>(d. Abel Ferrara, USA/Switzerland/France, 2012)</i> <b>A–</b><br />
Ferrara's latest is set on the day of the apocalypse, as a couple (Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh) deal with the impending end of the world, their own failed relationships and broken friendships, and past demons. They have sex, struggle to abstain from drugs and alcohol, paint, wander around; much of the movie is comprised of Skype sessions and grainy digital videos viewed online. If this sounds hilariously anti-special-effects for an end-of-the-world movie, that seems to be the point: these two people spend their last day on earth as they would most any other day, albeit with a greater sense of immediacy and regret. As in Béla Tarr's <i>The Turin Horse</i>, the apocalypse approaches quietly, unavoidably: humans are powerless to thwart it, and simply go about their routine until they can't anymore. Yet if Tarr's film is more bleakly existential (emphasizing the insignificance of humans within the cosmos), Ferrara's allows room for a bit of humanism: in their last moments, these characters at least <i>try</i> to reach out to their loved ones, the pain of mistakes and unclaimed futures unspoken yet written on their faces. (Equally existential, then, yet in a different way: if there's no pattern to the cosmos, all people can do is forge their own relationships, writing their legacy by the way they lead their lives.) Quietly thought-provoking, <i>4:44 Last Day on Earth</i> also has a fascinating view of technology as a bridge (rather than a hindrance) for human interaction – a theme devastatingly conveyed by a Chinese delivery man, who uses the main characters' laptop to Skype (in an unsubtitled conversation) with his family back home, tearfully saying his last goodbyes.<br />
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<b>Accattone</b> <i>(d. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1961)</i> <b>A</b><br />
Besides Buñuel, no other director mixes the profane and the sacred as audaciously as Pasolini, a tendency exhibited even from his feature debut, <i>Accattone.</i> Vittorio is a lowlife pimp on the outskirts of Rome; known as "Accattone" (a disparaging term for scrounger or beggar), he wanders the slums, visits his estranged wife and the son who doesn't know him, exploits the prostitute Maddelena (whose name pointedly echoes Mary Magdalene) until she's beaten by violent thugs and imprisoned by the police, and makes a fleeting effort to go straight for a beautiful peasant girl named Stella – an attempt at an honest living that doesn't last very long. Emblems of Catholic piousness (statues of angels, iconography of the crucifixion) commingle with the crumbling buildings and decrepit streets of the slums, turning <i>Accattone</i> into a spiritual story of degradation and the illusion of redemption. The movie is bleak and unflinching in its portrayal of the main character's coarse selfishness, but it's also tremendously sympathetic and humane: as in neorealism (the movement in which <i>Accattone</i> is usually, somewhat misleadingly, placed) the characters' everyday lives take on the vivid scope of real human experience, but Pasolini's formal ingenuity and gritty symbolism transcend neorealism, attaining something more spiritual. <br />
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<b>The Merry Jail</b> <i>("Das Fidele Gefängnis," d. Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1917)</i> <b>B+</b> <br />
Lubitsch's earliest surviving film is an interesting precursor of things to come for fans of the director, not to mention a blithe sex comedy (made in Berlin during the first World War!) that revels in carnal pleasure. More will be written on this soon, as I'm starting a series of articles about Lubitsch's filmography; here, I'll just mention that "the Lubitsch touch" is on display right from the beginning, especially in the director's subtle visual touches, which can deliver an entire joke and punchline through a simple tilt or pan.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/fCD5yJxHb_o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-17843453074967347492012-06-03T15:05:00.000-05:002012-06-03T15:05:24.397-05:00Screening Log, May 23 - May 29<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Ten</b> <i>(d. Abbas Kiarostami, 2002, France/Iran/USA)</i> <b>A–</b><br />
One of Iranian cinema's most cerebral pranksters, Kiarostami here places a tiny digital camera on the dashboard of a taxicab in Tehran, then steps back and allows semi-improvised conversations to take place in an uncanny valley between fiction and documentary. In an example of his graceful minimalism, Kiarostami auditioned a large number of non-professional actors, then simply provided the subject matter for their interactions and allowed them to forge their own characters and conversations. Kiarostami is hardly absent, though; he steers the conversations into feminist territory, evoking female characters grappling with unfaithful lovers, a restrictive patriarchy, crises in religious faith, divorce, motherhood, and other issues that Iranian women typically aren't allowed to confront so explicitly in movies. Because of this, <i>Ten</i> is at once an emotional depiction of universal themes, a revealing snapshot of modern-day Tehran, and a striking formal experiment in fortuitous improvisation and a sort of laissez-faire directorial style.
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<b>Bronson</b> <i>(d. Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009, UK)</i> <b>B–</b><br />
Refn's stylish biopic relates the unsettling story of Michael Peterson, a London lad from a middle-class family who was imprisoned (initially to a seven-year sentence) for robbery, then spent the next 30 years in prison (most of them in solitary confinement) for instigating brutal brawls among prisoners and guards. Fittingly, he takes the alias Bronson – in honor of the <i>Death Wish</i> actor – for his vicious exploits. We should be thankful that the movie doesn't try to psychologize Bronson: there are no childhood traumas or mental anomalies to explain away his behavior, which of course makes his animalistic bloodlust all the more disturbing. While this means that there are no lazy plot devices to wrap up the main character with a tidy bow, it also means the movie can seem like all style and no substance: Bronson's violence is presented to us with a hypnotic arsenal of slow tracking shots and vivid patches of color, but any interpretations for its existence (a latent libidinous male impulse; society's propensity for turning violence into awe-inspiring spectacle) are entirely up to the viewer. But if the movie's point sometimes seems a little muddled, at least we have Tom Hardy's awe-inspiring lead performance and Refn's reliably dynamic style. (If he ever incorporates some strong ideas or genuine emotion into his aesthetic, he could be brilliant.)
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<b>This Is Not a Film</b> <i>(d. Mojtab Mirtahmasb & Jafar Panahi, 2012, Iran)</i> <b>A</b><br />
The production backstory is well-known: sentenced to six years in prison and a 20-year ban on filmmaking by the Iranian government for allegedly "conspiring against the state," Jafar Panahi enlists the help of a friend (documentarian Mirtahmasb) to film his house arrest as he ponders film and the creative process. Meanwhile, the anti-government demonstrations of Firework Wednesday erupt on the Tehran streets outside — only a wall away, yet infinitely further. Knowing these circumstances won't prepare you for the singular experience of watching this quasi-film, though; the title, while a coy evasion of the punishment that was handed down to Panahi, is also correct in that you've never really seen a movie exactly like this. Close to certain essay films by Chris Marker or Agnès Varda, <i>This Is Not a Film</i> stands in awe of the creative process, cherishing the unexpected difficulties and fortuitous mistakes of the act of filmmaking, alleging that often it is the movie who "directs" the director. There's deep sadness, inevitably, as Panahi wonders if he'll ever be able to continue his next film project; but there's also a palpable love for Panahi's homeland and compatriots. Infinitely more complex than its anti-censorship foundation might suggest, <i>This Is Not a Film</i> ultimately makes the inspiring case that artists will continue to create, even after the tools of their expression have been cruelly taken away.<br /><br />
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<b>The Kid with a Bike</b> <i>(d. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 2012, Belgium/France/Italy)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
The Belgian masters of spare minimalism turn their attention to a motherless boy in a Parisian foster home. His immature dad works at a nearby restaurant but wants nothing to do with his own son, desperately holding any kind of responsibility at arm's length. (He's played by Jérémie Renier, a longtime Dardenne regular, in an echo of his deadbeat-dad role in 2005's <i>L'Enfant</i>.) The boy, compellingly played by Thomas Doret, is a red-haired spark of energy: we typically see him biking, running, flailing through the frame, often pouncing on boys much larger than him in a torrent of pent-up adolescent confusion. Really he's just looking for love, which sounds trite here but never comes off as stale in the film itself: the characterizations (sparse dialogue, seemingly effortless naturalism) convey emotion and honesty as subtly as possible. Ultimately <i>The Kid with a Bike</i> may seem less momentous than the Dardennes' <i>The Son</i> (2002) or less intense than <i>L'Enfant</i>, but it's also much more hopeful and has some of the brothers' most beautiful cinematography to date (it's shot by Alain Marcoen).<br /><br />
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<b>Cat People</b> <i>(d. Paul Schrader, 1982, USA)</i> <b>D+</b><br />
Schrader's sexed-up remake of Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic is a perfect summation of the writer/director's bizarre mix of Catholic conservatism and drugged-up, lustful hedonism – which, it turns out, isn't a good thing. Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell play sibling members of an ancient race of Cat People; if they make love with anyone outside their own race, they revert to their feline form at the point of orgasm, and can only become human again if they kill their lover. The story is ridiculous in a grandiose, mythical way, and it works whenever we're only watching Kinski: she has the kind of innate movie-star beauty where she only has to stand in front of the camera and we're instantaneously awed. An incredible movie could have been made around her alone. But unfortunately there are other characters – as her brother, McDowell is all bug-eyed insanity, an over-the-top self-parody that contrasts absurdly with Kinski's slow-burning passion; and as the zoologist who is irresistibly attracted to her, John Heard is an obnoxious epitome of crass early-80s machismo (you want to see him mauled by leopards as soon as possible). The movie is visually intoxicating, but its style can't mask a ridiculous moral prudishness: the underlying theme is that Kinski will unleash her dangerous wiles if she succumbs to her sexual impulses, but thankfully she's literally caged at the end of the movie, domesticated into obedience in a repellant metaphor for marriage. If the ending is supposed to be depressing (i.e., if Schrader finds marriage a soul-crushing imprisonment), you still have to notice the hypocrisy: he puts Kinski's nubile naked body on display for most of the movie, only to suggest that that kind of uninhibited sexuality has to be subdued and controlled somehow (preferably, it seems, by the arrogant zookeeper who's allowed to indulge his sexual whims any way he wants).<br /><br />
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<b>Cinévardaphoto</b> <i>(d. Agnès Varda, 2005, France)</i><br />
Actually a triptych of short documentaries by one of the progenitors of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda. In the first short, <i>Ydessa, the Bears, and Etc...</i>, Varda employs digital video to peruse an art exhibit curated by vintage-photo collector Ydessa Hendeles. The exhibit covers several stories of an art gallery, overstuffed with photos from the early 20th century that somehow involve teddy bears; the gimmick is ostensibly a "narrative that explores world memory," and it's true that the photos (especially those of Nazis and Jews before and during the Holocaust) allow us to pore over them intently, trying to inscribe some sort of family history into the compositions (an investigation Varda accommodates by showing numerous still photos onscreen for long durations). While it offers a dense entryway into Varda's themes of photographic composition and its imprinting of memory, the next two shorts are more successful, especially <i>Ulysses</i> (from 1982), the high point of the collection. Varda re-explores a still photo she took in the late 1950s, a mysterious image of two naked male figures on a rocky beach, with the corpse of a goat in the foreground. <i>Ulysses</i> finds Varda at her most intellectually lively, drawing allusions and remembrances from a visual enigma; it also displays her blithe sense of humor (witness the follow-up interview with one of the photo's male subjects in the nude, or the scene of a goat proudly devouring a photographic print of one of its dead brethren). Finally, the last short – a documentary about the Cuban revolutionary movement made in 1963 – may be less dense and thought-provoking than the first two, but it offers a glimmering snapshot of an idealistic time and place that now seem petrified in history. Together, the three shorts provide a surprisingly entertaining deconstruction of notions of composition, remembrance, and community.<br /><br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Tl_8vuApIsA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-6731246755043224392012-05-23T21:18:00.000-05:002012-05-23T21:18:21.850-05:00Screening Log, May 16 - May 22<i>In an effort to post more frequently on</i> Phantom Lightning, <i>I'd like to initiate a new weekly series: Screening Logs containing every movie I watch, with at least a sentence or two on each title. Though the commentary I provide for each film might sometimes be brief or dismissive, I'll try to keep the snark to a minimum...</i>
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<b>The Avengers</b> <i>(d. Joss Whedon, 2012, USA)</i> <b>B+</b><br />
Some mind-numbingly long (and not terribly impressive) action scenes are inevitably part of <i>The Avengers</i>' lifeblood, but this is about as good as overproduced Hollywood blockbusters come. Essentially, the task handed to director/writer Whedon (and scenarist Zak Penn) was to get a motley crew of superheroes together as quickly as possible so they can wage bombastic, eerily 9/11-reminiscent war against a squadron of alien invaders. The CGI special effects are fine but not particularly distinguished (what sleek mainstream movie <i>doesn't</i> have pristine graphics?); the warfare itself is exciting but once again proves the disconcerting fact that American audiences love to see our cherished metropolises demolished onscreen. (The desert of the real wasn't real enough for us, apparently.) The movie is really enlivened by Whedon's reliably witty dialogue, the actors' convivial interplay, and the emotional import supplied by Mark Ruffalo as the third cinematic Bruce Banner in recent memory. (He's the <i>only</i> semblance of emotional depth, but still.) What's more, the movie's ideas about how humanity craves subjugation (even at the hands of supposed heroes) are, while not original or especially deep, at least sporadically thought-provoking.
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<b>Hail the Conquering Hero</b> <i>(d. Preston Sturges, 1944, USA)</i> <b>B</b><br />
One of the alternate titles conceived for this film was <i>Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition</i>, which suggests the outrageous subversive tone the final product could have had. It's true that even a mediocre Preston Sturges movie stands head-and-shoulders above a lot of lesser directors' works, but even so, <i>Hail the Conquering Hero</i> doesn't quite satisfy. It can't compare to the crackling satire and dizzying pace of <i>The Miracle of Morgan's Creek</i> or <i>The Palm Beach Story</i>, not to mention the unparalleled elegance and wit of <i>The Lady Eve</i>. A genial satire of wartime hero-worship and hollow patriotism, <i>Hail the Conquering Hero</i> speeds ahead so cavalierly through its cynicism that it somehow convinces you it's still a flag-waving portrayal of quaint, small-town Americana. (Surely this is why the Production Code censors, normally so stringent during the war years, let Sturges' portrayal of political corruption and social gullibility pass.) Eddie Bracken, as the hay fever-afflicted schlemiel barred from military service who's passed off as a wartime hero by a group of Marines for his homecoming, is too dour and agitated to make his character's plight either relatable or subversive; the strangely plucky group of soldiers who surround him are, in fact, more likeable characters. But of course the movie has its charms (its effortless portrayal of the ensemble of townspeople, subtle wit not only in the dialogue but in small visual symbols spread throughout the frame), and a great running gag involving a number of overeager marching bands who repeatedly start playing their patriotic fanfare prematurely.
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<b>Red Desert</b> <i>(d. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Italy/France)</i> <b>A-</b><br />
Antonioni's follow-up to his loose trilogy of <i>La Notte</i>, <i>L'Avventura</i>, and <i>L'Eclisse</i> (and his first color film) is a bleak but fascinating depiction of a depleted dystopia rampant with loneliness, ennui, desperation, and a deadening cycle of production and consumption. The plot (having to do with the wife of a factory manager, slowly driven mad by the harsh environment, who succumbs to a desperate affair with a visiting businessman) is only occasionally engrossing, but Antonioni movies shouldn't really be watched for their stories. More compelling is Monica Vitti's characteristically chilly performance, a wonder of slow deterioration that manages to be thrilling despite its iciness; and most of all the austere color cinematography, surveying the hellish landscape with both a haunting hopelessness and an adoration of its stark beauty. If we can associate Antonioni with any one dominant theme, maybe it's the breakdown of people's identities when faced with a capitalistic society that devalues humanity and togetherness – not at all a hopeful theme, but one that's undeniably complex and unsettling. You could stop the movie at any frame and likely have a masterpiece of cinematic composition (though in that case you'd miss out on the meticulous and foreboding soundtrack).
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<b>Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!</b> <i>(d. Pedro Almodóvar, 1990, Spain)</i> <b>B-</b><br />
As immersed in sex and cinema as we'd expect from an Almodóvar film, <i>Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!</i> is undeniably sexy and tantalizingly kinky, but its emotional resonance lags a bit behind its perversions. Ricky (Antonio Banderas), just released from a mental hospital, kidnaps a burgeoning movie star (who's also an ex-porn actress and former heroin junkie), convinced that she'll grow to love him over time. Which she does, suggesting a dark-toned, twisted examination of attraction, attachment, obsession, sadomasochism, and the possibility of "controlling" other people (and being controlled). Unfortunately the movie doesn't really capitalize on this potential, preferring instead to concoct a vibrant, propulsive smorgasbord of color and movement that's visually arresting but conceptually hollow. At least this allows the film to escape charges of misogyny or gratuitous shock value (despite a sweat-soaked sex scene, it's surprisingly timid), but it also doesn't make it especially memorable. As Marina, the former junkie-turned-starlet, Victoria Abril is only allowed to show range or dynamism in the last ten minutes or so, which at least provides <i>Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!</i> with a solid closing shot. But at least there is another image now imprinted permanently on my memory: a scene from Marina's film-within-the-film in which she swings, pendulum-like, from an open window in a pouring rainstorm.
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<b>Grave of the Fireflies</b> <i>(d. Isao Takahata, 1988, Japan)</i> <b>A-</b><br />
Courtesy of Ghibli Studio (the Japanese animation house where Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki were colleagues) comes a profound effort to translate the brutality and desperation of the Japanese experience during World War II into the traditional style of hand-drawn animation. Seita, a young teenager, is forced to care for his toddler sister Setsuko after their father departs to serve in the Japanese Navy and their mother dies, victim to an American napalm bomb. Those who assume animated movies are placating affairs directed at families and children will be proven wrong if they watch <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i>: despite moments of levity and solace, the movie's overwhelmingly bleak, and proceeds undeterred (and realistically) towards its inevitably heartbreaking conclusion.<br />
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Takahata employs static backgrounds comprised of desaturated, hazy colors — lots of browns, grays, blacks, and pale yellows — in order to evoke an atmosphere of hopelessness and pervasive warfare. Of course the unmoving backgrounds, so vastly different from the complex vistas created for latter-day Ghibli productions (not to mention the dazzling environments created by Pixar or other CGI-animation companies), is starkly unrealistic, as are the vivid facial expressions and gestures created for the characters; but that non-realism actually serves <i>Grave of the Fireflies</i> well, as it emphasizes the characters' unavoidable, cosmic fate and the extreme, abysmal situations in which they've been placed. (Call it neo-hyperrealism, maybe.) Yet there are also moments of great beauty (one montage sequence, bridged by a series of dissolves, segues from a flower-petal-strewn memory to a glorious cascade of white rice) as well as the fireflies themselves, which act as a potent all-encompassing symbol for both the joy and the misery that Seita and Setsuko experience.
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8xyS8UvkzKE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-87299751451974142012012-04-27T14:18:00.001-05:002012-04-27T14:18:31.867-05:002011: The Year in FilmNostalgia reigned supreme in 2011, at least in movie theaters: in the same year that Kodak declared bankruptcy and at least three companies (ARRI, Panavision, and Aaton) discontinued the production of 35mm cameras, directors looked wistfully into the past, celebrating bygone times as "simpler" or "purer" or simply more ravishing. <i>The Artist</i> epitomized this romanticization of the past: Hollywood wore its skin-deep enthusiasm for the history of cinema on its sleeve, heaping five Oscars (including Best Picture and Director) upon Michel Hazanavicius' charming but shallow semi-silent movie. The film's references to significantly better movies — not only the silent legacies of Douglas Fairbanks and Buster Keaton, but also <i>Citizen Kane</i>, <i>Vertigo</i>, etc. — did not refashion or even recycle historical filmmaking tropes with much creativity, but the almost-quaint cinephilia with which it recreated the look and feel of silent movies (even down to the aspect ratio) offered a pleasant rebuttal to purists' death-of-film prophecies.<br />
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The Academy also awarded Woody Allen with a screenwriting statue for <i>Midnight in Paris</i>, another movie teeming with rose-colored, freeze-dried nostalgia. Supposedly, that movie's main character comes to the realization that simply looking backwards while dismissing the present and the future is stifling and suffocating, although that's a lesson the movie itself failed to learn. (The primary pleasure the movie offers — recreating larger-than-life historical figures like Hemingway, Dalí, and Gertrude Stein — basically amounts to a slightly stuffier version of the historical menagerie seen in <i>Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure</i>.)<br />
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The nostalgia wasn't all facile in 2011, though: two superior movies embraced the past, either cinematic or otherwise, in radically different ways. Martin Scorsese's <i>Hugo</i> mastered cutting-edge digital technologies in order to lionize Georges Méliès, the unofficial founder of cinematic fantasy. The montage of Méliès films that appears late in <i>Hugo</i> — including a few painstaking 3D recreations — offered what may have been the most purely thrilling, and surprisingly emotional, rush for movie-lovers in 2011. While Scorsese's movie (along with <i>Pina</i> and <i>Cave of Forgotten Dreams</i>) finally convinced me of 3D's vitality and beauty, Aki Kaurismäki's <i>Le Havre</i> pitted the fairy-tale optimism that we associate with older movies against a jaded, cynical modernity complete with cell phones and bureaucratic immigration laws. Furthermore, it did so on glimmering, pulsating celluloid, often reveling in the simple, marvelous beauty of objects and light on film, magnified via close-up. Taken together, <i>Hugo</i> and <i>Le Havre</i> can be seen as a repudiation of the whole film-versus-digital debate: while I would have considered myself an obstinate supporter of the former up until about a year ago, the movies of 2011 convinced me that excitement, beauty, precision, originality — in a word, greatness — can be overwhelming onscreen regardless of the format.<br />
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Maybe it's not all that surprising that this wave of nostalgia surged at the same time that movies' technologies and business practices are transforming. Economic and/or technological flux in cinema seem to inspire periods of creative fertility among moviemakers: think, for example, of the great early-1930s sound pictures of Fritz Lang, Rene Clair, Ernst Lubitsch, and Howard Hawks, or the boundary-pushing New Waves of the 1960s and '70s (in France, Japan, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Germany) that accompanied new handheld cameras, societal upheavals, and economic turbulence. (Could the American New Wave have happened if Hollywood hadn't been experiencing such a drastic crisis?) The artistic liveliness that seems to accompany industrial change was exhibited once again in 2011, a remarkably good year for movies that featured knockout performances by a roster of the world's most esteemed auteurs (Kiarostami, Kaurismäki, Herzog, Wenders, Weerasethakul, Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Kelly Reichardt, Raul Ruiz, et al.) at the same time that it offered breakout new works by relative newcomers such as Sean Durkin (<i>Martha Marcy May Marlene</i>) and Andrew Haigh (<i>Weekend</i>).<br />
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A note about my (mostly arbitrary) criteria for a 2011 release date: the movie in question must have had at least a limited release during the calendar year. This means that films that snuck in a premiere in New York or Los Angeles just before the new year (such as <i>Coriolanus</i> or <i>Rampart</i>) are 2012 releases in my book. It also means that movies that had their Twin Cities premiere in 2011, yet had received a limited release in late 2010, are added retroactively to my 2010 list. Again, mostly arbitrary, not to mention convoluted: I realize that releasing films in a staggered, hierarchical manner (to the "film capitals" of New York and Los Angeles first, then the major metropolises, then the "small" big cities) is a successful business model that drums up anticipation, but it also gives the impression that smaller big cities (like Minneapolis-St. Paul) are being tossed distributors' hand-me-downs when they receive movies half a year (or more) after their initial premieres. There were a few movies initially released in 2010 that I finally saw in Twin Cities theaters in 2011; a couple of them were good enough to have made my 2011 list below, but my feeble attempts to abide by more-or-less standardized release information means I couldn't include them on my list. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgstoYyMsE1xaKFhtL9woJRzBD602LicnRR00melg47i8C9JNnbBbvK7WpPBPfJlLYZhoDYdNso0XG52OOV1BS6EPXTDsC2MAYHOvqHJT5oI1UM6VR4BSEHHGAfmmsYP_7ywY8naImAoEw/s1600/Hadewijch.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgstoYyMsE1xaKFhtL9woJRzBD602LicnRR00melg47i8C9JNnbBbvK7WpPBPfJlLYZhoDYdNso0XG52OOV1BS6EPXTDsC2MAYHOvqHJT5oI1UM6VR4BSEHHGAfmmsYP_7ywY8naImAoEw/s400/Hadewijch.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hadewijch</i></td></tr>
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The most egregious absence in this regard is Bruno Dumont's <b>Hadewijch</b>, which saw a limited US release in December 2010, although it finally premiered at Minneapolis's Trylon theater in June of 2011. <i>Hadewijch</i> would be fairly high on the list below if I had included it therein. It's beguilingly cryptic, volatile, angry — all appropriate descriptors for a semi-sacrilegious film about religious extremism, self-flagellation, terrorism, divine resurrection, and other hot-button issues. When I saw it, there were only about half a dozen people in the audience; all of them, including myself, were gasping repeatedly at what Dumont was ballsy enough to attempt. There have been a few movies about the violence spawned by religious zealotry — the one-two punch of <i>The War Within</i> and <i>Paradise Now</i>, released within a month of each other in 2005; the moody indie drama <i>Day Night Day Night</i>; elaborate epics like Spielberg's self-consciously "adult" <i>Munich</i> or Olivier Assayas's globetrotting, punk-rock <i>Carlos</i> — but most of them have stopped short of actually ripping into their difficult subject matter; the simultaneous blasphemy and piousness that such a theme entails are mostly missing from those titles. (Granted, some of them aren't interested in exploring that aspect of religious extremism; one of <i>Carlos</i>'s main points is how dismissive Carlos is of the spiritual dogmatism he purports to espouse, reveling instead in the shallow celebrity accorded by terrorism.) <i>Hadewijch</i>, on the other hand — the story of a harshly austere nun who is expelled from her convent, eventually becoming involved with a Muslim fanatic who's as desperate as she is to find God and self-discovery — confronts its uncomfortable aspects head-on. It's offensive at times, but only because it takes off the kid gloves and takes its main characters to task for their foolish, destructive zealotry. Beautifully spare and highly disturbing, it all ends with an ambiguous reversal of Bresson's <i>Mouchette</i>: instead of suicide by drowning, <i>Hadewijch</i>'s main character may or may not find resurrection from the unlikeliest of sources. Like much of the film, this ending has stuck with me since I first saw it about eight months ago; violence and existential doubt carry real weight here, which can't be said about many movies.<br />
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<b>2011 Movies I Unfortunately Missed:</b><br />
<i>Aurora</i><br />
<i>The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu</i><br />
<i>Beginners</i><br />
<i>House of Pleasures</i><br />
<i>The Interrupters</i><br />
<i>J. Edgar</i><br />
<i>Moneyball</i><br />
<i>Nostalgia for the Light</i><br />
<i>The Rise of the Planet of the Apes</i><br />
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<b>THE TOP TEN MOVIES OF 2011</b><br />
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<b>1. Certified Copy</b> <i>(d. Abbas Kiarostami, France/Italy/Belgium)</i><br />
<i>Love Story</i> for postmodern theorists? On the sun-dappled, cobblestone streets of Lucignano, Italy, two intellectuals meet-cute: he's an art theorist on a promotional tour for his latest book (also called <i>Certified Copy</i>), about the emotional and institutional value of mechanical duplications of an original artwork; she's the owner of an antiques store in Tuscany, who (it is revealed as the movie progresses) places great value in emotional legitimacy.<br />
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At first it appears that these two strangers are engaging in a capricious fling, batting intellectual questions and theories back and forth, yet in a flirtatious manner. At some point, though, the tectonic plates of <i>Certified Copy</i> shift, transforming everything that's come beforehand: at a cafe following a particularly heated dispute, a nearby waitress assumes that the couple is married and asks how they met. The two of them play along through the rest of the movie, dutifully portraying a husband and wife who both bicker and reconcile with the intimacy of longtime spouses. Which is the truth? Are they self-conscious performing artists enacting their possible future, or an actual married couple obscuring their relationship beneath a curtain of playacting? Whatever is the case, would they behave differently otherwise?<br />
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This might all make the movie sound cold and self-satisfied, but what thrills me most about <i>Certified Copy</i> is that its intellectualism is buoyed by great humanism: the head and the heart go hand in hand here. For sure, the central relationship is refracted, funhouse mirror-style, by the subtle yet mind-bending themes: why do people behave the way they do? Are all of our relationships mere performances, ordained primarily by the way we assume other people expect us to behave? What is a character on film and a character in reality, and are they any different? (In other words, are the things we do and say copies of what has come before?) Honestly, I don't know if I'm decoding Kiarostami's abstractions accurately, but I also don't think it matters all that much. (He'd probably say there's no single "correct" interpretation.) The movie ends in mystery and confusion; we shouldn't be surprised that we never really learn what the relationship is between them. But are relationships ever easy to categorize? Aren't the evasions and half-truths in <i>Certified Copy</i> more honestly, intricately human than the neat patterns of behavior most movie characters perpetrate?<br />
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<b>2. Meek's Cutoff</b> <i>(d. Kelly Reichardt, USA)</i><br />
One of the best directors currently working in America sets her sights backwards: Kelly Reichardt's first historical film (it's set on the Oregon Trail in 1845) is as spare and carefully-detailed as you'd expect from the director of <i>Wendy and Lucy</i> and <i>Old Joy</i>. Three pioneer families have banded together to make the journey west via covered wagon; their blustery guide Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) spins tall tales about his frontier prowess, all the while leading them further astray into the hellish, desert-like wilderness. Despite this synopsis, <i>Meek's Cutoff</i> has as much in common with <i>Jeanne Dielman</i> as with <i>The Way West</i> or <i>McCabe and Mrs. Miller</i>: Reichardt takes care to convey the pioneers' grueling labor with exacting detail, mending wheels, preparing the wagons, or sewing clothes in the blistering sun. In particular, the movie nudges the audience towards the female perspective, emphasizing their lack of power in the face of their male counterparts' wrongheaded decisions; even the sound design muffles and mutes the men's conversations at seemingly crucial times.<br />
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<i>Meek's Cutoff</i> can be viewed as allegorical from several different perspectives — as a feminist drama of errant male power, or a political parable regarding our leaders' abuse of their people's trust — but it's more simply impressive as a minimalist existential thriller: a group of doomed strangers wander through an arid wasteland, with every white hill of sand and endless stretch of desert leading to death's door. It's not wrong to call <i>Meek's Cutoff</i> at once one of the scariest and most pared-down movies of the year, achieving intensity through the agonizingly slow crawl of daily life while death is imminent. <br />
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<b>3. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives</b> <i>(d. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Spain/Netherlands)</i><br />
J. Hoberman called <i>Uncle Boonmee</i> "the fullest expression yet of Weerasethakul's singular sensibility" — the fullest and, one might add, the most concise, as the Thai master of everyday magic seems to pare his interests in reincarnation, storytelling, alternate realities, and the bending of time to their mind-bending basics. The movie's simple and cosmic at the same time. Boonmee is an elderly man suffering from kidney failure; at death's door, he is able to access and communicate with a spirit world replete with red-eyed monkey ghosts, slowly-appearing apparitions of deceased loved ones, princesses charmed by amorous catfishes, and a luminescent, mysterious cave that <i>must</i> be some kind of portal between this world and the next.<br />
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Both less silly and more hypnotic than it sounds, the world that <i>Uncle Boonmee</i> conjures is not easy to fathom, but that might be because we simply don't know the rules of reality yet. As far as we know, reality is immediate, perceivable, rational: it abides by the laws of science and reason. But there may be more laws out there, those that we're not aware of, and these may be the realities that Boonmee becomes acquainted with in his few remaining days. (Is our reality more "real" than the one this movie shows to us? Maybe our universe is just too tunnel-visioned to encompass others.) This sounds like surrealism, but it's more genuinely spiritual and achingly humane than surrealism typically is; the style that Weerasethakul forges (a mad mix of influences, from the Thai horror movies he enjoyed as a kid growing up in the rural northeast jungles of the country, to the American avant-garde films he became fond of at the Art Institute of Chicago) can't be relegated to a particular school of thought. We may not always know where he's leading us when he watch his movies, but the destinations are hypnotic almost to the point of bliss.<br />
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<b>4. Hugo</b> <i>(d. Martin Scorsese, USA)</i><br />
<i>Hugo</i> cites some of the earliest films available to us (<i>Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat</i> in 1896, <i>A Trip to the Moon</i> in 1902) with technologies and production equipment as cutting-edge as possible. (<a href="http://thefilmstage.com/features/10-classic-films-you-must-watch-before-seeing-martin-scorseses-hugo/">This excellent <i>Film Stage</i> article</a> offers a thrilling short-list of some of the movie's influences.) Just as audiences 120 years ago may have gasped and thrilled at the new medium of cinema that was being introduced to them, modern audiences can gape at Scorsese's 3D images with the sensation that we're discovering the movies all over again. I had always assumed (like, I believe, many others) that 3D was a gimmicky technology designed to suck more money into the studios' box office coffers — fine for silly escapism like <i>Avatar</i> or <i>Tron</i>, but not a serious stylistic tool for directors. My mind was changed last year, partially by innovative documentaries like <i>Pina</i> and <i>Cave of Forgotten Dreams</i>, but mostly by <i>Hugo</i>. I can't remember another movie that so euphorically excited me practically as soon as it started: a digital vista of Paris circa the early 1930s gives way to a racing camera that fluidly wanders the halls of a bustling train station. The lengthy first part of the movie is devoted to exploring this space in a breathlessly visceral (and an invigoratingly <i>new</i>) way. <br />
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The story concerns a young orphan living in the walls of the train station; he eventually connects a mysterious automaton left to him by his deceased father to an irascible old merchant who turns out to be the cinema's original magician, Georges Méliès. Maybe the story of Hugo, the young orphan boy, and his budding friendship with Méliès' adventurous goddaughter Isabelle is less awe-inspiring than that of Méliès and his begrudging return to the seventh art that ultimately destroyed him, but it doesn't matter; the whimsical energy of the movie's young characters tempers the unabashed cinephilia that reigns throughout the rest of the movie. (One of the most inspiriting things about <i>Hugo</i> is how widely palatable it is, as it introduces Méliès, the Lumière brothers, and Edwin S. Porter to audiences who might otherwise have no interest in those names.) The earnest, aw-shucks proclamations delivered by Hugo about how movies can transport and comfort and inspire us could have been clumsily cheesy if <i>Hugo</i> itself didn't convince us of these attributes so incontrovertibly.<br />
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It all culminates in a montage of classic Méliès movies from the first 15 years of cinema, some of which are painstakingly recreated in Scorsese's own glorious, colorful 3D. This climactic montage is emotionally overwhelming partly for its narrative context (Méliès being pulled from the brink of destitution by the art form that sent him there in the first place) but also for what it means beyond the context of <i>Hugo</i> itself: always an avid film historian and preservationist, Scorsese brings his respect and enthusiasm for film history to spectacular cinematic life.<br />
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<b>5. A Separation</b> <i>(d. Asghar Farhadi, Iran)</i><br />
The most humane movie of the year, and also perhaps the most meticulously constructed, albeit in subtle ways — as such, it recalls some of Jean Renoir's empathic masterpieces, among them <i>The Crime of Monsieur Lange</i> and <i>The Rules of the Game.</i> <i>A Separation</i>'s plot unfurls slowly, with mounting apprehension; we take our time observing the characters, regarding them as fully-formed individuals rather than mere cogs in a narrative machine. It is because of this sensitivity that, when the gears of the plot do start chugging away and even interlocking precisely, the acrobatics of the storyline (the juggling of numerous subplots, the brief gestures and conversations that reappear with great significance later on, the character motivations that must be fully conveyed so we can become convinced of the narrative's complexity) overwhelm us emotionally more than conceptually. <br />
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I brought up <i>The Rules of the Game</i>, a cause célèbre that was notoriously met with caustic reviews, riots, and bans when it was first released. Indeed, Renoir's film was an impassioned satire of French social hierarchy and the pettiness of the Parisian upper class, but that's not what <i>A Separation</i> has in common with it. What the two films share is an ardent respect for human life, a profound consideration of human complexity and volatility. It's become commonplace to commend certain films for their moral ambiguities, for their unwillingness to condemn or celebrate characters as either villains or heroes, but I can't think of a movie that demonstrates that complex empathy more ably than <i>A Separation</i>. Characters who at first seem like vilified plot devices take on astonishing depth and pathos as the movie progresses. It's a movie in which people take on agonizingly real dimensions, something that's a lot less common in the movies than it should be.<br />
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But <i>A Separation</i>, as I mentioned, does not share with <i>The Rules of the Game</i> an embittered commentary on the society in which it was made: while it does portray some of Iran's social institutions (especially its penal system) as absurdly labyrinthine, the movie's concerns are infinitely more humane than political. The hardline Iranian officials who have condemned <i>A Separation</i> for catering to Western perceptions of the country and emphasizing its social inefficacy are astonishingly misguided in their accusations. The poignancy, the believability, of <i>A Separation</i>'s ensemble of characters extends to its social relevance: in addition to the vivid, immersive snapshots of modern-day Tehran that it offers, the movie makes it clear that there are no villains here, simply people struggling with the pressures of everyday life. More benevolent and beneficial than a hundred Hollywood message movies, such humane simplicity is vital in a politically antagonistic climate, one in which pundits have been debating the likelihood of war between Iran and either Israel or the United States. It might be obvious, but no less significant, to recognize that one of the many glories that movies (and art in general) offer us is to connect emotionally to people half a world away. <br />
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<b>6. The Mill and the Cross</b> <i>(d. Lech Majewski, Sweden/Poland)</i><br />
One of the very best movies about painting that I can think of (Henri-Georges Clouzot's <i>The Mystery of Picasso</i> also comes to mind), <i>The Mill and the Cross</i> is as cinematic as it is painterly, giving credence to that old aphorism that the art of film entails "painting with light." Polish director Lech Majewski (who's been making films since 1980, although most of them have found only limited exposure in the States) dives headfirst into a behemoth of a masterpiece: Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1564 painting "The Procession to Calvary," which places the crucifixion of Christ obliquely amid a huge ensemble of characters, most of whom pay no attention to his suffering. One of the mystifying paradoxes of Bruegel's painting is that he infuses the setting of Christ's crucifixion with his own immediate world, incorporating the lives of the peasants and millers and noblemen around him into his quasi-historical document — an anachronistic simultaneity that the film duplicates as well.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFSyBxOWNJRYLu2ilESZ-Gcjw0G3h1XUMiU_b7wV-NfHpnt-Ypv5pzgOGJYmgjS9nn9XLt92joKi3CE15MU2mBm15jYyMxWyxwlavrJZHYx5J2OBsvqeBfgEaabB5XUZy2kYQoL4mp5FQ/s1600/800px-Pieter_Bruegel_d._%25C3%2584._007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFSyBxOWNJRYLu2ilESZ-Gcjw0G3h1XUMiU_b7wV-NfHpnt-Ypv5pzgOGJYmgjS9nn9XLt92joKi3CE15MU2mBm15jYyMxWyxwlavrJZHYx5J2OBsvqeBfgEaabB5XUZy2kYQoL4mp5FQ/s400/800px-Pieter_Bruegel_d._%25C3%2584._007.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Procession to Calvary," 1564</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
Bruegel had an ethical reason to commingle his own world with that of Judaea in the first century: Flanders in 1564 was overrun with Spanish Catholics terrorizing Belgian Protestants. The painting, then, is more a commentary on the eternal cruelty and barbarism of man than a historical representation of the crucifixion. <i>The Mill and the Cross</i> achieves the same breaking-down of historical timelines, allowing the executions of both Christ and two innocent peasants to parallel each other, to take on equal significance. If both the painting and the movie suggest the unchanging capacity for violence that people are capable of, this may prod the audience into relating such ideas to our own time: have such forms of merciless, deadly prejudice been eradicated, or they have simply taken on new, more "civilized" appearances?<br />
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More prominently, though, <i>The Mill and the Cross</i> asks us to deconstruct artistic forms and question the varying modes of vision that different arts utilize. <i>The Mill and the Cross</i> uses computer-generated imagery, a complex interlaying of backdrops and studio-shot footage, and even a full-size replication of "The Procession to Calvary" (painted by Lech Majewski himself) to concoct a hypnotically <i>new</i> visual style, halfway between painting and film. The use of stasis or movement on various simultaneous planes (complete immobility in the foreground with only a few characters stuttering around in the background, for example) is meticulous and transfixing; it really does seem like Bruegel's painting is being slowly kickstarted into motion (which, after all, is the general aim of the movie). It is because of this that <i>The Mill and the Cross</i> ultimately ends up in that mysterious middle ground between fantasy and reality, in which demonstrably real people can act in front of vivid, larger-than-life brushstrokes. <br />
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<b>7. The Skin I Live In</b> <i>(d. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain)</i><br />
Almodóvar's films are typically steeped in the vivid colors, lurid melodrama, and propulsive plots of cinematic soap operas, citing such genre antecedents either implicitly (as in the sweat-soaked <i>Matador</i> or my personal favorite, <i>Live Flesh</i>) or explicitly (<i>All About My Mother</i>, <i>Bad Education</i>, the scopophilic <i>Broken Embraces</i>). There's no doubt his films take place in Movieland, but his allusions are usually good-natured and irresistibly self-deprecating rather than empty, soulless references that aim for artificiality. <br />
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But never before has Almodóvar made a film as densely referential as <i>The Skin I Live In</i>: this movie latches on to (and reappropriates) ideas from <i>Eyes without a Face</i>, <i>Vertigo</i>, <i>Island of Lost Souls</i>, <i>Frankenstein</i>, even a little bit of <i>Persona</i>. Almodóvar, though, never fails to revitalize this fodder in ingenious ways, spinning a few of those earlier movies on their heads and turning their concepts into a tortured expression of sexual confusion. <i>The Skin I Live In</i> can be accurately described as a lurid mad-scientist psychosexual horror movie, but its genre trappings convey a highly disturbing, genuinely shocking obliteration of both genre and gender identity. <br />
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The puzzles and cinematic allusions that Almodóvar concocts seem entirely devoted to complicating the emotional trajectories undergone by the characters. Also as in <i>Eyes without a Face</i>, the horrors we see aren't supposed to be campy or tossed-off; this is meant to be horrific and painful, even serious. Almodóvar's ruse is in conveying this pain with the same pop-colored bravado that he usually does. But the movie is, after all, about at least one person trapped in a body that doesn't belong to them (that's the closest I'll get to a spoiler); since <i>The Skin I Live In</i> tackles sexual malleability and ratchets that theme's intensity up to the nth degree, it only seems fair that this movie isn't all fun and games to watch. (It seems necessary to point this out, since that skin-crawling anxiety is exactly what critics like <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20111019/REVIEWS/111019982">Roger Ebert</a> and <a href="http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/the-skin-i-live-in-edelstein-2011-10/">David Edelstein</a> criticized, though that's entirely appropriate to the movie's subject matter.) <i>The Skin I Live In</i> takes place in traumatized, horror-movie territory, not in Almodóvar's usual sphere of exuberant melodrama; what sense does it make to criticize him for tackling something uncomfortably new?<br />
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<b>8. Pina</b> <i>(d. Wim Wenders, Germany/France/UK)</i><br />
My second-favorite 3D experience of 2011: hearing an arthouse-film crowd gasp in astonishment at the very first image of <i>Pina</i>, which is nothing more than a nighttime street scene in Wuppertal, Germany. (My <i>favorite</i> 3D moment: seeing the title to <i>Hugo</i> fly past my bewildered eyeballs after what seemed like an hour into the movie.) That first image in <i>Pina</i> may be nothing more than an unspectacular building on a street corner (how many of those have you seen during your lifetime?), but at the same time it's so much more than that. Think of the train arriving at La Ciotat station in the Lumière Brothers' 1895 film: today such a scene is commonplace, but at the turn of the century it presented the onset of a brand new form of vision. And so it is with 3D (or so it could be): a transfixing new space in which filmmakers can experiment.<br />
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Primarily, <i>Pina</i> is about movement, about the human body, about the strange and unexpected directions in which creativity can lead us. It's a movie that <i>moves</i> quickly and irrepressibly, which is apt for a documentary about dance. Director Wim Wenders and celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch, longtime friends, had actually discussed a performance documentary for decades, but Wenders remained uncertain how he could capture the visceral movements of her and her dancers on film. With the increasing prevalence of 3D filmmaking over the last several years (Wenders specifically cites <i>U23D</i> as an influence), they finally found their answer. Bausch died suddenly in 2009 (two days before shooting was set to commence) and Wenders was about to abandon the project, but her dancers convinced him to see it through to the end, turning the documentary into a commemoration of her legacy and art.<br />
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Almost as much as <i>Hugo</i> (but in a totally different way), <i>Pina</i> perfects a burgeoning 3D aesthetic, wowing us with its newness. An endless parade of dancers mimes the four seasons, snaking across a stage and along a dusty ridge, seemingly smiling directly at us. We then leap into Bausch's staging of <i>The Rite of Spring</i> (the still above), a remarkably intense primal scream that, of course, involves no screaming at all. (The few words we hear in <i>Pina</i> make us realize how much more potent the images are on their own.) Bausch's <i>Café Müller</i>, <i>Kontakthof</i>, and <i>Vollmond</i> are also performed (the last of these leaps off the screen with soaring arcs of water beneath shimmering lights), along with seemingly spontaneous dances by members of Bausch's troupe. The film embraces a healthy surrealist streak (my favorite example: a rabbit-eared bystander witnesses a white-clad woman attacking a pillow on an el train) but its silent performances suggest untold pain and desperation as well. <br />
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What point is there in saying more? This is that rare kind of movie that has to be seen to be experienced — a plot synopsis or thematic analysis would simply result in the supremacy of words that Bausch and Wenders were trying to avoid. ("There are situations that leave you utterly speechless," Bausch says in the film. "All you can do is hint at things.") This simpleness has caused some reviewers to describe the film as slight, but there's a difference between simpleness and simplicity, and <i>Pina</i> is simple in a ravishing, all-encompassing way. To say it's "just" about the artistry that Bausch and her dancers created is akin to claiming that the movie is "just" about life.<br />
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<b>9. Melancholia</b> <i>(d. Lars von Trier, Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany)</i><br />
How can a movie about extreme depression and the end of the world seem so <i>invigorating</i>, so restorative? I remember leaving the theater on a chilly November day, moments after bearing witness to the destruction of earth and the termination of humanity's petty problems, and feeling inexplicably happy. In fact, I remember feeling similarly vivified moments after watching Antonioni's <i>L'Eclisse</i>, the bewildering ending of which seems to suggest that the characters' feelings of detachment and desperation didn't mean all that much when nuclear war could end it all in an instant anyway. The endings of both movies and how perversely happy they made me brought to mind an aphorism that Roger Ebert wrote a long time ago: no great movie is boring, even if it's a movie some people might deem "difficult." We might extend the formula: no great movie is depressing, even if its subject matter is bleak as hell. <br />
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A strange paradox distinguished 2011: it was filled with nostalgia, yet at the same time populated with hopeless apocalyptic fantasies. <i>Melancholia</i>, <i>The Turin Horse</i>, <i>4:44 Last Day on Earth</i>, <i>Take Shelter</i>, <i>Contagion</i> — all of these movies looked ahead to the end of times while other movies looked backwards, towards some kind of purity. (Whether this end-of-the-world mindset was sparked by actual social crises or something more existential is another question.) Of all these movies (besides maybe <i>4:44</i>, which I haven't seen), <i>Melancholia</i> provides the clearest illustration of the destruction of earth (thanks to a blindingly annihilative special-effects-laden climax), so why is it also, perhaps, the most electrifying of them all?<br />
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A lot of it has to do, I think, with Lars von Trier's extravagant modernism: he never tries to hide the fact that his films are thoroughly inflected with his skewed worldview, his neuroses and obsessions, his dark yet entrancing ideas and stylistic whims. This was extreme to the point of repugnance with his previous film, <i>Antichrist</i>, but with <i>Melancholia</i> it seems like we're bearing witness to von Trier's self-therapy, and it somehow feels cleansing for us, too. (What better way to exorcise one's demons than to manifest the end of the world?) In interviews (including that notorious Cannes press conference), von Trier has admitted that he was undergoing severe depression during the making of both <i>Antichrist</i> and <i>Melancholia</i>, yet while the former exhibits nothing but hatred and ugliness, the latter seems to approach some kind of acceptance, maybe even a self-reckoning. <br />
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<i>Melancholia</i> also exhibits more sympathy with its characters than any von Trier film to date. The director has often been criticized for brutalizing his lead female characters (Emily Watson in <i>Breaking the Waves</i>, Björk in <i>Dancer in the Dark</i>, Nicole Kidman in <i>Dogville</i>), but here the violence is almost all psychological, and it's a pain that von Trier apparently understands all too well. Kirsten Dunst was also reportedly recovering from severe depression while making the film; her Justine seems fairly clearly to be a stand-in for von Trier (at least in some ways), and her recklessness and cruelty always seem to emanate from a very real psychological wellspring. All of this led <i>Salon</i>'s <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/is_melancholia_a_feminist_film/">Lindsay Zoladz</a> to reasonably posit that von Trier "is the misogynistic author of a feminist film," in that <i>Melancholia</i> deals sensitively with the mental anguish undergone by Justine (instead of simply blaming "female hysteria" for her behavior). There's so much going on in <i>Melancholia</i> (conceptually, visually, stylistically, psychologically) that its artistic vitality counters the movie's undeniable existential despair.<br />
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<b>10. Margaret</b> <i>(d. Kenneth Lonergan, USA)</i><br />
A movie that's almost entirely comprised of rough edges, <i>Margaret</i>'s first cut was actually finished more than six years ago, with a running time of about three hours. Then, from late 2005 to last year, the movie languished in editing purgatory: contractually obligated to provide a cut of two-and-a-half-hours or less (the kind of arbitrary and draconian stipulation that movie studios love to exert), Lonergan labored to provide an acceptable compromise, eventually bringing in Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker to help with the process. What they ended up with — and what was barely released (in NY and LA) late last year, with an eventually staggered release towards the beginning of 2012 — was a sprawling, nervy, unforgettable, absurdly ambitious project that attempts to encapsulate post-9/11 life in New York City, through the eyes of a self-absorbed high schooler.<br />
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The extent to which you like <i>Margaret</i> depends on your fondness for messy, rambling, multifaceted, strident movies that emphasize emotions and ideas over story. Moviegoers looking for lean, economical, well-told narratives may groan exasperatedly during the film (as many did in the Minneapolis theater that showed <i>Margaret</i> for about two weeks in late February). Others, though, will find much to appreciate (and mull over, and grapple with) in the movie's jangly combination of Cassavetes' raw emotions with Godard's scattershot pontifications.<br />
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At its most basic, <i>Margaret</i> is about a high-schooler (significantly <i>not</i> named Margaret) grappling with her feelings of guilt after indirectly contributing to the death of a pedestrian on a New York City street. But the emotional fallout from this tragedy shares screen time with the high-schooler Lisa's loss of virginity, her combative relationship with her mother, heated arguments in class seminars about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the role (or lack thereof) that works of art play in our everyday lives, a modern America defined by money and isolation and sensationalism, and a baker's dozen of tangential themes. <br />
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This all does comprise a jagged patchwork of sorts, and the multifaceted nature of <i>Margaret</i> does serve a purpose: it reflects, with jarring complexity, the daunting heterogeneity of both entering adulthood and living in a huge metropolis (like New York City). Life is difficult, or at least dynamic, and there always necessarily exists a breach in communication between people: <i>Margaret</i> is one of the few movies that fully conveys those ideas, or even cares to think about them. Ultimately, the movie provides hope in the form of creative expression, the kind of artistry that Lisa has repeatedly denounced as solipsistic: by the end of the movie, she begins to believe that creating art is a way of dealing with the monumental difficulties that modern life has to offer.<br />
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<b>THE NEXT TEN</b><br />
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In a phenomenal year for movies, <b>Le Havre</b>'s low-key delights were somewhat overshadowed by grander, more hypnotic films, but the subtle magic that Aki Kaurismäki evokes in his latest is no small achievement. Ardently, unabashedly sentimental (to the point that its happy ending poignantly defies all logic), <i>Le Havre</i> harkens back to silent cinema's ability to turn ordinary, everyday life into something otherworldly and fantastic. (Kaurismäki and his cinematographer, Timo Salminen, remind us how gorgeous a simple ray of sunlight can be on 35mm.) Which isn't to say that dialogue is unimportant in <i>Le Havre</i>: the deadpan dialogue for which Kaurismäki is known (and which Jim Jarmusch occasionally emulates) is as ingratiating as ever, making the movie as funny as it is emotional.<br />
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<br />A dazzling Möbius strip of a movie, <b>Mysteries of Lisbon</b> is all about the pyrotechnics of storytelling — the shuffling of narrators, the manipulation of vision, narrative recursion and refraction and so on. This four-and-a-half hour adaptation of Camilo Castelo Branco's 1854 novel was also one of the last films of the celebrated Portuguese director Raúl Ruiz (<i>The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting</i>, <i>Time Regained</i>), who has directed more than 90 films since his debut in 1963 (he died on August 19 of last year — exactly two weeks after <i>Mysteries of Lisbon</i> was released stateside). Comprised of gorgeous, acrobatic tracking shots, lush costume and set design, an unforgettably romantic musical score by Jorge Arriagada, and a plethora of stylistic tricks (so many diopters!), <i>Mysteries of Lisbon</i> constantly makes you aware of its elaborate construction, which paradoxically makes its story (or make that stories) more engaging rather than less. Maybe by the end you'll be feeling the 270 minute running time, but primarily because your eyes and brain will become exhausted from all the dizzying opulence.<br /><br />
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Naming your film <b>Poetry</b> seems to entail at least some kind of overreaching pretense, but Lee Chang-dong's South Korean drama distinguishes itself as one of the most humane and empathetic movies of the year. The director of <i>Secret Sunshine</i> focuses on another female protagonist: a 60-something woman who impulsively begins studying poetry partially in an attempt to combat the onset of Alzheimer's, and who simultaneously learns that her grandson (for whom she's the primary guardian) has committed an unspeakable and heinous act. At 140 minutes, <i>Poetry</i> takes its time getting to where it's going, but that provides plenty of opportunities for character development, slowly mounting suspense, and a visual palette that is, admittedly, poetic. The film's uniqueness and sincerity is epitomized by its ending, a jarring conclusion that radically deconstructs character identification, first-person perspective, and linear storytelling in poignant ways. <br />
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<b>Martha Marcy May Marlene</b> provided two of the most impressive breakout performances of 2011: for Elizabeth Olsen, the doe-eyed actress who manages to make her character, a refugee from an abusive, identity-demolishing cult, terrifyingly paranoid and constantly relatable at the same time; and for writer-director Sean Durkin, who's able to sustain an astonishingly consistent and oppressively eerie atmosphere throughout the entire movie. It's not really a horror film, but it's still one of the scariest movies of the year, with an agonizingly unresolved ending that puts us in exactly the same position as the main character.<br />
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A soul transmigrates through human, animal, vegetable, and finally mineral form in Michelangelo Frammartino's <b>Le Quattro Volte</b>, a sublimely simple still life-in-motion shot in the countryside of Calabria, where — 2,500 years beforehand — Pythagoras developed his theory regarding the cyclical, harmonic nature of the universe. More than a philosophical head-scratcher, though, <i>Le Quattro Volte</i> is a charming and sometimes blissful observational work, infused with simple beauty and the kind of meticulous visual comedy that Jacques Tati perfected. Unconcerned with the stifling structures of narrative and (to an extent) character development, here's one of the few movies that embraces the underlying pleasure to be gleaned from movies: the act of looking at the world. <br />
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Mind-boggling and beautiful as <i>Cave of Forgotten Dreams</i> is, I far prefer Werner Herzog's 2D documentary from 2011 to his 3D one. <b>Into the Abyss</b> finds the German auteur casting his lens on the American penal system and capital punishment; the film details Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who received the death sentence and life imprisonment, respectively, for a triple homicide in Conroe, Texas. The men's guilt isn't really in question here — although Perry and Burkett both blame each other for the murders, there's no doubt that both men are at least indirectly culpable. Rather, Herzog uses their guilt to question the morality of capital punishment in a complex way: whether or not they're guilty, what are the repercussions of state-ordained retribution? Herzog hardly hides his anti-death penalty bias, but he also allows all of his subjects to speak for themselves, quietly respecting their polarized reactions to this tragedy. Especially memorable are interviews with Jason Burkett's father (a man also facing a life sentence in prison, regretful and ashamed of the legacy he feels he's passed on to his son); and Fred Allen, a former execution supervisor for the Texas Department of Corrections who abandoned his career and pension after he became haunted (perhaps literally) by the ghosts of those he'd killed. Unshakably emotional (I was probably tearing up, if not outright weeping, for the last 45 minutes) and thematically complex, it's yet another movie that demonstrates Herzog's penchant for depicting the uncompromising firestorms provided by real life (though it's to the movie's credit that it somehow ends on a note of hope and rebirth).<br /><br />
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A number of David Cronenberg's movies have injected Freud's psychoanalytic theories into corporeal horror (<i>Rabid</i>, <i>The Brood</i>, <i>Dead Ringers</i>, <i>Crash</i>), so it's not too surprising that he would eventually tackle the Viennese analyst head-on. Cronenberg's real ploy with <b>A Dangerous Method</b> is to suggest the characters' neuroses, drives, and desires in restrained, mostly invisible ways, relegating their psychosexual urges to a subterranean (or at least cerebral) realm. The movie also has the most affecting doomed romance of any 2011 movie, or rather (as <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/09/09/dangerous_method/singleton/">David O'Hehir</a> points out in his <i>Salon </i>review) two doomed romances: between Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, the doctor and patient who would become lovers and who were aware of the bearing that their psychosexual theories had on their own behavior; and between Jung and Sigmund Freud, the two hotheaded scientists whose personal rivalry established one of the prevailing psychological movements of the twentieth century.<br />
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<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/arts-review-of-2011--film-2011-was-definitely-the-year-of-the-goat-6278572.html">Jonathan Romney</a> called <b>The Tree of Life</b> "the least good masterpiece in recent memory," which sounds about right: its monumental vision and overwhelming beauty have to coexist with faux-transcendental voiceovers, off-kilter pacing (we know next to nothing about the adult life of Jack yet are still expected to care about what happens to him), and a schmaltzy ending (surely such a visionary work could have created a more awe-inspiring afterlife than some doorways lugubriously propped open on a windswept beach). So it's saying something that <i>The Tree of Life</i> still seems so magisterial and overwhelming despite its flaws; it's hard to disparage a movie that overflows with so much beauty, ambition, and aching emotion.<br />
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<b>Take Shelter</b> falters a bit in its final moments, but before that it's an unshakably intense look at a man grappling with apocalyptic visions and the possible onset of paranoid schizophrenia (a disease with which his mother became afflicted in her mid-30s). As such it's the second movie of 2011 (with <i>Melancholia</i>) to sensitively draw an analogy between mental instability and the end of the world, but <i>Take Shelter</i> is distinguished by its respectful look at lower-middle-class America, not to mention awe-inspiring performances by two of the best actors working today (Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain).<br />
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A digital movie doesn't have to be stereoscopic to be visually impressive, a fact that Andrew Haigh's <b>Weekend</b> reminds us of constantly. With gorgeous (often nighttime) videography and a minimalist, removed aesthetic, <i>Weekend</i> details the burgeoning relationship between two men after a capricious (supposed) one night stand. It's a resolutely modern <i>Brief Encounter</i> that even ends with a bittersweet farewell in a train station. Written and acted with an incredible ear for naturalistic conversation, it's the kind of movie that offers us guarded yet intimate access to what seems like the lives of two real individuals.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-49826436671263260032012-04-24T16:11:00.000-05:002012-04-24T16:11:21.939-05:00New Releases: 'The Deep Blue Sea'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZHrQBMjnAZDGpTcwmMAqMsvMTS_-tss5FNEb_s5xxuSvIFjB0Vht49J2tkDA4EDPcT5QKOsFJmS04UdsCeBjiat0BWhy0s0G6nTSt-Rc0ahEqbv7_xeXcNz82SvYJoqlGUmpnS98aBFE/s1600/1_e_terence-davies-_the-deep-blue-sea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="225" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZHrQBMjnAZDGpTcwmMAqMsvMTS_-tss5FNEb_s5xxuSvIFjB0Vht49J2tkDA4EDPcT5QKOsFJmS04UdsCeBjiat0BWhy0s0G6nTSt-Rc0ahEqbv7_xeXcNz82SvYJoqlGUmpnS98aBFE/s400/1_e_terence-davies-_the-deep-blue-sea.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<b>The Deep Blue Sea</b><br />
98 minutes, R, UK/USA<br />
<b>Release Date</b> March 23 2012<br />
<b>Distributor</b> Music Box Films<br />
<b>Director</b> Terence Davies<br />
<b>Screenplay</b> Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan<br />
<b>Producers</b> Katherine Butler, Sean O'Connor, Kate Ogborn, Lisa Marie Russo<br />
<b>Cinematography</b> Florian Hoffmeister<br />
<b>Editor</b> David Charap<br />
<b>Production Designer</b> James Merifield<br />
<b>Art Director</b> David Hindle<br />
<b>Costume Designer</b> Ruth Myers<br />
<b>Cast</b> Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Ann Mitchell, Jolyon Coy, Karl Johnson, Harry Hadden-Paton, Sarah Kants, Oliver Ford Davies, Barbara Jefford, Mark Tandy, Stuart McLoughlin, Nicolas Amer<br />
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The ravishing new film from Terence Davies is maybe the lushest movie you'll see (and hear) all year: a "cinematic opera," as <i>Sight & Sound</i>'s <a href="http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/6649">Jonathan Romney</a> termed it, that reaches deliriously vivid heights of melodrama and aching emotion. Set "around 1950," <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i> is set in that dreary postwar London familiar to us from British classics of the '40s and '50s (<i>Brief Encounter</i>, <i>It Always Rains on Sunday</i>), not to mention Davies' own earlier films (<i>Distant Voices, Still Lives</i> from 1988, <i>The Long Day Closes</i> from 1992). Rubble litters the cobblestone streets; everything is washed in pale browns and grays, with smatterings of color. Davies, a director thrillingly consumed by attention to detail, recreates the setting with visceral immediacy: every ad beaming from brick walls, every cigarette pack and storefront display, immerses us in this time and place. Movies can be time travel machines, and <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i> achieves an overwhelming transplantation.<br />
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Terence Rattigan, the celebrated playwright who would have turned 100 this year (he died in 1977), wrote the play on which <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i> is based: a quietly tragic story of a love affair between a cavalier, insecure war veteran (Hiddleston) and a self-sacrificing woman (Weisz) married to a gentle but stolid judge (Beale). For his adaptation, Davies excised heaps of expositional dialogue and a few additional characters from Rattigan's play, preferring instead to suggest the characters' histories and psychologies through brief glances, through dexterous crosscutting, through images that pop with color and light and a dynamic use of sound versus silence. Davies' boyhood love of going to the movies in postwar Liverpool (musicals especially) seemingly bestowed a keen understanding of what makes movies cinematic, of how to manipulate sound and image for maximum effect (André Bazin, whose essay "The Stylistics of Robert Bresson" addressed the art of adapting literary or theatrical texts to parallel cinematic terrain, likely would have appreciated Davies' work). <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6u7sCyFRY1i1RURFAPSppfwWu6yih_t0f0F6uI8aVTdLjviLl1QB5n0QtTyiF9pc3asslbSAOV5Cyeo2xlGtFQN0SueD-q1FN3guq_nkoYPj_Pq_wBSUdkS34Y6gFqnXJfQkm788DkHs/s1600/Tom-Hiddleston-and-Rachel-007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6u7sCyFRY1i1RURFAPSppfwWu6yih_t0f0F6uI8aVTdLjviLl1QB5n0QtTyiF9pc3asslbSAOV5Cyeo2xlGtFQN0SueD-q1FN3guq_nkoYPj_Pq_wBSUdkS34Y6gFqnXJfQkm788DkHs/s400/Tom-Hiddleston-and-Rachel-007.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The movie wows us viscerally from its first image, a swooping crane shot that climbs leisurely up to the second-story window from which Hester Collyer (Weisz's character) gazes ardently. The music on the soundtrack is Samuel Barber's <i>Concerto for Violin and Orchestra</i>, a piece which actually continues over the ensuing ten-minute prologue, a montage of brief though telling episodes that tell us all we need to know: Collyer's docile though empty relationship with her upper-class husband; her irresistible attraction to the cocky, roguish ex-RAF pilot, Freddie; the passionate onset of their relationship; the dissolution of her marriage. The story itself — what happens after this prologue — is merely what happens throughout the course of one day between Hester and the people revolving around her. ("Merely" is a somewhat misleading word here, since these interactions take on the scope perhaps not of Greek tragedy, but at least of exuberant melodrama.) The immediate employment of such overt editing and cinematographical techniques, all of them set to music that's similarly operatic in its emotion, pulls back the curtains to set the stage in an appropriately fervent way: here's a larger-than-life stage play, ordinary and extraordinary, restaged for the camera's eye.<br />
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The legacy of war makes its appearance in surprisingly cryptic ways. Most overt is a gorgeous flashback sequence instigated by Hester's desperate escape to a barren nighttime subway platform. Hester has already attempted suicide once earlier in the film; it's possible she's fled underground in order to throw herself in front of an oncoming train, a fate from which she's saved by the vision she soon experiences. A sublime single tracking shot passes slowly along a group of Londoners who have sought refuge from German firebombs. One man on the subway platform sings "Molly Malone," the mid-19th century Irish ballad. Debris floats to the ground as thunderous booms erupt overhead. The tracking shot ends with Hester embracing the man she will soon marry, the esteemed judge Sir William Collyer. There is tenderness in their embrace, but more the sort between a father and daughter than between husband and wife. This foreshadows the anguish Hester will feel later in life, when she's discovered that her youthful passion (perhaps even the morbid thrill of looming mortality provided by the war) has given way to soul-crushing inertia. This meticulous and powerful one-shot sequence may be the movie's most awe-inspiring moment — a tricky claim to make for a movie filled with them.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5mI-jaK54cQ5b61pha5bIP83wLc7w7jbU70oWHbTa4911NYOShkZtNxEpPUKjsOcedbToPVXi7PxmM6GpAzHg3JYphksyFGti7p5_reM5P2Wa5uu7nTwDNSu9HfKR4aWQo9Ba3McpD_U/s1600/_56868973_deepbluesea_kiss2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="225" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5mI-jaK54cQ5b61pha5bIP83wLc7w7jbU70oWHbTa4911NYOShkZtNxEpPUKjsOcedbToPVXi7PxmM6GpAzHg3JYphksyFGti7p5_reM5P2Wa5uu7nTwDNSu9HfKR4aWQo9Ba3McpD_U/s400/_56868973_deepbluesea_kiss2.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The gaping craters bestowed by wartime bombings make another appearance later in the film; in fact, one such image closes the film. In a final shot that mirrors the movie's opening scene, the camera cranes away from the window at which Hester stands, past some children singing a playground song and jumping rope on the rubble-littered street, to an ominous maw that lies at the end of the street, replacing the building that once stood there with bleak, seemingly inevitable emptiness. This ending becomes even more ambiguous when we consider that, in terms of the narrative and Hester's character, it actually ends with a semblance of hope for the future, of moving on with one's life. Maybe, then, the ending of <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i> equates Hester's tumultuous personal traumas with the violence recently undergone by England as a whole: moving perpetually closer towards the abyss, yet somehow climbing through it, finding self-reckoning through the terror.<br />
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Despite Hester's name, <i>The Deep Blue Sea</i> is no <i>Scarlett Letter</i>-ish reprobation of a married woman's disastrous yet passionate affair with another man. We understand what Hester is going through, to a certain extent; the movie aligns us so intimately to Hester's perspective that we seem to glean some understanding from her quiet suffering, from her equivocal glances at the world around her. At times Hester seems too good for either of these men: too passionate, too mercurial, for her meek and gentle husband, too self-sacrificing and understanding for the cad who neglects and berates her. But it also seems as though her sacrifices invigorate her, help define herself in her own eyes; in a desperate bid to find passion in a world that's been discombobulated, maybe she does so by leaping headlong into relationships that don't befit her. In any case, Hester's occasionally inexplicable behavior resembles the fragile volatility of humanity more than the cerebral ambiguity of art films — despite Davies' alchemical skill with operatic cinematic style, he's always used elaborate sounds and images to bring himself closer to the people and the world around him, rather than further away.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-6440859238164582032011-12-01T14:50:00.007-06:002012-02-03T10:45:55.275-06:00Flashback, 1981: 'Absence of Malice'<div style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-size: small; line-height: 17px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span">This post is the second in my "Flashback 1981" series: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first, on Sidney Lumet's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Prince of the City</span>, was posted on this blog in late August.</span></i></span><br />
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<i>Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born. </i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-size: small; line-height: 17px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span"><br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Absence of Malice </b>116m., R, USA</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Release Date </b>November 19, 1981</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Distributors</b> Columbia Pictures</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Director </b>Sydney Pollack</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Writer</b> Kurt<b> </b>Luedtke<b> </b>(uncredited: David Rayfiel)</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Producers </b>Sydney Pollack &amp; Ronald L. Schwary</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Music </b>Dave Grusin</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Cinematography </b>Owen Roizman</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Editor </b>Sheldon Kahn</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Production Design </b>Terence Marsh</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Cast </b>Paul Newman, Sally Field, Bob Balaban, Melinda Dillon, Luther Adler, Barry Primus, Josef Sommer, John Harkins, Don Hood, Wilford Brimley, Arnie Ross, Anne Marie Napoles, Shelley Spurlock</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">Originally, I had intended to post an entry in this "Flashback 1981" series about twice a month, hoping that by keeping tabs on successive releases in late 1981 I could get a very general sense of filmmaking trends and styles of the time. There were a few films I was especially looking forward to watching or revisiting: the Walter Hill actioner <i>Southern Comfort</i> (scored by Ry Cooder), released on September 21, 1981; <i>My Dinner with Andre</i> (October 11), which I saw about ten years ago and, I would expect, might appreciate a little more fully this time around; <i>Shock Treatment</i> (October 31), the semi-sequel to <i>The Rocky Horror Picture Show</i>, which might have made a fine, excessively-80s addition to my hungover Halloween weekend movie marathon; and<i> </i>Terry Gilliam's <i>Time Bandits</i> (November 6), which hardly needs an excuse to be rewatched.</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'll be honest: much of the reason I didn't rewatch or write about any of these movies was a hefty work schedule, and the fact that there were plenty of new releases in theaters that I decided to catch up on instead. But another reason is that a surprising number of movies from the early 1980s</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">—</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">even those which might be considered classics, or at least fondly-remembered</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">—</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">are surprisingly difficult to find on DVD. I could only find <i>Southern Comfort</i>, for example, in a shoddy version posted on YouTube, and <i>The French Lieutenant's Woman</i>, which I assumed would be one of those overly stately "literary" movies available on a bare-bones "Special Edition" reissue DVD, was nowhere to be found. This makes me wonder if early-80s movies occupy a no-man's-land of past releases that have been given the cold shoulder by studios when deciding which of their holdings to reissue (though I suppose this is true of past releases from any period</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">—</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">it only makes sense that studios would give their attention to titles that have the greatest name recognition).</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">In any case, it's somewhat fitting that my second post in this Flashback series addresses Sydney Pollack's <i>Absence of Malice</i>, as it would make a nifty double-feature with Sidney Lumet's <i>Prince of the City</i>. Both movies are about rampant corruption and the almost-inevitable loss of honor and morality in modern social institutions. <i>Prince of the City</i>'s undercover narcotics officer is torn apart by guilt and self-loathing after he starts turning evidence over to an Internal Affairs investigation</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">—</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">he feels like he's betrayed his coworkers and friends and, what's worse, violated the unwritten code of honor among lawmen. Meanwhile, <i>Absence of Malice</i>'s Megan (Sally Field), a journalist who begins investigating a liquor distributor for possible ties to the mob, compromises her integrity and destroys the lives of those around her with sensational stories that value tawdry gossip over the truth. Both movies even feature Bob Balaban in practically the exact same role: a weaselly government agent who, in his dogged efforts to advance his own career, cares little about what actually happens to the people he exploits. </span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Between the two movies, <i>Prince of the City</i> is unquestionably leagues beyond <i>Absence of Malice</i>. Lumet's film is an epic, troubling account of how law, big business, the drug trade, and the federal government intersect in ways more symbiotic than antagonistic, ultimately shattering the lives of more than a few people. Its atmosphere of greed and self-compromise seemed particularly attuned to the economic state of the U.S. in the early 1980s, when urban drug trafficking was escalating at an alarming pace and Ronald Reagan's corporate-friendly government made the lower and upper classes drastically stratified. <i>Absence of Malice</i>, on the other hand, doesn't really seem to consider the specific sociopolitical climate of its story; it's a general (even cliched) take on the old journalistic cautionary tale about writers valuing "the scoop" over the actual lives of the people involved. Although Paul Newman did admit in a 1983 interview that the film was a direct attack on the <i>New York Post</i>'s sordid "Page Six" gossip column</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">, similar subject matter had been tackled in Billy Wilder's 1950 film <i>Ace in the Hole</i> and is even more pertinent today.</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"> In other words, <i>Absence of Malice</i> could have taken place anywhere at any time; Megan's lack of journalistic integrity has more to do with her own ambition and her romantic relationships than with any kind of external pressure from a corrupt industry or government. (Not that this character-based approach is less valid than a sociopolitical one; in the context of <i>Absence of Malice</i>, though, it's certainly less interesting.)</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">What the movie has to say about journalism and letting your emotions distort your occupational duty is simple, trite, and uninteresting, but <i>Absence of Malice</i> does feature some performances that lend the film a tough, compassionate humanism, giving it a much greater sense of gravity than might be expected. Field handles the vulnerability of her character more ably than her steely resourcefulness (for a character who's supposed to be so singlemindedly ambitious, she seems remarkably passive a lot of the time), but it's nice to see her in a semi-serious dramatic role in what was arguably the prime of her career (two years after her Oscar nomination for <i>Norma Rae</i>). She's someone I've always wanted to see more of, and <i>Absence of Malice</i> is a nice indication of her unique onscreen presence. </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">But the movie really belongs to Paul Newman and, in a significant supporting role, Melinda Dillon. Newman plays Michael Gallagher, the liquor distributor who, after he's slandered in Megan's article and unduly investigated by slimy federal prosecutors, plots his devious (and too-convoluted) revenge against the public institutions that vilified him. <i>Absence of Malice</i> is ultimately a revenge story posing as a morality play, but at least that revenge is given sophistication and quiet, burning anger by Newman. In what might be deemed the middle period of his career (after the youthful vigor of movies like <i>Hud</i>, yet before the twilight irascibility of, say, <i>Nobody's Fool</i>), Newman is still quietly heroic, world-weary and stoic but restraining untold feelings. His Gallagher is an iconic Hollywood prototype (the cynical, intense crusader who's always one step ahead of everyone else) in a movie that's supposed to reflect real life, but that's what makes him so interesting and appealing to watch; rather than him seeming out-of-place, it's as though the movie strives yet fails to reach the same level of energy and bravado that he displays. Gallagher is granted one emotional breakdown</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">: </span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">a suitably unsettling scene in which he claws at Megan</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">, hissing furiously at her until he literally throws her onto a dirty warehouse floor</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">. It's a pivotal and impressive scene, mostly because it unleashes the pent-up hostility of his character and allows some uncomfortable cruelty to sneak into a movie that's otherwise pretty tame (even though it pretends not to be).</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Melinda Dillon's character is a bit more simplistic</span><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">: she's all saintliness and misplaced trust as the Catholic school-worker who's most tragically affected by Megan's dishonorable actions. It's no coincidence her character's name is Teresa. But the movie obviously needs to give a human face to the negative repercussions of Megan's slander, and that face is given sensitivity and a poignant sense of naivete by Dillon (another actress whose late '70s/early '80s work I need to catch up on). The best moment in the whole movie, in fact, is her resigned, matter-of-fact attempt to suppress a shocking revelation about her (printed in another of Megan's articles) by walking up and down her block and stealing all of the newspapers from her neighbors' front lawns.</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;">Stylistically the movie is even less distinctive than <i>Prince of the City</i>; Lumet and Pollack both come from television backgrounds, which lent them both a concise, uncomplicated style that could be either powerfully compact or lifelessly dull. With <i>Absence of Malice</i>, Pollack is content primarily to point and shoot, although he has the good sense to evoke both the sun and squalor of the Miami setting, and to let the characters dominate the storytelling. If those characters sometimes seem a little one-note, not to mention in the service of disseminating overly trite moral lessons, then at least they are given occasionally-exciting life by at least three actors who were all working at the top of their game. </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="font-family: inherit;"><div style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small; line-height: 115%;"><b>NEXT: Warren Beatty's <i>Reds</i> (Dec. 4)</b></span></div><br />
</div>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-40284566120879788362011-10-13T21:02:00.001-05:002012-01-25T14:26:25.439-06:00New Releases: 'Drive'<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXYHoOMHZuga4z1oaNtOE5yPdiqGDmE-FsVvCP95CCtSoyFcvgwcxWzZSPSiLG32VIRgZ1Aya4r0li97sg54bHE0y6x2hxBU-EcDfTjaJnEaMNTM3u0e1Kh9QPFobuqrF8p8zQFoF1iow/s1600/618w_movies_drive_jacket.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="305" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXYHoOMHZuga4z1oaNtOE5yPdiqGDmE-FsVvCP95CCtSoyFcvgwcxWzZSPSiLG32VIRgZ1Aya4r0li97sg54bHE0y6x2hxBU-EcDfTjaJnEaMNTM3u0e1Kh9QPFobuqrF8p8zQFoF1iow/s400/618w_movies_drive_jacket.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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</tbody></table><b>Drive</b><br />
100 minutes, R, USA<br />
<b>Release Date </b>September 16, 2011<br />
<b>Distributor </b>FilmDistrict<br />
<b>Director </b>Nicolas Winding Refn<br />
<b>Written by </b>Hossein Amini, based on the book by James Sallis<br />
<b>Producers </b>David Lancaster, Bill Lischak, Michel Litvak, Linda McDonough, John Palermo, Marc Platt, Gigi Pritzker, Adam Siegel, Jeffrey Stott, Gary Michael Walters<br />
<b>Music </b>Cliff Martinez<br />
<b>Cinematography </b>Newton Thomas Sigel<br />
<b>Editing </b>Mat Newman<br />
<b>Production Design </b>Beth Mickle<br />
<b>Art Direction </b>Christopher Tandon<br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><b>Cast </b>Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn, Joey Bucaro, Tiara Parker</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">In his recent appraisal of the Dardenne Brothers’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Kid with a Bike</i>, Jonathan Rosenbaum laments what he sees as “the most detestable [single trend] in contemporary commercial filmmaking...: exploitation movies that go out into the world as ‘serious’ art movies.” As an example of the moral hypocrisy, the underhanded audience-pandering, that would have extreme violence standing in for sensitivity and seriousness and depth, Rosenbaum cites <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i> as an example. He’s right—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i> is the most extreme example in recent (or even distant) memory of a movie that so badly wants to have it both ways. It wants to eat its cake and have it too, to use an outworn aphorism; or more accurately, it wants to shove some nasty dessert in our faces, smearing it roughly into the mouths/eyes of audiences distanced by irony and detachment, but the movie also wants to pretend to gently offer us such desserts on a gleaming silver platter. Is it a disgusting badass exploitation flick or a sensitive existential character study? The movie doesn’t know, and it doesn’t ask or expect us to decide. Some critics have graciously labeled the movie “ambiguous,” but that seems like an overreaching way to say that the movie can’t decide what it wants to be (thematically, conceptually) because it has nothing on its mind. This leaves us with a movie that is unquestionably well-made—it builds and maintains an astonishing level of dread and stoic misery with impressive formal exactness—but insultingly fake about its own pretensions. </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">The director, Nicolas Winding Refn (who’s made some fascinating movies before, especially 2008’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bronson</i>), has offered an excuse for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i>’s bipolar nature in interviews: he is interested, he says, in the duality of macho action heroes, whose (typically) rigid black-and-white moral decisions mask an unsettling aggression and a penchant for snapping into brutal violence instantaneously. If he’s trying to deconstruct action movies’ typical characterization of their protagonists, he’s in some good company: this duality has also been on the mind of directors such as Robert Aldrich, Sam Peckinpah, Kathryn Bigelow, and David Cronenberg (whose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A History of Violence</i> may be the textbook example of this kind of morally-shaded deconstruction). Those directors, to varying degrees, all tackle the emotional drives, the external circumstances, and/or the latent psychological neuroses that lead their action heroes to commit acts that could be reasonably deemed either selflessly heroic or viciously bloodthirsty. Movies like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kiss Me Deadly</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Straw Dogs</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Point Break</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A History of Violence</i> don’t attempt to tidily explain their characters’ proclivity to violence, but they do at least try to explore it, to place the characters in such a world and to convey their actions in such a way that might suggest why they’re so willing to do such awful things.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">What seems self-defeating about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i> is that Refn is operating on a different wavelength here: this movie’s style is more reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville than of, say, Peckinpah. Melville’s cool, distanced observations of professional lawmen and criminals at odds seemed so stripped-down that they avoided fleshing out their characters at all. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le Samourai</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le Cercle Rouge</i>, for example, primarily seemed to observe their stoic characters going through the motions, filling their preordained roles of policeman or thief almost obligatorily, seeming to know that they were already caught up in a web of fate that would kill them in the end. It doesn’t seem off-base to call such films existential because the characters are defined almost exclusively by their actions; like Meursault in Albert Camus' novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stranger</i>, Melville’s characters often seem resigned to the fact that they have no free will, that a series of causes and effects have led them to carry out their actions, and that emotional or psychological reactions to the world around them would not in any way influence their behavior. Camus’ writing in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stranger</i> is deceptively simple: he does not psychologize or appraise his main character, but at the same time there are a wealth of interpretations that the reader may reflect back on to Meursault. (Why does he kill the nameless Arab? Camus’ unwillingness to even ponder this question forces us to question why we do anything in our lives, just as Melville’s films sometimes seem like tauntingly cryptic observations of human specimens trapped in a cage.) </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i>, apparently, is meant to be a similarly existentialist observation of a character switching robotically back and forth between sensitive self-sacrifice and god-awful brutality. The Driver (Ryan Gosling), as he’s known, spends his time working in a garage and performing stunts for Hollywood action movies. By night, he hires himself out as a professional driver for thieves, hitmen, disreputable businessmen, whoever—his only stipulation is that he’s given a five-minute window to pick up the loot or the henchmen, anything beyond that window is not his responsibility. He doesn’t know what to do when he’s not driving; early in the movie, he returns home for less than a minute, dejectedly looks around his apartment, and immediately leaves again, aimlessly driving around Los Angeles. This robotic state of being—just keep moving until the ride is over—is meant to be a stripped-down representation of human existence. Melville's influence is all over the beginning of this movie, especially in a meticulously-planned opening heist that reveals the one and only pleasure the Driver feels in his life: knowing that he’s good at what he does.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">But the Driver’s clocklike existence is impeded, burst apart, by a random meeting with a next-door neighbor, adorable Irene (Carey Mulligan). She has a young son named Benicio, whose father is in prison for undisclosed (but easily-guessed) reasons. The Driver and Irene almost involuntarily become attracted to each other—they fall into the other’s company, they smile and flirt awkwardly, tenuously. Gosling and Mulligan are so good that we believe in their mutual attraction; each fleeting glimpse and touch suggests characters who don’t <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">want</i> to feel anything for each other (she’s still married, after all; he lives his life based on a principle of austere isolation) but do so anyway, against their will.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">A week later, Irene’s husband, Standard, is released from prison. We think we know where the movie’s going here—a tense confrontation in a hallway makes it apparent that Standard distrusts the friendship between his wife and the Driver—but there are no altercations between the two, and only the slightest antagonism. In fact, after Standard is mercilessly beaten by a couple thugs in a parking garage, the Driver hesitatingly, and foolishly, offers assistance to Standard. In order for Irene and Benicio to remain safe, Standard must pull off (wait for it…) One Last Heist, for which the Driver will act as accomplice. We know the heist will go horribly awry, but when it does it still catches us off guard: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i> takes its time getting to its lower depths, spending nearly an hour with drawn-out, quiet scenes of mounting dread before the bodies start piling up. And after such a long stretch of quiet intensity, the blood splatters—a head, literally, explodes—and the movie smacks us awake with its aggressive contradictions. Sensitivity and slaughter—all, apparently, in the name of jerking around the audience.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: inherit; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYBAgfMTSBtPQ2rppYetRk5luQYZHLsYTNJiAlXyMXGy9xFQUu3ggJNDhYccaj3Ek9_sTTi7c_K665Y-jZXq_uilTt5KyXAeU-LGBzJtpCqSS9nO3nNj7Yoth5nQ_-fGeQHNJMHiKkN7M/s1600/Drive-6.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYBAgfMTSBtPQ2rppYetRk5luQYZHLsYTNJiAlXyMXGy9xFQUu3ggJNDhYccaj3Ek9_sTTi7c_K665Y-jZXq_uilTt5KyXAeU-LGBzJtpCqSS9nO3nNj7Yoth5nQ_-fGeQHNJMHiKkN7M/s640/Drive-6.jpg" width="424" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">The movie is so well-made that I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wanted</i> to believe it had more to say, that there was a reason for its attention-grabbing nastiness. But the Best Director prize that Refn won at the Cannes Film Festival (where audiences reportedly stood up and cheered at the exploding-head scene) was, all evidence indicates, a reward for a well-brought-off prank, essentially congratulating the director on making artifice look substantial. I’m willing to admit that the exploding-head scene is incredibly powerful—it does viscerally reflect the movie’s conflicting states of mind, and allows the slowly mounting tension to erupt, with disgusting liquescence, at just the right time—but things get worse from there (in terms of gore as well as in terms of phoniness). </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">The epitome (or the nadir, depending on how you look at it) of this “sensitively violent” hypocrisy comes in a scene set in an elevator: the Driver and Irene share a long, slow ride to the ground floor, with the Driver trying to make amends to her for hiding the truth about his partnership with her husband. (I’m not kidding when I say that, after Irene slaps him in the previous scene, the Driver sheds a single, lugubrious tear.) An admittedly gorgeous slow-motion shot—set to an opulent techno-synth love song, with the fluorescent lights of the elevator flickering grandly—has the Driver sweeping Irene to the corner of the elevator and kissing her passionately (here we have a relief of the prolonged sexual tension that mirrors the aforementioned relief of the film’s mounting threat of violence; both moments are technically faultless). But there’s another man in the elevator with them—a villainous hitman, which the Driver detects when he spots a handgun bulging from the man’s jacket. (Why would Irene and the Driver passionately make out in an elevator next to a total stranger? Because it would make a good scene…that’s all that really matters here.) The elevator reaches the bottom floor and violence erupts: the Driver pushes Irene out of the opening door; he proceeds to kill the bodyguard in outrageously violent fashion, essentially crushing his skull by stomping on it incessantly. (Refn reportedly asked Gaspar Noé for advice on how to make the head-stomping scene more visceral and disturbing. You know you’re heading in the wrong direction when you’re asking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him</i> for filmmaking advice.) Though the scene was shortened so that the film could receive an R rating, we’re still not spared grisly images revealing the full extent of the victim’s mutilation. Irene backs out of the elevator in horror, as the Driver gapes back at her, wordlessly, bloodstained. We’re sickened…but isn’t it all in the name of love?<br />
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</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">How susceptible does Refn think the audience is? I understand that that’s precisely what he’s trying to challenge—our willingness to believe that action movie heroes behave virtuously and rightly, despite the violence they perpetrate—but by pairing his characters’ emotions and their violent atrocities so intimately, he makes them both seem ridiculous. The gore, the brutality, seem like little more than ploys in order to make us sit up and pay attention because they serve the fatuous notion that the Driver is committing them out of love, out of selflessness. Concurrently, the tenderness he feels towards Irene and Benicio just seems like a pose to inject some humanism into an aggressively heartless affair. Cynicism and artifice posing as compassion is the worst kind of anti-humanism imaginable.<br />
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</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">How are we supposed to feel about the Driver? It would be fine, maybe even commendable, if the movie didn’t ultimately try to answer that question, instead forcing us to decide. But <i>Drive</i> does ultimately provide an answer for us. Refn goes to great lengths to convey the Driver’s rugged emotionalism, his man-of-few-words vulnerability; he may crush skulls with his feet and force a bullet down a man’s throat with the claw of a hammer, but really he’s just misunderstood and lonely. Swooping slow-motion shots of Irene and the Driver walking down hallways, set to melancholy yet romantic music, as Irene quietly takes in Gosling’s chiseled profile reveal just how enamored we’re supposed to be of his gruff manliness. And even though he’s (at times) maniacally violent, he’s better than the movie’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i> villains—a loudmouthed gangster (Ron Perlman) who sets the plot in motion by sending his goons to beat the shit out of Standard; a conniving businessman (Albert Brooks) who emotionlessly stabs a man in the eye with a fork, then repeatedly plunges a butcher’s knife into his throat. The final showdown, in fact, is between one of these villains and the Driver, and when the latter character seems to prevail, driving off into the sunset while undergoing extreme blood loss, there’s no question that we’re supposed to take satisfaction in his victory. (This final showdown is filmed almost entirely in shadow, with sharp objects sticking out of bodies in silhouette—an approach that you might think would be preferable, since it doesn’t indulge in hollowly shocking violence, but which may be just as off-putting by acting infinitely more serious than anything in this movie deserves.) There’s no moral ambiguity here; there are heroes and villains like always, it’s just that the former act more violently than they usually do (or, at least, that violence is shown to us more unflinchingly). </div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">The majority of critics have been duped by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i>’s sleek style, by its initial patience and its quietness, by sensitive performances in the service of paper-thin characters. Make no mistake, to the extent that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i> works beyond its style, it’s almost entirely because of the cast. Gosling is fascinating to watch whether he’s in sad-eyed sensitive mode or psychotic bloodlust mode—the contradiction inherent in his character would seem much more juvenile in another actor’s bloodied hands. Mulligan is miscast but we can’t help but care for her, and their chemistry is remarkable. In supporting roles, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, and Ron Perlman may not make their characters seem like actual human beings (Cranston fares best of all), but at least they make them charismatic and interesting to watch. Like practically everything in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i>, the performances are technically proficient and well-honed, but they disguise an underlying attitude towards the world (and the audience) that is seriously deluded, hypocritical, and condescending.</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;">Why condescending? Because the movie assumes we’ll take its aesthetic at face value: that open ending, those artsy compositions and lighting, the meticulousness of the framing, they all must mean that the movie is serious and deep and extraordinary. But it gives us nothing beyond its style to merit such faux-profundity. Nobody in the movie is deep or interesting enough to warrant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i>’s self-seriousness. The film’s makers assume that audiences today are so cynical and ironic and detached from actual emotion that we’ll take a semblance of emotion for the real thing—in other words, that caring about characters (or, by extension, about human beings) is now just a matter of images and surface appearances, that all it takes is good cinematography to convince us of the movie’s sincerity. More than any Quentin Tarantino movie, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i> antes up the violence and the grittiness of earlier exploitation movies and asks us to believe that they stand for innovation and intelligence. There’s more sincerity in any one scene of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jackie Brown</i> than in all of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drive</i>.</div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div><div style="font-family: inherit; text-align: left;"></div>Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-29156028051302220602011-09-22T09:36:00.001-05:002012-01-25T14:27:46.165-06:00Classics: 'A Matter of Life and Death' (1946)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVW152glcWn9H2Glv3FHVRI0dC3PchsprGFCKiiGfFMLGi4z1se5y4sIN4bQ_Qa6pjqFGF9P6YHAhc2Irbj-nK7Ws9Vm0eSZGxDNVKC41hS_1B86uUuUpORLj5wRDkKg_Kwl-oOZmkN6Q/s1600/matter+of+life+and+death.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVW152glcWn9H2Glv3FHVRI0dC3PchsprGFCKiiGfFMLGi4z1se5y4sIN4bQ_Qa6pjqFGF9P6YHAhc2Irbj-nK7Ws9Vm0eSZGxDNVKC41hS_1B86uUuUpORLj5wRDkKg_Kwl-oOZmkN6Q/s1600/matter+of+life+and+death.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Gentium Basic';"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></span></b></span></div><b>A Matter of Life and Death (<i>Stairway to Heaven</i>) </b><br />
104 minutes, PG, UK<br />
<b>Release Date</b> December 25, 1946<br />
<b>Distributor </b>Universal Pictures<br />
<b>Directors </b>Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger<br />
<b>Written by</b> Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger<br />
<b>Producers</b> Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger<br />
<b>Music </b>Allan Gray<br />
<b>Cinematography </b>Jack Cardiff<br />
<b>Editing </b>Reginald Mills<br />
<b>Production Design</b> Alfred Junge<br />
<b>Special Effects</b> Henry Harris and Douglas Woolsey<br />
<b>Cast </b>David Niven, Kim Hunter, Robert Coote, Kathleen Byron, Richard Attenborough, Bonor Colleano, Joan Maude, Marius Goring, Roger Livesey, Robert Atkins, Bob Roberts, Edwin Max, Betty Potter, Abraham Sofaer, Raymond Massey<br />
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You’re sucked in to <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> (or <i>Stairway to Heaven</i>, as it was known by its American title) <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM2c6q7g3Dw&feature=related">before the end of the opening credits</a>, which are etched into an impossibly blue background that soon segues into the lush expanse of the cosmos. Stars and planets shimmer in this animated effects shot, which pans across infinity until it finally alights on earth and dissolves into the story proper. Over this fantastic first shot, the words of a narrator can be heard: “This is the universe. Big, isn’t it?” One of the overwhelming feats that the movie accomplishes is that it convinces us of both the universe’s immensity and of individual humans’ significant role in it: there may be an infinity of things we don’t know, questions we’ll never be able to answer, principles of reality we’re not even minutely aware of, but that doesn’t make us less important in the grand scheme of things. In a particularly romantic and extravagant mood, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger convince us that the universe would stop functioning if humanity was relentlessly violent and murderous towards one another; that, in other words, it’s humanly love that keeps the wheels of heaven and the cosmos rolling—a nakedly sentimental lesson that aches with the sense of urgency bestowed by World War II (<i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> was released in 1946).<br />
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If you’re engrossed in <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> by the end of the second minute, you’re completely entranced by it before the end of the fifth, and maybe around the fifteenth or so you’re bowled over, speechless, enamored. How could you not be? Technicolor has never seemed to pop as much as in Jack Cardiff’s cinematography for Powell and Pressburger films, and of those, never as much as it does here. The oranges and yellows of a burning wreck, the greens of an idyllic garden, the deep red of Kim Hunter’s lipstick—they’re all impossibly lush, as though the color is throbbing, realer than reality. (Here is a movie that incontrovertibly disproves the theory that the more fantastic is a film’s premise, the less immersive that movie’s evocation of reality will be.) The vibrancy of the colors is accentuated because half of the film—the half set in heaven—is shot in silky black-and-white, while all the earthbound scenes dazzle with their color. (The color process is even mentioned by name in one surprisingly self-reflexive line of dialogue, as an angel laments the lack of Technicolor in the heavens.) The color scheme is clever and exquisitely done (every dissolve from black-and-white to color will likely leave you awestruck), but it also perfectly complements what the movie’s about: between eternal heaven and an earthly life in which you’ve found true love, the more magical, hopeful, and blissful of the two worlds is undeniably the latter.<br />
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That’s the key to the lasting appeal of Powell and Pressburger’s films: technically masterful though they are, they impress most of all because of their aching humanity, the intense empathy with which they view their characters. At times the vivid emotionalism of their stories, their larger-than-life dramas, can date awkwardly, as they do with <i>Black Narcissus</i>'s repressed nuns or <i>The Red Shoes</i>' non-ballet sequences. <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i>, though, carries out a sublime balancing act: as technically innovative as it is achingly sincere, it's the work of humanists as well as stylists.<br />
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The movie is about a cosmic oversight: RAF pilot Peter Carter is supposed to die. We meet him at the tail end of a failed air strike sometime during World War II, desperately trying to radio back to land while his wrecked aircraft struggles to remain in the air. He contacts an American radio operator named June and, improbably (but charmingly), they <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9v5H0IhODg">fall in love over the airwaves</a>. Carter quotes classical poetry to her before he leaps from his plane without a parachute—here's a movie so stylized and so unabashedly romantic that quoting Marvell and Sir Walter Raleigh doesn't seem out of place.<br />
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Carter is scheduled to die on this night, but he doesn't: the heavenly transporter assigned to retrieve him cannot see him through the dense fog (occasioning a wry joke about typical British weather). So Carter washes ashore and almost immediately finds June bicycling down the beach, a coincidence that would seem contrived if the movie wasn't already operating on such a cosmically-charmed, magically-predestined wavelength. We cut from the gorgeous Technicolor greenery on earth to the black-and-white (though opulently stylized) bureaucracy in heaven, where the angelic transporter responsible for Carter is being reprimanded for his mistake. He's called Conductor 71, but apparently was a French aristocrat beheaded during the Reign of Terror.<br />
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Sent back to earth to reclaim Carter's soul, Conductor 71 freezes time as Carter and June canoodle in the forest (the kind dotted with impossibly bright colors) and tries to convince Carter to cede himself to the heavens, thus righting the cosmic balance. Carter unsurprisingly refuses and proposes a trial: he will defend himself in a heavenly court, using June's and his own love as evidence, and argue for the right to continue living. <br />
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As usual in fantastic stories like this, we have a parallel storyline that could propose a rational explanation: June suspects that Carter's visions are hallucinations brought on by brain trauma, and enlists the help of her friend, Doctor Reeves, in diagnosing him. The relationship between Reeves and Carter is fascinating to watch, a burgeoning friendship built out of mutual respect and a reckoning with unexplainable laws of the universe that they can't hope to fathom. (David Niven and Roger Livesey, as Carter and Reeves respectively, make their friendship a moving one; neither actor has ever given as sensitive a performance as they do here.) Reeves believes that Carter's hallucinations and faltering health are the result of a concussion, the effects of which may be alleviated by brain surgery. The entire climax of Carter's heavenly trial, then, may be nothing more than Carter's own anesthetized brink-of-death vision, a parallel fantasy in which he's allowed to plead for the right to go on living.<br />
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Released in the immediate aftermath of World War II, <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i>'s impassioned plea for love and brotherhood is honest, direct. The movie tells us, adamantly and sweetly, that love is its own heaven on earth—preferable, in any case, to the legions of G.I.s that we see filling the heavens in <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i>. The message seems less cloying when we consider it as a desperately hopeful response to the ravages of war.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Matter of Life and Death</i>'s cosmic courtroom</td></tr>
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Late in the film, a showdown occurs during Carter's heavenly trial between the prosecutor—an American named Abraham Farlan, who was killed by British soldiers during the Revolutionary War—and Carter's British defense counsel, a semi-major character whose death I won't give away here. A surprisingly long sequence (maybe fifteen minutes in all) consists of their proud, vitriolic back-and-forth, a dialogue reflecting fraught British-US tensions at the time. (After the war, much of the British public was resentful of the lingering presence of US soldiers in some of their cities.) The debate turns increasingly towards the merits and injustices of each respective culture—even a dull British cricket match and a grating American pop tune are used as detrimental “evidence” against each other. The argument goes deeper, addressing values, crimes against humanity—slavery, the exploitation of foreign cultures, invasion. An all-American jury is eventually proposed to act as demonstration of the country's sense of justice and honor—a jury that contains a multicultural assortment of Americans, reflecting both a nod to American “melting pot” eclecticism and a criticism of the United States' takeover of cultures. (An all-black regiment of the American army seated in the audience at this heavenly trial—as well as the appearance of numerous slaves in heaven—offer potent visual illustrations of American racial inequality.) For a long stretch, the movie turns away from Carter altogether, instead focusing on British-American antagonism. The move at first seems bold and disorienting, and definitely adds unexpected folds into the fabric of the narrative, but really the whole film could be described as “about” British-American relations—considering that June is British and Carter American. In the end, then, the love between June and Carter offers a union between both the man and the woman and between the US and the UK—hopeful in every way. While the lengthy dialogue between the American and British counsellors come off as slightly didactic or transparent, this should be seen as an admirably direct and earnest address to the audience—propaganda, in a way, but with the most beneficial aims in mind. Like Chaplin's climactic speech in <i>Monsieur Verdoux</i> (1947), we're directly asked to consider war a massive injustice, an inhumane crime committed by states against multitudes of citizens; the speeches in both films may be didactic, but only because war is the catalyst and social dialogue the aim.<br />
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<i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> fascinates beyond its sociopolitical subtext. It seems to hit upon a new idea suddenly, in the middle of a scene, yet somehow incorporate it naturally into the movie as a whole. We are introduced to Dr. Reeves as he is operating a <i><a href="http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1131475377045">camera obscura</a></i> in his attic, essentially allowing him a godlike reflection of everything going on in his village in the immediate vicinity. The images his <i>camera obscura</i> offers us are gorgeous, fuzzy, dreamlike—Dr. Reeves' elaborate mirror setup acts as a parallel to the film camera, offering us visual access to worlds we otherwise would not know. This brief introduction to Dr. Reeves doesn't seem to have much of a point beyond allowing Powell (who typically addressed the directing duties, as Pressburger concentrated on the screenplay) and Jack Cardiff an excuse to experiment with perspective and framing and indulge in their visual inclinations. But it also seems like a natural diversion somehow, and warmly suggests Dr. Reeves as an inquisitive, playful, enthusiastic innovator—a scientist who stands in contrast to Carter's flights of fancy. Or, later, consider a brief cutaway to a group of British soldiers rehearsing a performance of <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>—a moment partially played for comedy, but also an appropriate allusion for a film that's somewhat about the knotty relationship between gods and mortals. In short, the movie is lively, intuitive, and incredibly fast-paced, fascinating for the unexpected directions in which the agile narrative takes us.<br />
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The special effects are rightfully celebrated as some of the most innovative and beautiful of the time (or ever), and there's no question that the vast expanse of the heavens—the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXAEqBywUt8">seemingly endless staircase</a>, flanked by immense statues, that stretches into infinity; the massive courtroom, a sort of floating coliseum, somehow surrounded by blankets of wispy clouds and shimmering sky—are astonishing in their vastness, their meticulousness. The sets themselves are elaborate blends of matte paintings, models, and enormous locales with seemingly hundreds of extras—a fantastic visualization of an impossibly beautiful heaven. (Heaven in this movie seems remarkably like our typical image of the afterlife from fables and myths—which makes you wonder if its portrayal in the movie reflected popular culture's conception of heaven or if it helped to entrench it in our cultural collective.) The most awe-inspiring shot in the whole movie begins in Technicolor in an emergency room, tilts down and slowly dissolves into a serious of bubbles erupting in liquid, dazzling in color (an influence for the opening of <i>Kwaidan</i>?), until the image dissolves to black-and-white, tilting further down over the milky, cloudy expanse of heaven to introduce us to the first image of the courtroom—an endpoint that is an immense composition in itself. <br />
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But <i>A Matter of Life and Death</i> is also a “movie movie”—meaning its splendor, its unique power, can't be encapsulated by words. It's the kind of thing you have to see to believe, an appraisal which, I would suggest, is appropriate for all masterful cinema. The foregoing paragraphs have not, I'm sure, come close to the bewildering effect of this movie's stunning color or precise compositions, or the bleeding sincerity, the charming rosy-eyed optimism, that it offers.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-75569790897825947942011-09-04T23:23:00.001-05:002012-01-25T14:32:02.038-06:00New Releases: 'Another Earth'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7FFVpvEkPW6rrq0YqzLL_J0J4jCxAbVkqOTdkuBTY7WugS7nfaJl37s0lY9oeQjKurgvthXAimqAp7BZaPBZioTCrAEbNxoV8L6ghI9lkw90CUcCtQhqD_o8NZ8V7bZyHlCGiTeb_l4/s1600/another-earth-sundance.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhf7FFVpvEkPW6rrq0YqzLL_J0J4jCxAbVkqOTdkuBTY7WugS7nfaJl37s0lY9oeQjKurgvthXAimqAp7BZaPBZioTCrAEbNxoV8L6ghI9lkw90CUcCtQhqD_o8NZ8V7bZyHlCGiTeb_l4/s1600/another-earth-sundance.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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So far it's been a strong year for movies both American and otherwise, but we're never safe from grating pseudo-profound parables about tragic destiny and redemptive second chances—a lesson drearily reiterated by <i>Another Earth</i>. The movie won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, where it reportedly received a standing ovation (according to <i>Variety</i>), and was almost immediately picked up by major indie distributor Fox Searchlight—all of which suggest that some audiences are still taking one-note, morose performances, grainy handheld cinematography, and head-smackingly obvious metaphors as signs of profundity and creativity. Really, though, the only sign of uniqueness to be found anywhere in <i>Another Earth</i> is in its basic premise, and even this shard of originality is limited to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycITom5kLkc">a few luminescent shots</a> of the titular earth doppelganger suspended in the sky.<br />
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Brit Marling (also credited as producer and cowriter) stars as Rhoda Williams, a promising 17-year-old astrophysics student who has just been accepted to MIT. On the night of her high school graduation, Rhoda celebrates excessively at a house party that's shown to us in obnoxious two-second snippets—director/editor Mike Cahill employs the laziest brand of "naturalism" imaginable, cutting so restlessly that we can only assume a longer stretch of continuity would reveal how unsuccessful he is at conveying human behavior (this is a conclusion we'll come to sooner or later anyway). Driving home, Rhoda hears a news story on the radio about the discovery of another planet: a second earth, suddenly discovered just outside of our own earth's atmosphere, with unknown physical properties. Drunkenly, Rhoda cranes her head out the car window and gazes at the parallel planet, majestic against the night sky. She crashes head-on into another car; a woman and her young son are killed instantly, while the man in the driver's seat is put into a coma. It's a sign of the movie's laziness that the family is blissfully chatting away about the name of the toy in the young boy's hands immediately before he's killed; this isn't just your average nuclear family, this is something so blissfully perfect it's destined for cruel annihilation at the hands of a sadistic Higher Being and an overly calculating writer/director.<br />
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Rhoda is sent to prison for four years for driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter; when she's released, Brit Marling's dead-eyed stare (conveyed via shaky, grubby-looking shots of her character staring out of train windows while an aggressively somber score drones on the soundtrack—courtesy of a band named Fall On Your Sword, whose music is as bad as their name) tells us that Rhoda is, you know, sad. (Marling has been lauded for her performance, which is baffling—she operates on one unchanging wavelength for the entire movie. That's why we can't take her plight seriously—a performance that only aims for soul-crushing guilt can't even approach believability or empathy.) Rhoda takes a dreary janitorial job at a high school and eventually approaches the man whose life she ruined four years ago—the driver of the car she hit, a former composer named John Burroughs (William Mapother), who used to teach composition at Yale University. <i>Another Earth</i> is obviously concerned with the depression and hopelessness we all go through as everyday human beings, given that its two protagonists are once-promising intellectuals attached to MIT and Yale—does the movie assume we would be less interested in their difficult situations if they were just two hardworking nobodies, toiling away at nine-to-five jobs?<br />
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Anyway, Rhoda shows up at the home of Dr. Burroughs. She's rehearsed her apology, a confession that she hopes will alleviate some of her debilitating guilt. Suddenly face-to-face with the man whose wife and son she killed, though—he's now an alcoholic oaf in a refuse-stained bathrobe, a figure we might expect to see in an Off-Off-Off Broadway play about 1930s tenement dwellers—she pretends to be a consultant for a cleaning agency and offers to pick up his deteriorating home, free of charge. He accepts halfheartedly. She keeps on coming back, cleaning his house (get it, she <i>cleans up</i> his life!) and tearing up the checks he gives her afterwards. They develop an attachment somewhere between helpless desperation and genuine attachment, a relationship punctuated by clunky visual metaphors like one of Burroughs' deceased son's old T-shirts, which Rhoda absentmindedly sends through the wash, predictably instigating a feverish (but, needless to say, oh-so-humanly-imperfect) rant by Burroughs replete with twitching histrionics. This is the kind of movie in which no relationship can exist without a prop department's worth of <i>meaningful</i> things.<br />
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Four years after the discovery of that parallel planet, it's still unexplored when Rhoda is released from prison. Communications sent to Earth 2 have gone unanswered; no evidence has suggested that the planet is habitable, and it's never explained how or why the planet simply popped up right next door to ours'. (The whims of a lazy pair of melodramatists are the most likely explanation.) Actually, this vaguely sci-fi setup, which almost inadvertently raises a slew of metaphysical questions the movie never begins to explore, remains compelling for a while. Beyond its potency as a dreamy visual accent, the existence of Earth 2 makes you believe (or, at least, hope) that the movie is going in some promising directions. The best scene in <i>Another Earth</i> is a televised radio transmission from one of "our" NASA officials to a seemingly abandoned control center on Earth 2; suddenly, though, this official's radio call is answered—astonishingly, by her parallel self, her doppelganger, in this alternate universe. It's a tense, mysterious, unpretentious moment, and if the movie had at least touched upon some of the quandaries raised by this bizarre metaphysical moment, it would have at least been interesting.<br />
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But it becomes apparent almost immediately after this suspenseful scene that the ominous parallelism of Earth 2 simply exists as an allegory for the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNdYX5vCLtY">lame existential crises</a> experienced by Rhoda and John. Rhoda is obsessed with the parallel planet; desperate for escape, and clinging to the possibility that, on Earth 2, her "other self" never drunkenly killed a woman and young boy, she enters a contest in which the winners will be chosen to join the first civilian excursion to Earth 2. Some of these parallelisms would have been intriguing if the movie had handled them with any dexterity, insight, compassion, or grace, but these are concepts that Cahill is apparently unaware of. Will Rhoda win the essay contest, in which she professes her guilt and asks, self-loathingly, for a second chance? How will the outcome of this affect her relationship with John? Will she have an epiphany and realize the true emotional value of the tragedy that she has undergone—a realization complete with a frenzied scene in which Rhoda runs at breakneck speed at the side of the road to overcome her guilt, a scene which surely must have had Cahill shedding a single tear behind the camera? Since the movie won esteem at the Sundance Film Festival, the answers to all of those questions should be easy to guess.<br />
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Levity, spontaneity, originality—these are things that <i>Another Earth</i> is unconcerned with. It's so desperate to prove itself as something <i>deep</i>, something <i>real</i>, something <i>important</i> that it ends up as something diametrically opposite. This is a common tendency among first time directors (<i>Another Earth</i> is Cahill's first feature film), but at least sometimes we can acknowledge and understand this tendency (the attempt to make a mark in a film industry that's dauntingly hard to break in to) and recognize the natural skills, technical or otherwise, of the woman or man behind the camera. Not so in this case: judging from <i>Another Earth</i>, Cahill has no promising tricks or ideas or sentiments in his arsenal.<br />
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Am I being too hard on him, and on <i>Another Earth</i>? The movie is bad, but after all, it's just a typical American indie drama, one of many trite, lifeless, self-involved, precious cinematic dirges that find success at Sundance or Tribeca—no better or worse than most. The answer is yes, I am being too hard on the movie and on Cahill—because my frustration should be directed towards American independent cinema in general, not primarily at the filmmakers but, just as importantly, at the distributors and film programmers and industry "pundits" and scenesters and marketers who take this as something valuable, who give it a standing ovation, who put <i>this</i> forward as something we should celebrate as emblematic of American independent moviemaking. Give Cahill and <i>Another Earth</i>'s crew credit for one thing: they've made an industry <i>believe</i> they're seeing something new and enlightening. This means the shame should be placed on the movers and shakers (the ones who decide which movies are picked up for distribution—which movies American audiences will see) who have bought into <i>Another Earth</i>'s dog-and-pony show. They see grainy handheld cinematography, vacant and morose stares from attractive newcomers, and stories revolving around a distinctly non-humanistic pain and suffering and, desperate to pitch ticket-buyers that new underdog success story, see something worth selling. At least Hollywood knows what it's selling: brand merchandise that may not give consumers nutrition but, a lot of the time, gives them entertainment. Indie distributors like Fox Searchlight (which, needless to say, operates at the behest of 20th Century Fox—about as far from independent as you can get) pitch us gourmet organic food and then regurgitate slop onto movie screens. <br />
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Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-31309005017079262982011-09-02T01:15:00.001-05:002012-01-25T14:37:42.757-06:00Flashback, 1981: 'Prince of the City'<i>This post is the first in a new series I'm starting: viewings and responses to films released as close to thirty years ago as possible. The first entry is Sidney Lumet's </i>Prince of the City<i>, originally released by Orion Pictures and Warner Bros. on August 21, 1981. (Yeah, I'm a little late on this one—I have a busy work week to blame.) I hope these posts will offer a snapshot of the cinematic and social climate in 1981, and will be an interesting way to chart developments and/or innovations in film since then.</i><br />
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<i>Why 1981, one might ask? Two reasons, both of them mostly arbitrary. The first is that I have often neglected films of the 1980s and early 1990s much more than any other historical era—while I've enthusiastically explored silent film, classics of the early sound era to the mid-twentieth century, and developing New Waves and changes in international cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, I for some reason have been mostly uninterested in films of the 80s and 90s, until now. Secondly, I was born in 1984 and did not really start paying attention to movies as a social art form until the late 1990s, so I feel like it will be interesting to further explore and chart the changing cultural climate of the era into which I was born. </i><br />
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<b>Prince of the City </b>167m., R, USA<br />
<b>Release Date </b>August 21, 1981<b> </b><br />
<b>Distributors </b>Orion Pictures & Warner Bros. Pictures<br />
<b>Director </b>Sidney Lumet<br />
<b>Writers </b>Jay Presson Allen and Sidney Lumet, based on the book by Robert Daley<br />
<b>Producers </b>Jay Presson Allen and Burtt Harris<br />
<b>Music </b>Paul Chihara<br />
<b>Cinematography </b>Andrzej Bartkowiak<br />
<b>Editor </b>John J. Fitzstephens<br />
<b>Production Design </b>Tony Walton<br />
<b>Cast</b> Treat Williams, Jerry Orbach, Richard Foronjy, Don Billett, Kenny Marino, Carmine Caridi, Tony Page, Norman Parker, Paul Roebling, Bob Balaban, James Tolkan, Steve Inwood, Lindsay Crouse, Matthew Laurance, Tony Turco, Ron Maccone, Ron Karabatsos, Tony DiBenedetto, Tony Munafo, Robert Christian, Lee Richardson, Lane Smith, Cosmo Allegretti, Bobby Alto, Michael Beckett, Burton Collins<br />
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Commercially unsuccessful and middlingly reviewed upon its release (it was deemed inferior to Lumet's 1973 crime drama <i>Serpico), <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUz8HKTGsPM">Prince of the City</a></i> is now generally seen as one of Lumet's strongest hours (or, to be more precise, nearly-three-hours). And that it is, though I don't consider myself one of the director's fans: too often, he oversells visual metaphors with a deadening obviousness, and he sometimes allows his actors to overplay or to encapsulate their characters in broad, simple character traits. While his background in directing TV series and made-for-television movies in the 1950s and '60s can lend his films a swift, tough conciseness, it can also make them overly schematic in their narrative arcs—as though he were still working under the rigorous scheduling and episodic demands of working for a television studio. (This blueprint-following brand of filmmaking especially hampers his 2007 film <i>Before the Devil Knows You're Dead</i>.)<br />
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But it's easy to dismiss such quibbles in the context of Lumet's long career, which undeniably expressed the cohesive style and thematic concerns of an unassuming auteur. The director (who passed away less than five months ago, on April 9th) offered us at least two great films, <i>12 Angry Men</i> (1957) and <i>Dog Day Afternoon</i> (1975), and several almost-great ones (<i>Network</i> [1976], <i>The Verdict</i> [1982]). He has been deemed one of the quintessential "New York directors"—not unlike Martin Scorsese or Woody Allen, the director's adopted hometown is a driving character in many of his films. Some of his works would be inconceivable set in another city. He also returned consistently to the theme (which always fascinates me) of how large-scale institutions (television networks, police forces, urban governments, the court system, hospitals and health care) influence the lives of individuals embroiled within that system—and, correspondingly, how individuals may actively resist or refashion those systems.<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avWn9OAFfyQ">Prince of the City</a></i> is one of the finest examples in Lumet's filmography of both of these tendencies. His status as a New York filmmaker has never been more impressively displayed than in this film: the city is an indelible backdrop here, a writhing, squalid creature that instills moral crises in more than a few characters. The aspect of <i>Prince of the City</i> I'll likely remember more vividly than any other is its encapsulation of a pre-Giuliani New York, a snapshot of a city that could not be more foreign to us than the New York we now know. Like the city as seen in <i>Taxi Driver</i> (1976), Chantal Akerman's <i>News from Home </i>(1977), or Bette Gordon's <i>Variety</i> (1983), New York here is a grittily evocative contradiction: glittering and disgusting, monumental and festering, impressive and disheartening. <i>Prince of the City</i> is absolutely a product of its time and place, which here should be taken as a thunderstruck compliment rather than a disparagement—it is the most immersive portrayal of New York in its Ed Koch days that I've ever seen.<br />
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The film is also a complex, sprawling document of the ways that numerous forces of law and order interacted (and, to an extent, still interact) in the city. The story concerns an esteemed narcotics agent, Danny Ciello (Treat Williams), who undergoes a crisis of conscience (and self-identity) and decides to work with the FBI's Chase Commission in exposing corrupt agents on the New York police force. Like any other undercover narcotics agent at the time, Ciello relies upon addicts and junkies for information, often being forced to supply them with hard drugs in order to get them to cooperate (and, more distressingly, simply to survive). One of the film's strongest scenes is his excursion to the underbelly of Manhattan at three in the morning to console an informant suffering from withdrawal; rescuing the shivering, desperate man from a grimy alleyway during a rainstorm, Ciello drives him from one supplier to another, looking for anything that will placate him (heroin, coke) and keep him in Ciello's good graces. Eventually, Ciello winds up chasing down another junkie named Jose, beating him mercilessly in order to score two bags of coke for his informant. Shortly thereafter, Ciello, in the midst of self-loathing, drives Jose to a decrepit rattrap of an apartment covered with graffiti—then simply watches in helpless horror as Jose beats his girlfriend for getting high off of his stash. Swiftly and unforgettably, <i>Prince of the City</i> evokes a cesspool of a world in which the close relationship between narcs and junkies makes it easy, as Ciello later confesses, to mistake heroes for villains, right for wrong—to commit unspeakable acts and defend them, sometimes self-righteously, as ultimately moral behavior.<br />
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It is this blurring of previously absolute moral codes that leads Ciello to provide testimony to federal agents investigating corruption. Initially, he is told that their targets will be the true overlords of the urban drug trade: wealthy suppliers, lawyers, judges, mayors, city officials that are bought off in order to look the other way, or even to facilitate the profitable narcotics industry. Ciello is immediately (and, as it turns out, rightly) distrustful of the agents who approach him, including Rick Cappalino (Norman Parker), a kind, mild-mannered young agent who genuinely respects and empathizes with Ciello but has no way to defend him from the manipulations of the system in which they find themselves. (Parker gives what may be the most sensitive performance in the whole movie, which seems amazing to me—I had never heard of him before, and besides this film he appeared mostly in television series.) Ciello vociferously tells the FBI he will never betray the trust and camaraderie of his partners in narcotics, he will never rat on them, and at first he is told he will never have to. But of course, as powerful corporate and business agents are targeted by the FBI and exposed by Ciello, accusations against him and his squad force him to expose their past indiscretions—confessions which ultimately have deadly, soul-shattering consequences.<br />
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The brotherhood between Ciello and his partners—and the antagonism between Ciello and the federal agents who work for the Chase Commission (and, especially, between Ciello and the prosecutors who consider him a corrupt rat but still hypocritically rely on his testimonies)—is powerfully established by a huge and mostly impressive ensemble cast. Countless crime dramas and police stories have been about the unbreakable bond between the partners who work together, but rarely has that bond been as believable as in <i>Prince of the City</i>. Even when Ciello is initially pressured to deliver information about fellow cops, he tells his partners (drunkenly, despondently), and they respond to him with understanding, sensitivity. (An abrupt cut to a low-angle close-up of Ciello on the brink of madness and self-disgust in this scene is devastating.) They still don't believe he could or would ever betray them. The fact that he inevitably does is an indictment not against Ciello but against the system: the faceless, interconnected network of corporate, government, judicial, and police institutions that conspire to exploit one man in order to obtain a conviction, to offer their functionaries promotions, or to protect or dismantle a lucrative criminal enterprise.<br />
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<i>Prince of the City</i> is the most thematically complex of Lumet's movies I've seen—there's actually much more to be said about the film's employment of characters emblematic of different social forces and how they respond to and coerce Ciello's behavior. (He's a man who mistakenly believes he's in control of his own fate, his own morality—the movie is tragic partially because he eventually realizes how untrue this is.) It's tempting to claim that a movie like this—so long, so complex, so dark in tone and subject matter, so attuned to character and to societal forces—could no longer be bankrolled by a major studio, but this isn't exactly true: recent epic crime dramas like <i>Zodiac</i> (2007) and <i>The Dark Knight</i> (2008—more allegorical but almost as insightful) remind us that signs of creativity, intelligence, and power can still be found in Hollywood action movies.<br />
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What may be peculiarly early-80s about <i>Prince of the City</i>, though (aside from its garish costuming—itself a time-capsule wonder to behold, or bemoan), is its stylistic simplicity, its un-flashiness. Again, this may be largely the result of Lumet's origins in television, which serve the atmosphere and elaborate themes of <i>Prince of the City</i> extremely well. It seems like most crime dramas made today would be distinguished by a certain aesthetic panache: to return to the two examples above, <i>Zodiac</i> abounds in David Fincher's elaborate, sleek, razor-sharp form (though at least there it serves a purpose), and <i>The Dark Knight</i> delivers its themes through operatic superhero machinations. Or we may think of Michael Mann's so-beautiful-they're-hollow digital compositions (in his movies, the overabundance of style is itself a form of substance), or the self-conscious grittiness of movies like <i>Narc</i> (2002) or <i>We Own the Night </i>(2007), with their grainy handheld cinematography.<br />
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While Lumet does include a few stylistic flourishes—like cuts to the identification cards of policemen or federal agents accompanied by throbbing electronic music, or quotes from Robert Leuci, the narcotics officer who was the real-life inspiration for Ciello, splayed at the bottom of the screen in bold newspaper-esque lettering—for the most part his aesthetic choices are subtle, careful, well-thought-out. He gives the impression of a documentary-like remove from the material, but his cutting between expanded extreme long shots in wide angle (which make the characters near-microscopic), solid, static medium shots that simply observe groups in conversation, and emphatic close-ups of characters at the height of self-loathing or desperation reveal a sensitive knowledge of the material's emotional and psychological undercurrents. It doesn't seem overblown to claim that Lumet's style here is reminiscent of the precise yet "invisible" style practiced by classical Hollywood masters like William Wyler or Anthony Mann, though the subject matter is considerably (and justifiably) darkened and deepened for its early-1980s setting.<br />
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The weakest aspect of the movie, as I see it, is Treat Williams's performance in the lead, though this is something I'm still debating: his performance is either completely original or drastically off-base in its interpretation of Ciello's early moral crisis. There's a manic energy to it that seems miscalculated early on, though this desperation makes more sense as the movie progresses and Ciello becomes increasingly distraught by guilt, moral confusion, and self-disgust. An early scene has Williams shouting to the proverbial rafters, rabidly defending his impending actions to two federal agents, in a long and frankly irritating scene; the point, it seems, is to recognize Ciello's fraught attempts to rationalize his inner conflicts, his bipolar attitude towards the ethical leap and calamitous risk he's about to take, but this could be conveyed in a manner more subtle, more believable, and more in tune with how the character behaves at this early point in the film. I wonder if this style of overacting, of absolute self-abandonment and immersion, is something more common in movies of the late 1970s and 80s—a time, perhaps, when previous theories of Method acting coalesced with the expressive aesthetic techniques of American New Wave directors like Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola. After all, this bombastic acting style also irrevocably harmed Lumet's <i>Serpico</i>—a film that features such an overblown Pacino performance it's impossible to believe in the main character as a real human being (obviously, a quality that does not work well in a character study). In any case, my ambivalence towards Williams's performance corresponds strangely well to the movie's own ambivalence towards the character of Ciello—to the film's credit, it never decides absolutely whether its protagonist is a selfless moral crusader or a self-righteous hypocrite, a moral complexity that is unforgettably envisioned by the final freeze frame.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-71761681641925438012011-08-27T16:32:00.011-05:002012-01-25T14:50:57.167-06:00Classics: 'La Ronde' (1950) and 'The Earrings of Madame de...' (1953)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvps6JmLFt73rCgQg6CX_xh1ZBKqr9GqdgTRjC1zkeVXSvtIVFfZgZOQXd1djfDGWn3fTDcKwPAGUFltM_I54-NX7kZIuo52YdDBI7aIs6Pe6cFsxufn6nokZl-pIEAlz_LFngSP0k2Vc/s1600/9c-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvps6JmLFt73rCgQg6CX_xh1ZBKqr9GqdgTRjC1zkeVXSvtIVFfZgZOQXd1djfDGWn3fTDcKwPAGUFltM_I54-NX7kZIuo52YdDBI7aIs6Pe6cFsxufn6nokZl-pIEAlz_LFngSP0k2Vc/s1600/9c-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Max <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Ophuls</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>After watching both <i>La Ronde</i> and <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i> over the last week, it seems safe to say that Max Ophüls is one of the greatest stylists that cinema has ever known. Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Robert Altman have claimed him as a major influence, among many others. It does not seem too hyperbolic to claim that every graceful, extended camera movement employing a dolly or crane—especially the kind that floats leisurely through or over an interior space, following an actor's movements—are at least slightly indebted to Ophüls.<br />
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The pertinent question, maybe, is whether or not Ophüls' characters, ideas, and emotions are as beautiful as his camera movements—or, really, whether they're <i>more</i> than just beautiful, whether there's some tumult, some crisis, that affects us as powerfully as the aesthetic does. After all, Ophüls' films typically concern absurdly elegant aristocrats existing in a historical period (in <i>La Ronde</i> and <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i>, late-19th and early-20th century Europe), struggling to cope with calamitous affairs of the heart, suffering from love and lust and heartache but ever maintaining a veneer of beauty and untouchability in the process. For Ophüls' detractors, these movies are about dilettantes who modern (especially middle- or lower-class) audiences couldn't care less about—characters defined more by their prettiness than by their emotions. For his legion of avid admirers, though—which included, famously, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris (this may have been the one subject both of them agreed upon)—Ophüls broke through the brittle shell of aristocratic respectability to show the pain and maddening desire that lingered underneath. His always-roaming camera, they argued, patiently observed the possessions and elegant environs of wealthy characters to emphasize the significance of small tokens, tangible things, as they fit into turbulent lives. They were accoutrements for people, but also embellishments for a sort of cosmic cycle of desire, love, and loss—props in a vast and tragic comedy seemingly staged for God's own amusement. The predominance of things and decorations in Ophüls' films also act as juxtapositional foreshadowing: their houses and their belongings may be in order, but everything else (everything inside) is in disarray.<br />
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It seems fans of Ophüls are rarely timid in their enthusiasm: many celebrations of the director proclaim him the most beautiful, the most humane, the most sensitive and underappreciated visionary in the history of movies. (Molly Haskell, in <a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/547-the-earrings-of-madame-de-the-cost-of-living">this excellent essay</a>, lauds Ophüls as a defender of unassuming heroes and heroines, Stendhalian characters whose freedom and wealth are tenuous and unstable—values that could be forsaken in an instant for love and passion.) I may not go quite so far in my praise for the director, but I am (after seeing these two films, and with fond memories of his 1948 American movie <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmmuSIFcNw4&feature=related"><i>Letter from an Unknown Woman</i></a> still popping up constantly) unequivocally a fan. His camera movements and his characters may be pretty, but both the style and the characters are hiding something considerably painful underneath. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8koRA7qoYy2uVNK7rDcZamYboTXP_DpTCHZzIgvJzsi0DEnrU_HxBzvwAKZ6FaxyCbG6Gn078-s73p1yR3Oxl5ne0V6D7-nkZuwYpbnp6wDKYmyuWoSyp2ihzk5_o4nWHkJQcSs3GprA/s1600/9c-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>La Ronde</i></td></tr>
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Admittedly, this may be harder to detect in <i>La Ronde</i> than in either <i>Letter from an Unknown Woman</i> or <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i>. Ophüls' 1950 film was the first he made back in France after his brief tenure in Hollywood (which wielded a small number of too-little-known gems), and, as <a href="http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/549-la-ronde-vicious-circle">Terrence Raferty points out</a>, <i>La Ronde</i> exhibits Ophüls in a playful, unabashedly wry manner that epitomizes his “European” sensibilities. (Usually, that descriptor means nothing and reeks of ethnocentrism, but with Ophüls it actually makes sense: a born German who worked in his home country, France, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands as well as the U.S., he shared a cosmopolitan world-weariness, the bittersweet displacement of a refugee from his own land, and a sympathetic romantic fatalism with his European countrymen—although the winking self-consciousness displayed in <i>La Ronde</i> is a little closer to American comedies of the time.)<br />
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<i>La Ronde</i> is adapted from a notorious Arthur Schnitzler play that was written in 1897, finally performed in Budapest in 1912, and eventually staged in Schnitzler's hometown of Vienna in 1921. The play concerns a sexual merry-go-round, traversed over ten scenes, ingeniously plotted: in the first, a prostitute makes love to a soldier; in the next, the soldier seduces a seemingly naïve young chambermaid (who reveals herself to be more headstrong than we may have assumed); in the next, the chambermaid is taken by her fumbling employer; and so on, until the licentious cycle (“the ring” of the title) completes itself.<br />
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Ophüls' film adaptation introduces a new character: an elegantly bemused, disarmingly meta narrator who operates a literal merry-go-round as the sexual cycle rages on around him. In <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj3dnhLRkpE">the first scene</a>, this narrator takes us behind the camera, noting the artificiality of the studio set, even pointing out the lighting setups and cameras before the film itself gets underway. Later, Ophüls will cut to this narrator at the exact moment that a young male character (who fancies himself a virile stallion) is unable to perform in bed; after tinkering with the mechanics of the carousel for a minute, however, the narrator is able to kickstart the young man's libido and thrust the carousel back into motion. There's even <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaKNIRFeeG4&feature=related">another scene</a> in which the narrator can be seen cutting an explicit sequence from a strip of celluloid with a pair of scissors—Ophüls finds numerous ways to dance around onscreen sex in this film, with characteristic flair and cleverness.<br />
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Although there are melancholy sequences (the best scene in the film is an uneasy dialogue between an aged, wealthy aristocrat and his young, beautiful wife, who realize, through evasive and somewhat defensive testimonies, that they still care for each other after years of sexless marriage), the overall tone of <i>La Ronde</i> is spry and relatively carefree. The film is, of course, about rampant infidelity and unimpeded lust, but the audience never sees any tearful fallouts between lovers because of this disloyalty. We witness instead, as the narrator points out, the familiar machinations of the game of sex: amorous men and women playing off of each other, embodying all manner of lust and flirtation and desire. The central metaphor is, of course, that carousel, but we may also think of a chessboard: one of the movie's prime delights is that we can chart the characters' strategic come-ons and invitations, reveling in the excitement of sex as a game to be played.<br />
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This may all sound very icy and hollowly clever, but for all of its lasciviousness, <i>La Ronde</i> is surprisingly sweet. The most charming sequence in the film may also be the most aesthetically impressive: a prolonged flirtation between an awkward young man-of-the-house and his beautiful chambermaid, who bat double entendres back and forth as they circle around each other in a vast drawing room. When their mutual attraction makes itself clear, the camera dazzlingly follows the young man as he half-runs to all of the windows in the room, drawing the shutters closed. (This scene is also incredibly sexy, thanks mostly to Simone Simon as the chambermaid, Marie.) There may not be much to <i>La Ronde</i> besides its effortlessly elegant sense of humor, its dazzling camerawork, and engaging performances by a huge international cast. In other words, it's light as air, but that happens to be enough: Ophüls' enthusiasm for the art of moviemaking as well as for the romantic games people play becomes contagious almost immediately.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i></td></tr>
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If <i>La Ronde</i> is a somewhat lightweight offering from an undeniable master craftsman, then <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i>, made three years later, is a tremendously powerful film that expands and deepens its creator's sensibility. I may still prefer <i>Letter from an Unknown Woman</i>, which burns with unattainable desire and the passion of mad love, but I have to admit that <i>Madame de...</i> may be the more sensitive film: all three of its main characters are the Stendhalian protagonists that Haskell cited—unheroic people who think they are free and happy, only to realize how trapped and unfulfilled they really are, forsaking everything for <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwoqaNDlxJs">a taste of true love and passion</a>.<br />
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“There is no happiness in joy,” says a character in another Ophüls film, <i>Le Plaisir</i>—a sentiment that helps to explain the melancholy power of <i>Madame de...</i>. The titular Countess (who remains unnamed throughout the movie—her plight is universal, not confined to the wealthy) sells the earrings that were given to her by her husband on their wedding night. At the beginning of the film, they obviously mean little to her; yet, as the film progresses, they take on greater emotional significance (both for her and for the audience), especially when they are re-gifted to her, through a taunting twist of fate, by a dashing Italian Baron with whom she is helplessly in love. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45U1wbynt10&feature=related">The sequence in which the Countess and the Baron Fabrizio Donati waltz</a>, night after night, falling deeper into the throes of love and passion, is rightfully celebrated as one of the most sublime in the history of movies: a series of dissolves orchestrates the temporal movement of the editing with the spatial movement of the gracefully-waltzing camera, as weeks are compressed into minutes and helpless passion is somehow, miraculously, visualized. The sequence seems effortless, light as air, but was clearly very meticulously planned out. Like the dance numbers in <i>Swing Time</i> or <i>Top Hat</i>—which seem similarly effortless but took months of preparation for Astaire and Rogers to perfect—the ballroom scene in <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i> makes us believe that it's possible to convey the deepest love onscreen. (Maybe the most gifted composer can suggest passion sonically, and maybe the most brilliant writer can suggest its unequaled beauty, but don't movies seem especially suited to conveying such an inexpressible emotion?)<br />
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Lest we assume <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i> is just a beautiful movie about beautiful people falling in love, it's actually <i>about</i> how impenetrable these characters assume themselves to be, and how perfect they consider their lives to be. At first, admittedly, we may be put off by these characters. The Countess is selfish and manipulative; she knows how to play off of the men around her (including, and especially, her husband), staging fainting fits and flirting publicly with aristocrats, confidently aware of her standing in the Parisian upper class. She's not really vilified—she's simply abiding by the expectations and opportunities afforded to her in 1900 Paris. We sympathize with her inflexible social position and the behavior expected of her, but we also are dismayed by the value she places in material objects (and, maybe, the extent to which she sees other people as material objects). Her husband, an esteemed General, is hardly more likeable: a tyrant who is aware that his wife no longer loves him, the General simply accepts this as a consequence of aristocratic marriage in his society, finding social standing more valuable than intimacy between a husband and wife. All of this changes when the Baron enters the scene, however. Lives of shallow materialism and invincible pride are suddenly revealed to be empty; people and possessions are discovered to have real value. Those telling earrings reveal to the Countess how shallow her life had been; they reveal to the General how powerless he was over his wife, precisely because there was no love between them; and they reveal to the Baron how willing he is to sacrifice everything for a love he knows can never be recognized by society. If Ophüls' films can be accused of a sort of aristocratic aestheticism, <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i> would seem to absolutely deflate that criticism: all of the beauty and wealth of their lives revealed to be totally meaningless.<br />
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Here, the agile camera movements are in the service of the actors, the characters: no stylistic flourish exists for its own sake. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U_julmmUsE">The glacially-paced tracking shot that opens the movie</a>, which scans the Countess's jewelry and clothes like an auctioneer appraising goods, reveals how little these possessions mean to her; a remarkably swift camera during the scene in which the Countess and the Baron first meet (at a Parisian customs office) conveys the excitement, the giddiness, that the Baron feels upon first seeing her. <br />
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As sensitive as Ophüls is—and as finely tuned as Christian Macras's cinematography is to the movements and sentiments of the characters—the film may ultimately excel because of its cast. Is Danielle Darrieux's Madame de... one of the most romantic, tragic, unexpectedly powerful characters in the history of movies? The smoothness of her features, the deepness of her eyes, define elegance, yet she flawlessly allows traces of her sadness, her despair, her restrained passion, to suggest themselves. I was unsure of how much the movie would affect me emotionally until relatively late in the film, when, at a ball, the Countess is simultaneously spurned by the Baron (who finally discovers the real origins of the earrings he gave her as a gift) and forbidden to wear those earrings by her jilted husband. Darrieux's absolutely deflated performance in this scene is heartbreaking, especially because she so desperately struggles to maintain a semblance of elegance and cool resolve. Charles Boyer, meanwhile, as her husband—the cold, confident, yet not unfeeling General—uses his untroubled demeanor to present a man totally unwilling to believe there are cracks in his hypothetically perfect life. Boyer is no less excellent at allowing fractions of pain and jealousy to sneak into his cool stoicism. (Boyer and Darrieux had played lovers in the 1936 film <i>Mayerling</i>, by Anatole Litvak. It was a huge success, and almost twenty years later, the memory of their onscreen chemistry must surely have affected audiences seeing <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i>—as though the couple who fell in love in <i>Mayerling</i> would eventually become the distant husband and wife seen in Ophüls' film.) And finally, the great director Vittorio De Sica, incomparably dashing and hopelessly romantic as the Baron, epitomizes one of those aforementioned “small heroes”—a man who has the bravery to simply obey passion, give in to love, though he knows without a doubt that it will destroy him.<br />
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The immediate pleasures of Ophüls's filmmaking—the silky, acrobatic black-and-white cinematography, the lush costumes, beautiful actors, opulent set design, meticulous plotting—may bring some viewers to the assumption that its style is more than its substance, that the director's humanity, his characterizations, couldn't possibly compare to his virtuoso aesthetic. Maybe not—but in <i>Letter from an Unknown Woman</i> and <i>The Earrings of Madame de...</i>, they come close. There is no joy in happiness; beauty has never been so sad.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-4712966369302737552011-08-16T19:34:00.012-05:002012-01-25T16:31:59.337-06:00New Releases: 'Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyGe-Fw7C-xrN1DasOUfiMfEuEjTwHkUdeZf3xe8lHQBpJddMyJ94kJAcwRSdWXieDiC4ckl1Ui_zOpBQROEDAG3ZgSrtxzAt9lfTh39pjGVqz8HV0QeiaU6f-6-8b7v-4L_1oCFWNQ_Y/s1600/BEATS-RHYMES-AND-LIFE-TITLE-620x250.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyGe-Fw7C-xrN1DasOUfiMfEuEjTwHkUdeZf3xe8lHQBpJddMyJ94kJAcwRSdWXieDiC4ckl1Ui_zOpBQROEDAG3ZgSrtxzAt9lfTh39pjGVqz8HV0QeiaU6f-6-8b7v-4L_1oCFWNQ_Y/s400/BEATS-RHYMES-AND-LIFE-TITLE-620x250.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The most shocking moment of <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i>, Michael Rapaport's look at the rise and fall of one of hip-hop's most influential and eclectic groups, occurs late in the movie. Maseo, a member of De La Soul, performing with A Tribe Called Quest at 2008's Rock the Bells tour (where estranged members Q-Tip and Phife Dawg reunited for what were allegedly their last live performances), is asked if he thinks Tribe will ever play in front of an audience again. “I hope not,” is his immediate, unexpected answer—and this coming from one of the group's most devout, respectful admirers. <br />
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By this point, antagonism between Q-Tip—acting as unofficial frontman, confident, charismatic, perfectionist—and Phife Dawg—ingratiating and often quiet, suffering from diabetes but addicted to sugar—had festered to its breaking point. Surprisingly candid behind-the-scenes footage at the 2008 Rock the Bells tour shows the duo (the two MCs behind some of the most memorable rap songs of all time) physically confront each other immediately before they're supposed to perform. In this light, Maseo's confession that he'd rather not see the two perform together again makes disheartening sense: their rivalry can only cast a suffocating shadow over what had been, years earlier, one of the most fertile partnerships in hip-hop.<br />
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How had things gotten to this point? Eighteen years earlier, A Tribe Called Quest released their first full-length album, <i>People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm</i>, and almost instantaneously changed what rap could sound like. The album provided two singles that would become unforgettable landmarks in the history of rap—<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-L7YXpFPk4&feature=fvst">“Bonita Applebum”</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WILyWmT2A-Q&ob=av2e">“I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”</a> (the title of which, Q-Tip confesses, came from a recurring joke on the show <i>Sanford & Son</i>)—but the songs <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCvr8sevyLk">“Luck of Lucien”</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBIajxETI5w">“Can I Kick It?”</a> arguably provide the album's highlights. (“Can I Kick It?” in particular provides a seemingly incontrovertible case for the art of sampling: the Lou Reed snippet that provides the song's hook is completely transformed by Tribe's lush production.) The ensuing years would see the release of two subsequent masterpieces, 1991's <i>The Low End Theory</i> and 1993's <i>Midnight Marauders</i>, which would cement Tribe's place in the annals of rap history. The beats on all three of these albums were jazzy, obscure, complex, and perfectly complementary to the group's smooth style; as one interviewee notes, their productions heavily sampled the unheard-of jazz LPs hidden away in their parents' record collections, which few other producers had sought out before. (This eclectic sound is one way, among many, that Tribe's influence may be detected in the later productions of Kanye West, Madlib, DJ Premier and Pete Rock, among many others.) The rhymes, meanwhile, were equally obscure, bizarre abstractions and non-sequiturs, smoothly delivered, without pretense, seemingly transplanted from some parallel alternate dimension. While many other groups were leaning towards violent manifestations of a life of crime or impassioned commentaries about the life of black people in the United States (Public Enemy, Gang Starr, NWA, or even Wu-Tang Clan, whose debut <i>Enter the 36 Chambers</i> was released the same day as <i>Midnight Marauders</i>), A Tribe Called Quest remained tantalizingly playful, even otherworldly. <br />
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Their music is so good one almost wishes <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> would concentrate on it more. While the process of making these three landmark albums is briefly outlined (including an excellent scene in which Q-Tip explains how he retrieved the drumline for “Can I Kick It?” from an old Lonnie Smith record), and a lineup of modern-day rap figures respectfully details the group's lasting influence, these formative early years are skimmed over in order to get to the bitter dramatic conflicts that defined the group's later years. But this is a gripe coming from a hardcore fan of the group who, confessedly, heard a few strains of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4poAOhrsvWE">“Excursions”</a> in the documentary and mostly just wanted to listen to <i>The Low End Theory</i> from beginning to end. There's a lot packed into this 97-minute film; in fact, Rapaport finds an excellent balance between adulation and brutal honesty for both neophytes and faithful Tribe fans. (It helps that Rapaport is obviously an enthusiastic fan himself, especially judging from the attention he gives to Phife Dawg's outstanding verse on <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhgEpT4f7p8">“Buggin' Out.”</a>)<br />
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Tempers rose following the release of <i>Midnight Marauders</i>. Phife Dawg moved to Atlanta (partially due to his ailing health, as he struggled to overcome his addiction to sugar) while Q-Tip and beatmaker/DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad remained behind in their native Queens. (Jarobi, who is sometimes considered an unofficial member of the group, had already bowed out beforehand.) It's difficult to describe exactly what led to the falling-out between Q-Tip and Phife; even the two musicians seem to have trouble doing so throughout <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i>. But the answer may be found in their respective personalities: throughout the documentary, Q-Tip is emphatic, charismatic, controlling, boastful, while Phife Dawg is quiet, modest, sensitive, and ailing. Increasingly resentful of Q-Tip's self-appointed rise to leader of the group, Phife nonetheless contributed verses to their ensuing albums and performed live with Q-Tip and Muhammad, but became angry with Q-Tip's rigorous perfectionism. Accusations were flung in the press, particularly by Q-Tip, though he continues to insist that his words were taken out of context. It all culminated in 2008's Rock the Bells tour, during which Q-Tip seems to call out a sickly Phife Dawg's lackluster performance onstage, leading to a near-physical altercation backstage.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZP7OY9vCzTg_u72XjegSUCGFMETUnJkgtqMEeyBNN-evETkddLpmeeaF_Pw4L-ACaEMEsiuwE8ZLQJfTdLsIODmCuvt0IS1zU9_MopeccdavQXDEO-shrFNDReFFfvrPG8ZBzlKmIpAw/s1600/Tribe-Called-Quest.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZP7OY9vCzTg_u72XjegSUCGFMETUnJkgtqMEeyBNN-evETkddLpmeeaF_Pw4L-ACaEMEsiuwE8ZLQJfTdLsIODmCuvt0IS1zU9_MopeccdavQXDEO-shrFNDReFFfvrPG8ZBzlKmIpAw/s1600/Tribe-Called-Quest.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
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Like 2004's <i>Metallica: Some Kind of Monster</i>, <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> vividly portrays the inflated egos and impassioned altercations that rage in the background of the creative process. To my admitted surprise, I liked the Metallica documentary—I've never considered myself even remotely enthusiastic about their music. I've been a fan of A Tribe Called Quest, on the other hand, basically since I started listening to hip-hop in high school, and <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> functions reasonably well as a commemoration of the group, and extraordinarily well as an exposé of their unfortunate fallout. The personalities of all four members of the group come across vividly, giving further vibrancy to the music they created (which in any case remains among the most creative and exciting ever made in the rap world). <br />
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The documentary form should conceivably excel at characterization, offering real-life figures the chance to shape their own narratives onscreen; more realistically, though, documentary filmmakers shape these narratives form them, and sometimes end up neglecting the personalities of their subjects with a dreary obedience to traditional narrative form and an overly literal pursuit of objectivity (provided, mundanely, by an assortment of talking heads or an over-reliance on archival footage). <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> avoids the pitfall that many documentaries succumb to, especially music documentaries—it does not always strive for an objective portrayal of the facts, instead relying upon its own electrifying cast of characters for a certain account of the facts. It's a human drama, and it never tries to pretend otherwise. <br />
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This becomes especially clear in the case of Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the group's DJ, who remains a cypher throughout the film. This could have been a drawback if it had been a deliberate attempt on Rapaport's part to foreground the two larger-than-life MCs. But Muhammad is given numerous chances to speak for himself and, instead of giving in to the vicious rivalry erupting between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, remains neutral, peaceful, respectful and admiring of them both. He is, as Phife's wife notes at one point, a friend unfortunately caught in the middle; when Mary J. Blige showers praise upon Muhammad and A Tribe Called Quest at one point (he's helping to produce one of her albums), he simply smiles, somewhat sadly, aware that they've made incredible music and have degenerated into a squabbling family. The most powerful moment in the movie may be a candid shouting match between De La Soul's Posdnuos and Q-Tip in a backstage room at the Rock the Bells tour; while the two musicians lament what A Tribe Called Quest has come to, the camera happens to pan across Muhammad's face—then stays there. The two outspoken men remain off-camera as Muhammad stares at the ceiling, obviously frustrated but saying nothing. He appears oblivious to the fact that the camera is recording him, which, maybe, is why he offers such a humane and subtle expression of annoyance and sadness. Like Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, Muhammad exhibits a lived-in, vivid personality that remains unknowable, and it's a testament to the movie that it respects his privacy, never trying to pry from him a testimony he wouldn't otherwise give. <br />
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After all of this candor, this unflinching study of a group in dissolution (and from a diehard fan, no less), the ending of <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> seems to stumble a bit. The movie does not conclude with the disheartening Rock the Bells tour in 2008—an epilogue actually picks back up in 2010, when a seriously ailing Phife discovers that his wife happens to be a perfect match for the kidney transplant he needs to survive. An excellent (and surprisingly powerful) scene in the hospital shortly before Phife's operation reveals to us that Q-Tip sent a brief text message to Phife (which remains unseen to us)—nothing elaborate, just an amicable reaching-out, wishing him luck with the transplant. I wish the movie had ended here: on a note of optimism, with Phife realizing how blessed he is with a loving family and recovering health (and hinting towards the reconciliation that Phife and Q-Tip may still work at).<br />
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Instead, the documentary follows A Tribe Called Quest as they reconvene for one last tour (this time in Japan). As the group plays to sold-out stadiums and (somewhat absurdly) practices their choreography at rehearsals, Rapaport seems to suggest that the magic has been recaptured, that A Tribe Called Quest may be in the middle of their comeback. (An onscreen title even informs us hopefully that Tribe still has one record remaining on their original contract with Jive Records.) I understand (and sympathize with) Rapaport's desire to celebrate the group's reunion, but a lot of onscreen evidence in this last sequence simply doesn't support it. When Phife and Q-Tip initially meet again, for example, they nod tersely and embrace briefly; then Tip simply walks away to shake hands with Muhammad. Some canny editing tries to convince us that the group's Japanese tour is as electrifying as their original shows in the early 90s, but we're not fooled: the group obviously (and inevitably) just doesn't have the spark they once did.<br />
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But even if the end of the movie's rose-colored optimism is unconvincing (and too self-conscious), we are still reminded of the heights that hip-hop can rise to at its best, and we (arguably) also realize that no rap group since Tribe has come close to matching their playfulness, their eccentricity. Indeed, by trying to make <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> appeal to everyone imaginable, Rapaport may have made a documentary that's almost <i>too</i> streamlined for this one-of-a-kind group. (Imagine, for example, a film that would have played on the level of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRrM6tfOHds">“Check the Rhime”</a> for 100 minutes.) But, as mentioned before, <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> is trying to tell a larger-than-life human drama, not blow your mind with some Sun Ra-ish fantasia, so I suppose it doesn't make sense to criticize it for being overly conventional. Earlier masterpieces like <i>Scratch</i> and <i>Style Wars</i>—the two best movies about hip-hop ever made—strike an extraordinary balance between mass appeal and one-of-a-kind, mind-bending styles; <i>Beats Rhymes & Life</i> manages a feat that's nearly as impressive—fleshing out the human drama behind one of the most legendary groups in the history of rap.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-87656310110190532562011-08-13T22:31:00.001-05:002012-01-25T16:35:03.760-06:00New Releases: 'The Future'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb4Uqaz1cHCtSFhpCTyK94ZEqg-j6vE8PmYP8hRKMPw1hPd4H9q0f63PIxFcpiz5iuTUO_fpmYydyvsOS-ef5L3JlEG93uRYbH97nF3Khmtsw8yA4HvRDobCs-HCk3bfZaCcOHarTWlV4/s1600/tumblr_lp3tjyEzSp1qbhnrvo1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhb4Uqaz1cHCtSFhpCTyK94ZEqg-j6vE8PmYP8hRKMPw1hPd4H9q0f63PIxFcpiz5iuTUO_fpmYydyvsOS-ef5L3JlEG93uRYbH97nF3Khmtsw8yA4HvRDobCs-HCk3bfZaCcOHarTWlV4/s400/tumblr_lp3tjyEzSp1qbhnrvo1_500.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
The release of Miranda July's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span> (her second feature film after 2005's <span style="font-style: italic;">Me and You and Everyone We Know</span>) has re-instigated the common critique that the writer-director is too “twee,” too “precocious,” or too “quirky,” especially for the emotional sweep and the thematic heft that she's attempting. As in 2005, July's haters have come out of the woodwork, and there's a trace of sexism in many of the criticisms heaved her way. (David Edelstein's review in <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Magazine</span> claims that July has a gift for going back in time and evoking the “helpless little girl she once was,” for example.) After all, July's style doesn't really seem much more precocious than Wes Anderson's, although the two directors get varying degrees of mileage out of their hermetic worldviews.<br />
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The quirkiness of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span> (like that in <span style="font-style: italic;">Me and You and Everyone We Know</span>) is a double-edged sword: at times it comes off as too self-conscious, as its own form of empty showboating, but without this brand of daffy eccentricity neither movie would be as singularly effective. I still detest the scene in <span style="font-style: italic;">Me and You</span> in which the adorable little boy and the frigid art curator meet on a park bench as the music swells, realizing that they've been exchanging bizarre scatological come-ons with each other in an online chat room. But this same little-boy character and his frizzy-haired precociousness also make for the movie's overwhelming final scene, which stems from a concept that could be deemed “cute” but which strikes us with its wide-eyed curiosity with the world and its subtle interconnectedness with what has come before it.<br />
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Similarly, much of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span> threatens to be unbearably quirky. Its two main characters are melancholy, awkward wannabe-artists (July's Sophie and Hamish Linklater's Jason) who speak in deadpan non-sequiturs. They are mortified by the prospect of adopting an aged cat with renal failure, though they've committed to adopting it and have about a month to fret about their mortality and impending responsibility before they can take the cat home with them. Said cat, named Paw Paw, sporadically narrates the film's proceedings in warbly monologues (delivered by July herself), accompanied by adorably DIY shots of enormous cat paws nudging their way across crumpled newspaper. This isn't even to mention the liberal sprinkling of melancholy surrealism spread throughout the film, such as a talking moon with the voice of a gentle old man offering sage life lessons, a cherished T-shirt crawling its way across Los Angeles to be with its former owner, or a little girl who buries herself up to her neck in her backyard simply, it seems, to dabble in some attention-craving performance art.<br />
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This last scene is probably the weakest in the movie: the little girl is so nonexistent as a character in the film that her stunt has no discernible emotional or thematic value. True, this little girl is the daughter of a middle-aged man with whom Sophie initiates a desperate affair, so the stunt can be rationalized: just as Sophie callously throws herself at a stranger in an attempt to escape her mundane life, so does the little girl submerge herself as a way to express her vague dissatisfaction with her home life. I guess. Thing is, we have no way of reading the daughter character, so this sequence comes off as nothing more than yet another off-kilter gimmick on July's part.<br />
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Most of the other set-pieces in the film are, thankfully, more effective. In particular, Jason's inexplicable ability to stop time—especially after he discovers Sophie's infidelity (in a way)—is a powerful illustration of his fear of aging and his debilitating emotional fragility (and makes for the most beautiful image in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span>, as Jason eventually must push and pull the ocean's tides back into motion in order to kickstart time). And the aforementioned crawling T-shirt, once it finally finds its way back to Sophie, emboldens her to finish the dance she's been trying to perform throughout the entire film—an idea which probably sounds insanely corny but which is actually hauntingly beautiful, as July gyrates and contorts herself painfully from inside the folds of the fleshy yellow shirt. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span> has its weak moments, to be sure, but it has many more strong points—strong because the absurdity is so attuned to the fears and delusions undergone by the two leads.<br />
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In many ways, Sophie and Jason are unlikeable, self-obsessed, immature idealists. They simply expect life to lead them in the right direction, and are so naively convinced of the beauty and creativity that they have to offer other people that they are baffled when they are unable to spontaneously create it. That sounds like the kind of creative block that artists in particular suffer from, but July suggests that it's really a problem shared by her (and my) generation: late-twentysomethings to forty-year-olds, who may be so overwhelmed with what's expected of them (find a job, start a family, make money) that, at some point, they give up and simply allow time to run its course. This isn't to excuse them: it's an irrational form of irresponsibility, and if Sophie and Jason stayed this way throughout the whole film, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span> would be unbearable. In some ways, though, July's film actually seems like a condemnation of people who are perpetually precocious, desperately whimsical, obliviously flighty—the very traits for which July is typically criticized. But both Sophie and Jason do genuinely seem to go through transformations, and while genuine character arcs seem increasingly hard to come by in modern (American) movies, it's something almost effortlessly (and indelibly) achieved by July in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span>. Sophie, desperate to give her life a violent jolt, does so recklessly, maybe self-destructively—afraid of complacency, she embraces the first impulse that comes to mind. Jason, meanwhile, is initially horrified at encountering the truth, at making discoveries about himself or the world around him—until he ultimately relents, submits to it, and gives in to hopeless defeatism. When both characters' overwhelming flaws re-intersect with the life of Paw Paw, that talking cat finally turns into something meaningful, genuine, and surprisingly heartbreaking—in other words, cutesiness shattering apart into a harsh, unavoidable truth. Finally, the end of the movie finds both characters at a turning point: aware of their own weaknesses, trying to decide whether they should remain imprisoned in their own insular worlds or actually try to change them through their own actions. Assuming July actually is as precocious or twee as everyone accuses her, we might read <span style="font-style: italic;">The Future</span> as a self-reckoning (or, just as admirably, a direct and emphatic rebuttal to her critics): for those who think life is a wonderland full of affectation, time will prove you devastatingly wrong.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-38652538182136017062011-05-25T14:26:00.000-05:002011-05-29T20:58:54.813-05:00A Face in the Dark<span style="font-style:italic;">Below is the second chapter of a short story that I've been working on. The first chapter was published on this blog in early December.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Chapter two</span> 'a certain logical conclusion'<br /><br />His face was thin and sallow, with deep, cutting wrinkles on either side, running from underneath the eyes to just above the chin. His mouth was firmly set into a displeased, dour grimace, stretching pronouncedly downward at the corners, which seemed to elongate the skin that covered his face, pulling it tautly over the features of his skull. He was almost hairless, with only a shadow of gray hair running up to the edge of his bald scalp. Worst of all were his eyes. Eclipsed by the sharp features of his skull, they were buried deep within a pair of black-hole eye sockets. The glint of two beady pupils, barely visible within chasms of darkness. Because the overhead light was still on in Lena's office, it cast a sharp backlight upon the man; the oblong tip of his head gleamed brightly, but his facial features could only struggle through a murky fluorescent pall. Nevertheless, I saw him now with an almost supernatural vividness. He was four stories above me, his appearance partially obscured by the reflection of city lights on the glass in front of him, but he could have been two feet away. For those features that I could not quite make out in the darkness, my brain did the rest of the work, filling in the blanks in order to complete the hideous picture. I had never seen the man before, but I was certain that the vivid picture that now arose within my mind was absolutely correct. Not once did I doubt my fleeting apprehension of him standing there, across the street, in my dead wife's office. <br /><br />It was not only that I did not question the cosmic coincidence of it, it was not only that the moment's cruel illogic did not even occur to me. More than that, I immediately recognized that there was, without a doubt, a connection between this man and my wife's death. I became convinced almost instantaneously when the thought first occurred to me, with the kind of steely positivity that accompanies only those immense truths of which you become certain far before there is any tangible, concrete evidence to assure you of its validity. <br /><br />Vivified, shaken awake, I spun around violently and found the nearest stairway. No time for the machinery of the elevator. I bolted through the exit door, leaped down six stairs at a time, my hands clutching the rails on either side. I almost slipped, missing stairs completely, numerous times, but I was made agile by my sudden action, impelled into swiftness. I made it to the ground floor of the hospital and raced down two hallways, oblivious to the bewildered stares and disparaging glances cast in my direction. Made it to the automatic front doors and was momentarily detained while I waited for the doors to open, impatiently. Took three bounding strides forward until I came to the curb. Glanced frenetically down the street towards oncoming traffic, then bolted into the street anyway, fairly certain that there was enough room between me and the rush of steel vehicles. Horns blared and tires screeched, but I ran madly, and made it to the curb without incident. As my right foot pounded heavily down upon the concrete of the sidewalk, it occurred to me, with a lightning bolt of rage and helplessness, that I had narrowly avoided the fate that had befallen my wife only hours earlier. Being reminded of this, my legs pumped away even more violently, and I hurtled myself forward without hesitation. I knew only that I must come face to face with the man who had materialized in Lena's office; had to become absolutely certain that he was no horrible trick conjured by my bedeviled mind. <br /><br />I flung open the heavy glass door at 92011 Lexington Avenue, abruptly disturbing the sleepy silence that filtered through the lobby. The security guard at the front desk raised his head with a jolt of alarm. I glanced at him, mostly in annoyance—I had not even considered the fact that there would be anyone to impede me—and, after realizing that I couldn't possibly explain myself in my current state, simply rushed past him with an awkward gait between a walk and a run. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him stand up in a panic, then half-jog toward the bank of elevators at the far side of the lobby to cut me off. I still avoided looking at him. He extended his right arm towards me—hoping, I suppose, that I would politely respond to his gesture and offer an explanation. He had been shouting at me ever since I entered, but I didn't have the time or inclination to respond. I glanced at his belt; he had a walkie-talkie and a nightstick that I did not want to provoke him to use. He looked middle-aged, I had surmised from the split-second in which I had looked at him, and a layer of doughy fat surrounded his midsection, but I still hoped to avoid any altercation. I kept on moving forward towards the elevators, picking up my pace; the guard was only a few feet away. For a brief moment, I wondered whether I should explain to him that I was a detective who had been called out for some semi-plausible reason, but I then remembered that, in the disorienting rush of events that had confronted me that night, I had never even thought to bring my badge with me. I concluded that this security guard would be hard-pressed to believe that this frenzied character running through the lobby was, in fact, an officer who inconveniently had forgotten to carry his identification. <br /><br />Finally, we met, he and I, less than ten feet from the row of elevators, and he placed his hand roughly on my right shoulder. I took half a step back and looked him in the eyes for the first time. First, I saw panic, then fear, then simple curiosity; he was ready to restrain me forcefully, if necessary, but at this point I did not yet pose a physical threat. Only an abrupt intrusion. I empathized with him, this man who had simply come to work and had expected yet another night of dull, uneventful surveillance; but I didn't forget the face of the man who had forced me to race here so single-mindedly, and I knew I needed to get to the eighth floor without delay.<br /><br />“What do you want?,” the security guard asked.<br /><br />I wondered whether I should try to explain what had actually happened as concisely and reasonably as I could, but immediately recognized that, even if he did happen to believe me, my hurried anecdote would cost me too much time. In any case, I severely doubted my ability at the time to speak cogently and sanely, and even questioned whether or not my mouth would be able to perform the physical actions required to voice the words conceived of by my brain. So after a moment of awkward and alarmed silence, a jumble of words, the first things that came to my mind, spilled out.<br /><br />“My wife...Lena Davenport, she works here.”<br /><br />I left it at that, and the guard continued to gape at me in bewilderment. Finally, he nodded slowly and exaggeratedly, as though he needed to slow down and emphasize everything he did in order for me to comprehend. Maybe he was right. <br /><br />“Okay...is she here now? Do you need to see her?”<br /><br />I didn't want to explain myself any further, so I jerked my head away from him and took one assertive step forward towards the elevators. He took two quick running steps after me and placed his hand on my shoulder again, tugging roughly, spinning me around towards him. <br /><br />Before I knew what I was saying—before I thought about how mad I would sound—nonsensical words that approximated my insanity began to ooze from the space between my lips. “There's a man in her office. I've seen him. Just now.” I turned around, walked again towards the elevators, was close enough to lean over and press the button. <br /><br />The man swore at me, his frustration growing by the second. “Listen, you're gonna have to explain.” He stepped after me; his black boots clicked loudly on the floor. The echoes reverberated. <br /><br />I didn't turn around to face him, and in mid-step I responded, “I don't have time to explain.” I leaned over and pushed the button placed halfway between the two elevators before me. The circle with an up arrow emblazoned on it suddenly illuminated itself. A digital readout above the elevator began counting down from the twenty-first floor. I felt a rough hand on my shoulder again, as I heard the guard behind me unclasp his walkie-talkie from his belt and a burst of static erupted from it. The man said, “John, I may need you in the lobby, I think I have a situation here,” and the series of words sounded entirely abstract and ludicrous to me. I was, it now seemed, a “situation”; the revelation amused and infuriated me at the same time.<br /><br />While I waited for the elevator to descend, I came to the conclusion that the man behind me did, in fact, deserve an explanation, or at least that a fumbling half-explanation of my frenzied state of mind would allow me to think through my discombobulation. So lethargically I planted my left foot and spun on my right heel, pivoting in the man's direction. I remember thinking, halfway through this movement, that I should have been tired, emotionally if not physically, and it's true that a dull throbbing ache was rapidly spreading throughout my legs and calves, but my mind was overworking itself into hyperactivity; it was as though I was coursing to the peak of a caffeine fix, my heart was racing and my arms and hands were twitching and moving of their own volition, and I felt idle and deadened if I didn't just force myself to <span style="font-style:italic;">do</span> something. <br /><br />I turned towards the guard and I'm sure he recognized my current state of anxiety. To my surprise—and, I can only assume, to his as well—we traded looks for a long, silent interval, as though we realized that verbal communication would accomplish nothing and tried to fathom each other through piercing observation. What would I have seen if I had been in his place? I'm unnerved by what that image may have been: desperate, pleading, beseeching him to trust the madman in front of him. He, meanwhile, remained at least as curious as he was alarmed, and although he still held the walkie talkie in his hand, ready for a response, and his other hand hovered over his nightstick, and his eyes flicked back and forth between mine kinetically, there seemed to be some compassion in his uncertainty. I may have been incomprehensible and frenetic, but he seemed to detect that that precarious state had been instigated by something tragic, awful, intense. Maybe the empathy that I saw in his eyes was only a product of my own imagination; maybe I convinced myself, within fleeting moments of meeting this stranger, of the sensitivity and rightness of his character, simply because I wanted to believe that this man would provide a humane counterbalance to the rest of the night.<br /><br />Before realizing how unstable I would sound, I tried to reassure the man before me. “I'm not crazy. Something happened to my wife tonight. And I've just seen a man in her office, a stranger, someone who shouldn't be there.” The word that had swung towards me on the doors to the room where my wife's body currently lay came back to me, all of a sudden. “This is an emergency. Really. I need your help.” <br /><br />Either through compassion or exasperation, the guard who stood before me seemed to accept my state of anxiety as a plea for help. His left hand, which had been hovering over the club hooked into his belt, slowly moved forward towards me, and the palm stretched itself out in a gesture of consolation. He half-opened his mouth, about to respond, when the walkie-talkie in his right hand erupted with a blip of static and a harsh alien voice. It must have been “John”—some agent of authority hovering above me somewhere in the building. In my irascibility, I assumed that John was only waiting for a transmission like this from my security guard, a transmission that would allow him to exert some unrestrained yet justified force. John said: “I read you, Henry. Some uniforms are on their way. I'll be right down, try to detain the situation. Over.” Despite my distress, I chuckled at his sign-off, at the pleasure I assumed he felt at uttering it so officiously. <br /><br />No response from my brother Henry was necessary; he hooked the walkie-talkie back onto his thick black belt. Now, I was sure, panic mode had given way to overwhelming curiosity. Meanwhile, the elevator was on its way; it had just passed the tenth floor. Two more floors and, maybe, the cypher I was hunting for would board the elevator. I wondered if the hideous sharp face would greet me when the doors opened. Would he take the stairs? Would he simply wait for me in my wife's office, smirking cruelly, waiting for me to confront him desperately? <br /><br />Henry spoke to me now sensitively, with a voice usually reserved for socially-challenged adolescents. “What happened to your wife? Is she okay?”<br /><br />After a moment:<br /><br />“No.” Shook my head.<br /><br />“And there's a man in her office. A stranger.”<br /><br />“Yes.”<br /><br />I wondered how he was going to detain the situation.<br /><br />He nodded, consolatory. <br /><br />“Alright. What floor?”<br /><br />“Eighth.” I thought that was unclear. “Eight.”<br /><br />I looked back up at the digital readout. It had just switched from seven to six. I didn't turn around, but I assumed that Henry had noticed the same thing. I wondered what I wanted, what I hoped to see when the doors opened. To see that horrible skeletal face again, in such close proximity—the thought made me shudder, the idea chilled me inside; but, at the same time, nothing was of more crucial importance, to question that man, to alleviate my distress, my uncertainty. I felt confident in the power of my loss: to meet the awful hellish emptiness of his eyes with the pain of my own, I felt certain that he, whoever he was, would be unable to resist my frenzied plea for answers.<br /><br />Henry and I remained locked in this curious dual pose: me, head arched upwards towards the digital readout, hands clasped within one another, skin rubbing against skin, restless; him, standing behind me, presumably in a similar pose, waiting in anticipation for the elevator to alight. The silence that drifted throughout the lobby was distinct and abrasive; hums of heaters and fluorescent lights commingled to create a devilish chord. Never before had a handful of brief moments seemed more like a taunting eternity.<br /><br />Before the uniforms had a chance to arrive, the elevator finally counted its way down to three, then two, then L. Only a few seconds elapsed until the foreboding metallic doors churned open, but in these few seconds a whirlwind of doubts and anxieties flickered through my tortured head. What would I ask the man before me, if indeed he was waiting within the elevator when it opened? What basis did I have to suspect him of my wife's death, besides the taunting coincidence of his appearance in her office so soon afterwards? In those few haunting seconds, two images flitted back and forth before me like the pages of a flipbook, skipping kinetically: one, a face of pure evil and cruelty, glaring at me, haloed by the sickening glow of fluorescent office lights; the other, Lena's face as she smiled at me in her happiest moments, beaming carelessly. It sickened me to see these two faces intercut with one another, dissolving into one and the same creature; good, evil; until my mind could no longer distinguish one from the other, and I suddenly, in disorientation, forgot which face I expected to greet me when the doors of the elevator opened.<br /><br />They opened, at last—more slowly than usual, I thought, as the metal doors lazily churned aside. Inside, the image that met me was deflating: nothing, a pocket of fluorescent light, no body, nothing. The spark of desperate outrage that had compelled me in the first place was now suddenly extinguished, crushed out by prolonged uncertainty, ignorance, helplessness. Anything—any altercation, inconceivable revelation—would have been better than this nothingness, any face better than the hollowness of that elevator. <br /><br />I was snapped out of my dejection by a slight cough behind me; Henry cleared his throat, almost politely, I thought. His forced noise was inquisitive: inside the noise was an unasked question—was I crazy? Did the man I was looking for exist?<br /><br />I placed my right hand against the elevator door to keep it from closing, and I pivoted back towards Henry, looking him in the eye. The skittish, desperate energy with which I had burst into the building was now gone; my exhaustion, and my encroaching doubt, had flattened it into meek and deluded hope. There was a shrug in my eyes as I turned to Henry, and he simply kept that pose of readiness, confusion, alarm, and sympathy. <br /><br />“I need to see her office,” I said. The life was gone from my eyes but there was still an aching urgency in my voice. Henry nodded and walked past me into the waiting elevator car. <br /><br />“Alright then,” he said. <br /><br />The enormous door began shoving restlessly against my arm as I held it open, and I stepped inside after him. The doors closed behind us. We traveled the eight floors in silence. There was syrupy and absolutely hellish jazz music oozing out of the speakers. The floor under us was a thin blue-and-gray carpet that seemed to soak up the nauseating light like a sick sponge.<br /><br />On the eighth floor, the doors spread open with a ding. Across the hallway was an elegant desk with a light-blue glass top, and behind it a series of cracked glass panels that obscured the dark offices within. On one of these panels was a board listing office numbers and employees' names, with the name and logo for Perpetua Financial Consulting etched across the top. I stepped wordlessly from the elevator and peered at this list of offices; Henry unhooked a flashlight from his belt and swept it down the hallways, illuminating only a dim and eerie intersection of drab office architecture. I squinted, and in the dim light that still filtered there, I could make out her name—Lena Davenport, #817D. It offered a small reassurance that I had remembered her office number correctly—at least this was a sign that I still had control of my mental faculties, I told myself. Then a cruel realization followed: if this was true, if I hadn't simply been the victim of illusion and warped hallucination, then that man had in fact been in my wife's office. May still be there now. I stepped off quickly to the right. Henry followed me. The floor was made of smooth white tile and the footsteps of our shoes clacked in echo of each other—loud high ominous reverberating <span style="font-style:italic;">clicks</span>. We worked our way down half of another hallway when we both realized that a sharp fluorescent light was slanting towards us from the intersection of another hallway. The light was on in one of the offices. We walked hurriedly down the hallway, took a sharp turn into another, dread and urgency commingling. The office light was emanating from behind a thick glass door at the center of this hallway. I took a step forward until I felt Henry's hand on my shoulder; he gently held me back and stepped in front of me, flashlight extended and what looked like a taser gripped firmly in his other hand. Apparently he didn't doubt my story any more, and although, in any other situation, I may have resented his overeager vigilance, here I welcomed it. We neared the door to a bank of offices, one of which, we could now see, was harshly lit by a single overhead light. Its door gaped open forebodingly—a warning. <br /><br />I glanced at the number stenciled next to the outer door as we approached it: 817. As Henry pushed against the door with his outstretched flashlight—unlocked, it swung easily open—I could squint into the yellow light and make out the smaller number next to the inner office. 817D. My wife's office. Her name was painted on the wall next to the open door. <br /><br />Henry stood there for a moment, holding the door open with his body, his gaze still firmly locked on the open office door and the light that cut through it. I could tell he was scared. So was I. I wished I had brought my gun. <br /><br />I slipped past the open door, past Henry, and took three long uncertain strides towards Lena's office. The sound of my footsteps disappeared into the thick carpet. Henry walked up beside me. I was close enough now to see inside the office, through the half-open door; but all I could make out was a thick old mahogany desk, the side of a bookcase, and diluted neon lights filtering in from the city outside. I reached my right hand out, pushed gently on the door, and opened it the rest of the way. I couldn't hear Henry breathe. <br /><br />The door made no noise as it swung open until it tapped lightly against the wall. Lena's chair, behind the desk, its back to the row of windows, was empty. There were two dark red padded chairs on the other side of the desk, facing the windows. There was a man in one of them. He was not moving. He was sitting and looking out the window. I could only see the back of his head. He was almost bald and the tip of his head came to a sharp and ugly point. Thin, short black-gray hair ran up to his scalp. He was an ugly silhouette. There was a file open on the desk—Lena's desk. <br /><br />Henry stepped up next to me. He saw what I saw. I heard him unable to suppress a gasp.<br /><br />I took one more decisive step forward and rapped loudly on the door as I passed, wanting to make our presence known—as though the man before us was somehow not aware of it. He still didn't move. My eyes darted to the reflection of his face in the window; it was smudged and distorted, but it seemed to be the same hideous face that had returned my stare minutes earlier. I kept taking half-steps forward in trepidation, but his absolute stillness was beginning to make me shudder. It could have been a skeleton sitting before me.<br /><br />“You,” I finally said, absurdly. Henry stood standing at the doorway. The figure didn't move. “Get up.”<br /><br />No one moved for a long moment. Slow deep breathing and melodic city sounds were all that could be heard. Then finally the man placed both hands on the armrests. He stiffened his arms and pushed himself up. He stood facing the windows. He was incredibly tall, and the ceiling light, mere feet away from his bald sloping head, struck him harshly, and a horrible jagged shadow was cast across the office floor. <br /><br />“Turn around,” I said. <br /><br />The man obeyed, pivoting towards me slowly. Though I tried to interpret some emotion from the features of his petrified face—I expected, I suppose, a look of gloating condescension or merciless self-satisfaction, something that would betray his guilt—the man's skeletal face told me nothing. He simply returned my inquisitive gaze, though his eyes were lifeless. His hands hung awkwardly at his sides as he stood there, absolutely rigid. The suit he wore was an elegant dark gray, well-tailored, but somehow it still seemed too small for him. <br /><br />I didn't know what to ask him, what to say—too much was on my mind. I began with the most obvious question I could think of.<br /><br />“Who are you?”<br /><br />The man stood there blankly for a moment—either unwilling to answer or unsure how. I could sense Henry standing next to me.<br /><br />Finally, the man responded. His voice was as guttural and monotone as I had presumed it would be.<br /><br />“My name is Mark Voland. Who are you?”<br /><br />Before I could answer, a harsh burst of static erupted from Henry's walkie-talkie, followed by the voice of the man that Henry had contacted earlier: “John,” the top-middle-level security officer who I had imagined cooling his heels in some dank room outfitted with a bank of television monitors. “Henry, I've got two officers in the lobby down here,” John said. “Where are you? Is the situation under control?”<br /><br />Without peeling my eyes away from the man before me, I heard Henry unclip the radio from his belt and take four long strides out of the office. Henry's response came from the outer office a few feet away, muffled: “Not exactly. Come up to room 817D now. There's someone here.”<br /><br />A moment later, John's response: “Copy. We'll be there as soon as we can.” Another blip of white noise and the radio became silent. I waited for Henry to return to the office until I addressed Mr. Voland. My confidence was slowly rejuvenating itself within me, and I could feel a hot white energy rising inside of me again—the same kind of wild anxiety that I had felt upon seeing that face less than twenty minutes beforehand. I wasn't crazy, I could now tell myself with certainty; the man before me was not a phantom. I took a step towards him. He did not react.<br /><br />“What are you doing in my wife's office?”<br /><br />I thought this question would affect him somehow; if he really didn't know who I was, and if he had had anything to do with Lena's death, surely he would not have been able to conceal some kind of surprise at discovering that I was her husband. But as I peered desperately at him, I realized with dismay that, again, I could not read any discernible reaction from his stone-set features. I had spent the last six years interrogating suspects, reading and interpreting their reactions and gesticulations, studying the physiological behavior of people who lie, and I believe I can claim, with no boastfulness, that I have become an expert on visible human behavior and the ways in which it reflects those psychological undercurrents we would rather keep concealed. I could read nothing on Mr. Voland's face, besides a haunting emptiness.<br /><br />“Lena Davenport is your wife?”<br /><br />I was going to say <span style="font-style:italic;">was</span>—not <span style="font-style:italic;">is</span>—but instead I just nodded. It was then that I believe I detected the first trace of an emotion on his face: a smile.<br /><br />“What are you doing in her office?,” I repeated. <br /><br />He sighed, then, as an answer, reached behind him and picked the manila file folder off of Lena's desk. It was an enormous file, overflowing with sheaths of paper and color-coded Post-It notes that were overloaded with my wife's frantic scribbling. I grabbed the file from him, with some reticence, and noticed the name written upon the blank tab: Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. My eyes shot up to Mr. Voland's face once more.<br /><br />“This is the case your wife has been working on. Have you heard of my company?”<br /><br />“Your company?,” I asked, unable to suppress my astonishment. “You own Consolidated Metropolitan?”<br /><br />He shook his head, though his eyes did not leave mine for a second. “No. I'm just mid-management. Low on the totem pole. But two of my colleagues and I have been meeting with Mrs. Davenport—with your wife—in a consulting capacity. Maybe she's told you...our company has been experiencing both legal and financial difficulties recently, and she's been helping us—well, you know, get ourselves out of the red.”<br /><br />I glanced at a few of the papers that I currently held in my hand, but they were banking ledgers, accounting statistics, information regarding insurance policies and potential payouts versus foreseeable profits, and so on—they may as well have been written in a foreign language. I took another step forward, reached past Mr. Voland, and threw the file back onto Lena's desk.<br /><br />“Okay, you're a client of my wife's. That still doesn't explain why you're here.”<br /><br />“Well, we had a meeting this afternoon. Or yesterday afternoon, I guess. Maybe she told you?”<br /><br />He seemed to expect an answer, but there was something impertinent, even mocking, in his question. He must have known about my wife's death; another fraction of a smile crept across his face, and I was sure that he was taunting me. <br /><br />I didn't answer his question, so he continued: “The meeting went late, and we must have left around 5:30 or so. My two colleagues and I had a drink around the corner. It was a celebration, I suppose—things started to seem promising, you know? Mrs. Davenport is incredibly good at her job, I hope you know. So we had a few drinks and then were going our separate ways. I was walking home and was passing by—” (he turned his head around and arched it towards Lexington Avenue, eight flights down from us) “—right down there in front of the building, when something occurred to me. Mrs. Davenport had suggested a course of action involving subrogation of corporate entities who had been responsible for certain losses that had been incurred by our clients. Do you know insurance fairly well, Mr. Davenport?”<br /><br />“No.”<br /><br />“Well...I don't want to bore you with the specifics. To put it simply, Consolidated Metropolitan had compensated some of our individual clients for certain policies—health insurance, unemployment, liability, things of that nature—when in fact I thought we could prove that certain corporate parties could be held responsible for the losses that those individuals had incurred. Lena pointed out that we were within our rights to pursue legal action against these corporate entities, as long as we could document, in court, their culpability regarding our clients' payouts. About three hours ago, as I said, I was passing by across the street there, when certain policies came to mind—namely health insurance policies for construction workers who had experienced some respiratory problems after working at a job site just north of the city. We were unable, at the time, to prove that their employers had knowingly put them at risk, but we had always thought that the documentation supplied to us by those employers was somewhat specious, and Mrs. Davenport agreed with us after we showed her the risk assessments that the construction company had supplied us with.”<br /><br />I was growing tired with his lengthy response, and I wondered if he wasn't trying to talk circles around me—impressing me with the minutiae of insurance coverage while avoiding an explanation of why he was actually in Lena's office. So I said, simply, “So?”<br /><br />“So, I came back up to her office before going home, hoping to catch her at work and hopefully come up with another solution before calling it a night. I don't know if that makes sense, considering we had already been discussing possible solutions all afternoon, but I hope you understand that Consolidated Metropolitan is more than simply a job for me; I've been an employee since the company was founded four years ago, and I've been a witness as the company made some unforgivable mistakes and, in a way, dug its own hole. Anything I can do to help the company, to restore the potential we once had, I will do, and the opportunity to do so earlier tonight proved too propitious to resist.”<br /><br />I balked at his wording; I wondered if someone in his position would actually explain himself so convolutedly, with such rehearsed precision. As I mentioned, I had had considerable experience in observing the gestures, the oversights, the slips of the tongue, of criminals and liars and people with something to hide; and I had encountered numerous people who had explained themselves with similarly ostentatious rhetoric. In almost every case, they had had plenty of time to rehearse their defense, and had made the mistake of scripting their own dialogue with overzealous exactitude. I distrusted him now more than ever; his defense was self-incriminating.<br /><br />“What time did you come back up to my wife's office?”<br /><br />“Uh...it must have been about ten.”<br /><br />I turned to Henry, who was still standing next to me with a taser gripped in his right hand and a walkie-talkie in his left. He watched the man before us, Mr. Voland, with a similar combination of anxiety and distrust. I asked Henry, “Did you see him earlier tonight?”<br /><br />Henry shook his head, but never took his eyes off of the stranger. “No, but my shift started at ten. If he came back earlier, the other guard might have seen him.”<br /><br />I recounted the events of the night before, and for the first time the actuality of what had happened to me—not on an emotional level, but on a tangible, physical level—struck me with a vivid clarity, an almost cruel mundaneness. When had I fallen asleep on the couch, watching some idiotic cop show? When had that telephone call from the hospital shaken me awake? When did I start to walk across town, and when did I arrive at the hospital? I concluded that I must have gotten the call at about 10:30, eleven at the latest. My mind raced as the hypothetical timeline formulated itself: Lena could not have left her office later than ten o'clock. Conceiving of the previous night's events in such a methodical, exact fashion was both mercilessly mocking and a reassuringly tedious enterprise: reassuringly tedious, because I could conceive, at least momentarily, of Lena's death as mere happenstance, yet another natural (if horrific) occurrence removed of its sadistic metonymy; mercilessly mocking, because it forced me to re-experience the night of my wife's death with a cold practicality that now seemed vulgar, and because the insignificant and unbearable things that brought me to the hospital constituted (I was now sure) a rift in my life, before which my completeness was so uncomplicated that I took it for granted, and after which I could never be complete again. Abjectly hopeless, I now realized that there was a part of me (not only Lena's part, the part of me that Lena controlled exquisitely, but the part of me that thought it knew what life was and who I was) that was irrevocably lost.<br /><br />My mind was pulsating, throbbing, trying (and failing) to process the man's words objectively. Without doubt, there was something suspicious in his story—his explanations were convenient, well-thought-out. And of course, there was the question of what he was still doing in Lena's office, so long after (what? how to say it?) the incident. But I tried to work through his sequence of events anyway, seeing if there was any way to corroborate his story. I looked at Mr. Voland silently, my mind overexerting itself. Henry was silent next to me, his right hand resting on the unclipped taser lodged in his belt. The silence in Lena's office was heavy, tense, even foreboding—the muffled sounds of city life far below us sounded harsh, alien. A moment later, Henry's words broke the grim atmosphere.<br /><br />“I'll call the other guard—Tom. He was in before me. He'll remember if anyone came to see Mrs. Davenport.”<br /><br />I nodded, half-glancing at Henry—appreciating his calmness, his intelligence. He was a man doing his job. He did it well, without any kind of self-congratulation. His understanding and his support on this night, though, amounted to selfless heroism, at least in my eyes. <br /><br />“I'll keep an eye on him,” I said gruffly, without thinking. <br /><br />“You'll be alright?,” Henry asked before he left, casting an anxious glance in Mr. Voland's direction.<br /><br />I nodded yes. Henry took four steps away from us, back into the dimly-lit outer office. He took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket; I heard the plastic buttons clicking as he dialed. It was then that a tall, gangly man with balding hair and a dirty black goatee entered the outer door. He wore a plain white buttoned shirt with a cheap badge on it, and the belt he wore was equipped with the same gadgetry as Henry's: taser, radio, handcuffs, nightstick, even the outline of a 9-millimeter pistol in its holster. He must have been John—Henry's supervisor. He moved awkwardly, in long, emphatic strides that seemed unsure of their direction—a man on a mission who didn't know what the mission was. Behind him, two uniformed policemen followed, looking about the offices casually, if not with outright indifference—they seemed dubious that there was, in fact, a “situation” in progress. I half-hoped that I would know them; if they vouched for me and my history on the force, my suspicions, I believed, would carry greater weight, and they would respond to Mr. Voland with a similar sense of alarm. But I had never met them before.<br /><br />John sidled up next to Henry, shooting a spiteful, distrustful stare in my direction. (Trying to assert his authority in this place? Territorial, aggressive—a bad combination of traits for a job like his.) One of the officers joined them, looked inquisitively at Henry, expecting an explanation. Henry held up one index finger to the two of them as he brought his phone to his ear. <br /><br />The other officer walked slowly to the open door four feet to my left. He held back there, resting his hands on the doorframe and leaning his head into the office. He saw the grim, silent showdown between me and Mr. Voland—an exchange of unwavering stares, mine uncertain and desperate, Voland's cool and half-smirking, cruel. The officer stood there and looked between the two of us with rapidly increasing concern, even alarm; he may not have been aware of the night's events, but the heated, sinister tension flooding the office, temporarily dormant but ready to erupt, could not have been mistaken. His disinterest from only a minute ago had transformed into grim unease. He took three cautious steps towards me, his gaze volleying back and forth between me and the man in front of me, waiting uneasily for what would come next. A storm, a terror.<br /><br />We heard Henry's voice. He asked someone on the other end of the line—presumably the security guard who had worked earlier that night—if he remembered someone coming to visit Lena Davenport. No, no, Henry said—later, late at night. Around ten, he thinks. Pause, for a moment. Then Henry leaned back towards the open doorway, arched his head around so he could look once more at Mr. Voland, who had since sat down in one of the chairs facing the glass windows—he had turned his back on me.<br /><br />Henry looked intently at Mr. Voland's profile. What does he look like?, Henry said, seemingly repeating what the other man had asked him.<br /><br />You'd remember if you saw him.<br /><br />Tall.<br /><br />Black eyes.<br /><br />Almost bald.<br /><br />Short black-white hair.<br /><br />Thin, yeah. Emaciated.<br /><br />Another pause, for a moment.<br /><br />No? You sure? <br /><br />Then another pause. Very long. I took my eyes off of Mr. Voland, moved them in Henry's direction. He listened for a long time. His eyes widened, then narrowed. Shock? Anger? He returned my stare. No—compassion.<br /><br />No, I didn't know. What time did that happen?<br /><br />Almost ten?<br /><br />Yeah...what a hell of a way to end your day. Yeah.<br /><br />Yeah...her husband.<br /><br />Henry took his eyes off of mine. Looked at the floor.<br /><br />He hung up a minute later. I was staring at the back of Mr. Voland's head. He had been silent for minutes now, since the other men had arrived. <br /><br />Henry looked at me again. John and the other two officers looked at him expectantly. I stared at the pointed awful head of Mr. Voland until it became a blurry, senseless shape.<br /><br />“Tom said he doesn't remember anyone coming to visit Lena after her meeting this afternoon. He said he doesn't remember seeing anyone checking in at the front desk who matches Mr. Voland's description—but he said to remember that we get almost a hundred visitors here each hour, if not more. He”—Henry's voice faltered here—“also said that he only saw Lena just before ten o'clock, when she left. She worked late. She walked out of the front doors and was crossing the street, when...she was hit. The car was white, and it was one of those big old ones, like a Buick or something. He said he only saw the color and the shape of it as it drove away; it ran the light and sped off. Luckily, Tom said, the hospital was across the street, and they got her into surgery in less than five minutes...he said.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell Henry was still watching me. I didn't look back in his direction. “That was at the very end of his shift; I saw him when I came in, but he looked a little shaken, and he didn't stop to mention it to me. He said he hopes she's okay.”<br /><br />“She's dead,” I said. Water in eyes, too tired to cry though. The back of Mr. Voland's head, three feet in front of me. Wish I had brought my gun.<br /><br />I stepped up to the red padded chair in front of Lena's desk, the one to the left of Mr. Voland's chair, gripped the right arm, pulled it right up close next to the other one, angled it towards Voland, stepped around the chair, and sat down. I leaned in close to the stranger we had found in my wife's office, my elbows resting on my knees. So close I could see where his skeletal face was pocked with abrasions from a razor; so close I could see small scars from old wounds. He looked at me with no emotion. <br /><br />When I spoke, my voice was a shaky monotone. I tried to hide the fact that I needed to subdue myself, restrain myself from what I really wanted to do, but I couldn't hide it; my rage was painted on me.<br /><br />“What are you doing in my wife's office?”<br /><br />“I told you—,” he began calmly.<br /><br />“You haven't told me anything. Why are you in my wife's office?”<br /><br />“I wanted to see her about some old insurance policies—some payouts we could be compensated for. We're in hot water right now—”<br /><br />“Cut the bullshit, why are you in her office?”<br /><br />One of the officers—the one who had been standing next to me, the short and stocky one, whose muscle you would confuse for beer-bellied flab if you didn't know better—took a step up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. He knelt down next to me, spoke quietly.<br /><br />“We should wait—put in a call, get a detective here. They'll question him, you can be present at the interrogation. And after, you can ask him anything you want—you'll just have to have an officer present.”<br /><br />“I don't mind answering your questions,” Mr. Voland said, looking at me with feigned compassion. “It's fine.”<br /><br />I didn't look at him, or at John or Henry or the other officer, who had all uneasily entered the office and were lingering by the doorway. I responded to the cautious advice offered by the man next to me, but my words were directed at no one in particular—all of them and none.<br /><br />“Call 718-555-9898. That's the 184th Precinct in uptown. Ask for Detective Sean Ammond, he'll still be there now. Ask him about me, Michael Davenport. My badge number is 07464498276. I've been a detective for three years. I know the protocol. And I'm going to question this man now.”<br /><br />The officer next to me shrugged and stood back up. “Alright, I'll call, but...you should know this isn't a good idea. Just...be careful.”<br /><br />I knew what he meant—any information I might be able to glean then would be totally worthless in court (and I was increasingly unsure of my ability to keep from doing to the man before me what I really wanted to, fingernails digging into bloody palms)—but I was too heated, too stubborn, too proud to take the advice. The officer stepped back out into the outer office, picked up the phone on the receptionist's desk, asked John how to dial out, and punched in the number I had just given him. As he was calling, John asked Henry to go to the lobby for the sign-in sheet at the front security desk (though I was already convinced that Mark Voland's signature would be nowhere on it); Henry eyed me and Voland worriedly before leaving the office, but, unsure of what to say, exited without a word.<br /><br />Only four of us now remained in the office: John and one of the two police officers, both of whom lingered at the doorway, watchful, ready to intervene if necessary; and Mr. Voland and myself, seated in the two leather chairs in front of my wife's desk, my face (eyes narrowed, teeth clenched) less than a few inches from his. He continued to stare straight ahead, out the window, though I'm sure I dominated his peripheral vision.<br /><br />“What do you want to ask me?,” he said without moving. Without blinking.<br /><br />“First, let me recount your story. I want to get this right. You had a meeting with my wife yesterday afternoon, you and your colleagues, and it ended around 5:30. You got drinks at a bar nearby, and you said before you went home you wanted to see her about one more thing—one last thing you thought of. You said you returned here, to my wife's office, around ten. Is that right?”<br /><br />“I can't be sure of the exact times, but yes, that sounds about right.”<br /><br />“You were drinking for four hours? How many did you have?”<br /><br />A slight crooked smile crept onto his face—I think he was going for sheepish embarrassment, but he didn't know how to recreate the emotion. “Well, we went to a bar that was a bit of a walk away—a colleague of mine, Steve Bennetton, knew about it, it's his favorite, over at 82nd and 1st—my guess is it was about a twenty minute walk there. I suppose we were there for about three hours. I had three drinks. I think Steve and Kevin—that's our other colleague—might have had a few more. But we were wrapped up in conversation. You know, we were trying to save the company. We were optimistic, we were brainstorming. Time got away from us. Call the bar, they'll tell you. I even remember our server's name.”<br /><br />“We will, don't worry. So you must have left at, what, 9:00? But you didn't come back to my wife's office until ten or so? How is that?”<br /><br />“Like I said, I don't remember the timeline that precisely. Maybe we left about 9:15. They caught cabs back home. I went for a bit of a walk—I live a little north of Morningside, so I was going to walk home anyway. On the way, I thought of a few recent cases where I thought we could recoup our losses—you know, prove in court that corporate entities who held policies under us were actually responsible for losses incurred by individuals they employed. I wanted to talk to Lena about them, see if she thought we had a chance. So I walked back over here and I suppose I got here around 9:40 or so.”<br /><br />“And you checked in at the front desk then?”<br /><br />“Yes. How else could I have gotten up here?”<br /><br />“How is it that the guard doesn't remember you? Especially if you came so late, so soon before my wife's...” (words failed me again) “...<span style="font-style:italic;">accident</span>, and requested to see her? Seems strange, doesn't it?”<br /><br />He shrugged defensively. “Yes, it does, but you're going to have to ask him about that. I can't speak for his state of mind. I signed it at the front desk, you'll see my signature.”<br /><br />“Fine,” I said. “Finish your story.”<br /><br />Mr. Voland returned my unwavering stare, finally averting his eyes from the windows in front of him. “There's nothing else to say, is there?,” he said. “The man at the front desk said your wife was still here, but when I got up to the office there—” (he nodded his head towards the outer office, past John and the two policemen) “—it was empty. The receptionist must have already left. I can only assume your wife and I crossed paths on my way in.”<br /><br />“Quite a coincidence.”<br /><br />“Maybe. But I don't have any other explanation.”<br /><br />“How did you get into her office if no one was here?”<br /><br />Once again, he averted his eyes from mine, and directed them squarely towards the pulsating electric lights of the city outside. He instantaneously seemed to adopt a look of apologetic shame, as his shoulders—which had previously been staunchly held in a posture of guiltless pride—drooped ever so slightly. “Well...that, I suppose, was somewhat dubious on my part. The cleaning man was just making his rounds on the floor, and he happened to be approaching this office shortly after I arrived. I knew where Mrs. Davenport kept our files—I had seen them earlier in the day, of course—and I desperately needed to check on those few cases. I honestly thought I had landed on a solution that might save us. So I persuaded him to open her office for me.”<br /><br />He abruptly halted himself in the middle of his explanation, despite how unsatisfying and questionable was his recounting of events. His rigid stare did not falter, but I sensed he was waiting for me to respond—eager, even quietly giddy, to see whether or not I would buckle under the weight of his ridiculous story. And it <span style="font-style:italic;">was</span> ridiculous: if his narrative didn't make me so intensely angry, so sure of his culpability, its sheer absurdity would have made me laugh. Too many coincidences, too many cover-ups—no outright cracks in his story, but plenty of tenuous perforations to make it completely porous, absolutely weightless. For a moment no one said anything; I noticed myself exhaling protractedly, my rage now affecting me physiologically. With some effort I subdued myself and arched my head back towards the three men standing at the doorway; I caught their glances and raised my eyebrows, indicating how unbelievable I found his explanation. John and one of the officers nodded slightly, apparently corroborating my disbelief; the other officer furrowed his brow and looked back towards Mr. Voland—certainly dubious, yet unable to come to a conclusion regarding the man before us.<br /><br />I stood up. I had to move. My close proximity to Mr. Voland had started to make me feel queasy. I walked to the glass windows that he had been resolutely staring at throughout his account. His stare met mine, coldly, emotionlessly. <br /><br />“And you've been here for the last three hours, is that right? Poring over files? A diligent employee of Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance?”<br /><br />He smiled—antagonistically this time—and shrugged. “You don't believe me. But yes, I swear that's true. All of it.”<br /><br />“You must realize how stupid that sounds. All of it.”<br /><br />“Does it? I don't know. Check the sign-in sheet. Call the bar. Ask the cleaning man. Call CMI. My information can be verified.”<br /><br />Another tense period of silence. I heard Henry enter the outer office and approach the three officers at the doorway. He handed John a clipboard. I walked over to them, leaving Mr. Voland momentarily.<br /><br />Henry flipped over two sheets on the clipboard and pointed to a signature far down on the list. Under his breath, Henry remarked, “His signature is there. 9:42pm. And there were two other visitors since then—it doesn't look like this has been forged in any way. And look—” (he pointed at a series of initials on the right-hand side of the page) “—those are Tom's initials. He did check him in.”<br /><br />John shook his head, bewildered. “Why didn't Tom remember him? He's been with us for years, there's never been a problem with him. I don't understand.”<br /><br />One of the officers glanced up from the clipboard at me. “I talked to Captain Ammond a couple minutes ago. He vouched for you. He and another detective—Ciposetta—they're on their way. They'll be here soon. Ammond told me to tell you not to do anything stupid.”<br /><br />I couldn't resist a tired smile. “He knows me too well.”<br /><br />The other officer—the short, stocky one—interjected. “Mr. Davenport, I'm sorry about all of this. I'm sorry about your wife. But...I mean, there's definitely something wrong with this guy, his story doesn't make any sense, but...what could he have to do with your wife's accident? If it's true that he was up here when she was hit—well, how could they be related?”<br /><br />I shook my head and glanced back at Mr. Voland. He hadn't moved from his position: motionless in a red padded leather chair, in the middle of Lena's office. “I don't know, but there's something. There are too many overlaps. He's lying about something.”<br /><br />“So what now?,” Henry offered uneasily.<br /><br />I shrugged. “Wait for Ammond and Ciposetta. We need as many opinions as we can get. In the meantime, check security cameras, take a look around the office—see if we see anything out of the ordinary. I'm gonna ask him a few more questions.”<br /><br />Henry and John left the office a moment later, retreating to the security office in order to peruse the night's security videos. One of the officers began investigating the hallways, the offices, the stairways for anything—any sign of a struggle or forced entry—while the other (who professed to have some knowledge of the insurance industry) began combing through Lena's file on Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance. I appreciated their support, the unspoken camaraderie shared by those in our line of work, and I wondered what I would have done without them there. I looked at my palms, which were red and raw from my nails tearing into them for the last thirty minutes. I wondered what would have happened if I had been alone with Mr. Voland for that half hour—if it would have been him, instead, that would now be red and raw, if my rage and my staggered confusion would have physicalized themselves in such a direct manner. The human presence of Henry and John and the two officers had tempered me, had restrained me—I was unwilling to abandon myself when I knew I would be witnessed and judged by other people, when I knew it was not simply myself and God who would have to deal with the repercussions (moral and otherwise) of my actions. And I wondered if people only do good—act rightly—when they're concerned with the responses of other individuals. And if, left only to our own moral self-motivations, divorced from the inquisitions and reproaches of others, the world would be ruled by anarchy and cruelty and despair.<br /><br />As we waited for Ammond and Ciposetta to arrive, I sat down in the chair across from Mr. Voland's—Lena's chair, a cheap black leather thing on wheels, less comfortable than the red padded seats she offered to her guests. I wheeled her chair in front of Mr. Voland's, about four feet away, confronting him directly. I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees, rubbing my chin and running my hands along the unshaven stubble, exhausted and hostile. I said nothing—scrutinized the features of Voland's face. He met my gaze directly.<br /><br />“You're inspecting me?”<br /><br />I said nothing.<br /><br />“Tell me what you find.”<br /><br />The guilt on his face was deepening, as I saw it—like the stubble of a five-o'-clock shadow as night progresses.<br /><br />After a moment, he leaned in towards me, paralleling my own posture: elbows on knees, leaned in close.<br /><br />“I heard what your colleague said before, and I have to ask you again: What could I possibly have to do with your wife's death? You don't believe me, fine, but...it's simply illogical to think I could have any kind of relation to a hit-and-run that happened eight floors below me.”<br /><br />“Why don't you explain it to me?”<br /><br />“<span style="font-style:italic;">Explain</span> it to you?,” he asked incredulously. “Mr. Davenport, I don't want to sound callous, but what is there to explain? I am sorry, sincerely, for your wife's tragedy—for your tragedy—but there is no conspiracy here. No plot. You don't want to hear this, but there is no meaning here.”<br /><br />“Maybe. But there is something going on.”<br /><br />“If there is—and I'm saying this to you because you're a detective, and you will understand this—what is going on here is cause and effect. Something happens, and because of it, something else happens. I'm sure you've seen this many times before, so why can't you apply it to yourself? To this?”<br /><br />“Now you're interrogating me? Judging me?”<br /><br />“No, I'm not judging, I understand. You're human. It's natural to give things meaning when you think they need them. But it's also foolish.”<br /><br />“I don't need you to tell me, Mr. Voland, about the meaning of things. About fatalism. I'm not looking for any kind of grand design here. I'm trying to get to the truth about what happened to my wife.”<br /><br />“And if the truth is less meaningful than you hoped it would be? Or simpler? Will you supply your own truth then?”<br /><br />“No. I never have.”<br /><br />“Because the truth about things has never affected you personally. In your line of work, I mean.”<br /><br />“How can you pretend to know about that?”<br /><br />“I'm sorry, I'm just...hypothesizing. But there's no harm in that, right?”<br /><br />I said nothing.<br /><br />“My hypothesis is that your line of work allows you, even requires you, to judge human action, or even non-human action—simply happenstance—or even cosmic action, if you want to look at it that way—objectively. Scientifically, empirically. You can observe people and the things that they do, or the things that happen to them, as a series of cause-and-effect patterns that leave behind a trail of verifiable data. You see gestures and responses, and you hear inflections or promises or lies, and you don't see them as <span style="font-style:italic;">human</span> behavior—I mean, you see them as evidence. Indicators of the truth, or of lies. And that's what makes you good at your job, am I right? Their lives—not just what happens to them, but the way they feel about those things, why they do the things that they do—they don't overlap with your life. You don't concern yourself with those things, that's not your job. I'm not blaming you—it makes sense. But if you've always been able to observe the people that you investigate with that kind of logic—that rationalism that has no room for...whatever you want to call it, cosmic motivation, a deeper <span style="font-style:italic;">meaning</span>—why can't you apply these things to yourself?”<br /><br />My anger and bewilderment had started to make room for trepidation; my uncertainty was propagating, spreading, within me.<br /><br />I said, slowly, methodically, stressing each word: “Who the hell are you?”<br /><br />He gave me a smile that was more malevolent than anything he had yet said or done. “You mean, do I work for Consolidated Metropolitan Insurance? Am I an insurance salesman? Is my name Mark Voland? Now, <span style="font-style:italic;">those</span> questions you can answer absolutely. With facts. I'll leave that to you.”<br /><br />“How did you know my wife? The truth, this time.” When I said it, even I was able to recognize the desperation and futility that went into uttering it—I knew already that his answer would be no different.<br /><br />“Really, I only met her this afternoon. She seemed like a really good person. And I am really sorry for what happened to her, even if you don't believe me. But some things we just can't change.”<br /><br />I leaned back in the chair; I could no longer stand to be so close to him. Fatigue and despair afflicted me. There was pain behind my wizened eyes, a deep abyss of pain. <br /><br />“You were waiting for me, weren't you?,” I asked him. “When I was across the street, in the hospital. You were watching me. We were meant to have this meeting, is that right?”<br /><br />“<span style="font-style:italic;">Meant</span> to? Mr. Davenport, you have destiny on the brain tonight. I'm sorry, that's a cruel thing to say—I understand why you might.”<br /><br />I shook my head at him. I still felt an unbridled rage towards him, but now, by this point, I would have no idea how to unleash it. <br /><br />“Forget what I actually <span style="font-style:italic;">am</span> for right now,” he whispered to me. The other two officers were single-mindedly inspecting the outer office, the hallway, a stack of files—most likely, they didn't hear a word of what was being said. “Tell me what you <span style="font-style:italic;">want</span> me to be. Or what you're scared that I am. It seems you've already come to your own conclusion anyway.”<br /><br />I couldn't answer. I believe I did actually ponder this question—I did ask myself those things—but I had no answers for them. I knew that I wanted him to be more than simply an insurance salesman whom I had found, coincidentally, in my wife's office.<br /><br />“Well, I can tell you this,” he said finally. “I'm no...celestial accuser. I'm no great deceiver. How can I be, in <span style="font-style:italic;">my</span> line of work?” He whispered these words in a thin rasp, uttered close to my left ear. Then he leaned back in his chair and a narrow serpentine smile stretched the skin taut against his face. “Now you're wondering where you've heard those words before. And now, again, you're asking yourself <span style="font-style:italic;">what</span> I really am.”Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-80829025774035206172011-05-15T12:14:00.002-05:002012-01-25T17:01:39.399-06:002010: The Year in FilmMost people who make movies (and those who distribute and market them) like to believe that bigger is better—that film is the art of bombast and overstatement, that subtlety and elusiveness and fine-tuned simplicity are better left to art forms less visceral (and expensive). This overgeneralization may seem unfair, but it especially rang true in 2010, a year that seemed uncommonly populated by Big Movies.<br />
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This was predominantly true in Hollywood, as it often seems to be. <span style="font-style: italic;">Inception</span> sought to astound us with its gravity-defying action sequences, its trippy conundrum of a plot, the obvious precision (and money) that went into the movie's set design, visual effects, and overall conception. (If it failed to awe, that was likely because half of the movie was wasted on mundane exposition.) <span style="font-style: italic;">The Social Network</span>, meanwhile—one of the year's most critically acclaimed movies—is a good, solid, intelligently-made tragedy, but its marketers (and some critics) told us that it did nothing less than define our digitized generation, that it amounted to an instantaneous classic that encapsulates our era—overblown claims that make it all too easy to dismiss the movie's significant simpler pleasures and concentrate on what the movie <span style="font-style: italic;">doesn't</span> achieve. This isn't even to mention the typical glut of sequels and remakes that substitute an overproduced style and predictably “cutting-edge” visual effects for anything approaching creativity.<br />
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This predilection for hugeness and self-aggrandizement at least makes more sense in the world of Hollywood—after all, America's movie factory does peddle flashy excess more reliably and consistently than any other movie industry in the world. Also, when it's done well, that larger-than-life splendor can admittedly make for more exciting, even more magnificent, cinema than some quieter, humbler movies. This year, the spectacular dream factory that is Hollywood pumped out a few amiably “big” movies—namely <span style="font-style: italic;">Shutter Island</span>, Martin Scorsese's flippant but nonetheless immersive genre puzzle; <span style="font-style: italic;">True Grit</span>, a solid remake that excels by <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> trying to be a Coen Brothers movie; <span style="font-style: italic;">Predators</span>, an unnecessary but kinetic and surprisingly beautiful series reboot; and gorgeous, compelling animated movies like <span style="font-style: italic;">Toy Story 3</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">How to Train Your Dragon</span>.<br />
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Delusions of grandeur also afflicted smaller-scale American indie movies and foreign arthouse exercises, though here the sense of self-importance is more pedantic than juvenile. (Such movies, when they fail, <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span> they're brilliant when they're not; bad Hollywood movies, on the other hand, usually don't pretend to be.) Again, the off-putting sense of condescension and pretense we get from such overreaching movies can be the result of overzealous marketers and self-conscious critics rather than bad filmmaking (though that's often to blame too). For example, we were told that <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Swan</span> was the most insane, mind-bending horror-camp mashup of the year, when really it just uses a lot of tried-and-true aesthetic tricks to disguise its predictability and rampant cliché; we were told that <span style="font-style: italic;">The Kids Are All Right</span> was a brave, honest, raw exploration of human sexuality, when it's actually just a dull, simplistic study of overprivileged characters; and we were told that <span style="font-style: italic;">The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</span> and its sequels (or the Millennium trilogy or whatever it's called) were unflinchingly sordid, post-feminist indulgences in modern depravity, when in fact they're the braindead foreign equivalents to torture porn like the <span style="font-style: italic;">Saw</span> movies. (For a foreign trilogy that really does immerse you in stylish yet horrific grime, check out the British <span style="font-style: italic;">Red Riding</span> movies.) Meanwhile, in France, the predictably self-involved Gaspar Noé made probably the biggest, most overindulgent, most ridiculous experiment of the year: <span style="font-style: italic;">Enter the Void</span>. Like his previous <span style="font-style: italic;">Irreversible</span>, it's not actually good, but it's good that it exists, and it's worth watching if only to experience Noé's insane aesthetic gimmick (he basically places you in the head of a recently-deceased former drug dealer whose soul is floating over and throughout Tokyo) and to appreciate his almost stubbornly excessive ambition. <br />
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I say all of this because most of my favorite movies of the year did not pretend to be huge, groundbreaking achievements. They were, for the most part, focused, compact, and clever—stemming from a central concept or idea, and subtly branching out to encompass a plethora of unexpected tangents. Small-scale absurdity, subversive political commentary smuggled into a solid story via razor-sharp aesthetics, an astonishingly maintained atmosphere of encroaching dread, a sincere scrapbook of a turbulent relationship, an ironically-plotted murder mystery—these seemingly small achievements overshadowed the <span style="font-style: italic;">Inception</span>s and <span style="font-style: italic;">Social Network</span>s of 2010. The best movies of the year demonstrated deceptive simplicity—they revealed the difference, in fact, between simplicity and simpleness. (The former can be an attribute, a dilution and magnification of compelling themes and ideas; the latter follows a single, uncomplicated course—namely, a plot—and does not concern itself with its own most fascinating nooks and crannies.) <br />
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On the other hand, some of my other favorite movies of the year included a five-and-a-half-hour epic miniseries about a notorious terrorist, an unabashedly opulent foray into “sensorial cinema” whose every sight and sound seems to pulsate electrically, a grandiose historical opera about Benito Mussolini, and a very long and very exciting crime drama set in a French prison. So maybe, sometimes, the people who make and market movies are right: bigger is (or can be) better. (We return to that common-sense, but often-overlooked, platitude of filmmaking and criticism: every movie must be made and responded to on its own terms.) <br />
A final note: for a movie's “official” release date (meaning, official to me), I arbitrarily use the earliest date that that film had at least a limited release throughout the United States. While most critics use the movie's premiere date in New York or Los Angeles, I don't think it makes sense to abide by the moviegoing schedules that only a small handful of people on either coast are able to experience. This means that there are a few movies on this list—like numbers two and ten below—that were considered by many critics to be 2009 releases (and there are also several movies that were considered 2010 releases that I haven't seen because they haven't even had a limited release in the U.S. yet—movies like, say, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">The Strange Case of Angelica</span>).<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">1. Dogtooth</span> (d. Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece)<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">Dogtooth</span> is both the funniest movie of the year and the most disturbing—a seeming contradiction that attests to the movie's singular wavelength of traumatic absurdity. The dictatorial patriarch of a bourgeois family in Greece has apparently imprisoned his three children (one son, two daughters) in their closed-off family estate since birth. They are led to believe that the outer world is treacherous and impregnable—even airplanes that pass by overhead are re-presented to the children (now apparently in their late teens) as tiny model planes that have landed in their backyard. <br />
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The father in the film runs his family sternly, tyrannically. With his wife (who participates in the cruel game but apparently has no say in it), he orchestrates bizarre and pointless contests, peddling out an arbitrary number of stickers to the “winner” (the prizes mean nothing but a sense of accomplishment for the three siblings). The unnamed mother and father have also imposed their own mangled language system on their children, swapping definitions of words for others simply, it seems, to show that they can. When one daughter asks her parents the meaning of the word “pussy,” mother replies that it means “a bright light”; more significantly, father informs his children that they'll only be allowed to leave their home once their “dogtooth” falls out. <br />
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The patriarch's injustices against his family go further than pointless contests and the deconstruction of language. Incest is not only permitted in this closed-off world—it's mandated. Having become aware of his son's burgeoning sexuality (unsurprisingly, he's indifferent to the sexual awakening of his daughters), the patriarch initially enlists the help of one of his employees to provide sexual initiation for the boy (a partnership which, for the father, has all the gravity of a mundane business relationship). When that arrangement proves disastrous for the family (after the sexual liaison brings material goods from the outside world to one of the daughters, in exchange for sexual favors), the father forces his son to choose between his two sisters for a sexual partner. This results in one of the movie's queasiest scenes: a seemingly endless static medium shot of the three siblings packed into the family's bathtub, naked.<br />
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Sometimes the movie's absurdity is presented as a minimalist joke (such as a scene in which the son anxiously stalks a tiny kitten that has strayed into their backyard, mistaking the animal for a vicious predator); most of the time, however, the movie's premise (and its sense of humor) is haunting and unsettling. Two abrupt acts of violence (both committed by the father) rescue the movie from potential glibness: there are disturbing, unavoidable ramifications to the parents' tyrannical reign over their children's lives.<br />
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There is no overt allegory made in <span style="font-style: italic;">Dogtooth</span>; the father, for example, is not meant to symbolize Greece's modern political state, nor is he a stand-in for some dictatorial capitalist overseer. Nonetheless, there are parallels that may be drawn, especially thanks to a few scenes that depict the father in a cold modern workplace defined by rigid, deadening geometric lines and drab pastel colors. (The fact that he rewards his children's competitive natures with meaningless compensation in the form of stickers furthers the capitalistic analogy.) But I think the movie works just as well as a disturbing satire of bourgeois insularity, removed of its sociopolitical undertones (this is why comparisons to Buñuel seem mostly appropriate).<br />
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The movie is brief and concise, but it sticks with you. Late in the film, after a frenetic dance-off performed by the sisters that perfectly encapsulates the movie's funny-frightening tone, one of them attempts to forcibly remove her “dogtooth”—thereby allowing her to leave the family home. (This brutal scene, like much of the movie, is shot in a static, direct medium shot, which makes Lanthimos' attitude towards his characters akin to that of a scientist studying specimens under a microscope.) We'll never know, however, if her attempt to escape her father (and her family) is successful—the movie cuts off at an agonizingly uncertain moment. <span style="font-style: italic;">Dogtooth</span>, then, leaves us in an anxious state that approximates the one experienced by the three siblings: oppressed by uncertainty and helplessness, dominated by an omnipotent ruler (in the siblings' case, their father; in the audience's, the director). We hope for escape, desperately, and maybe futilely.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">2. The Ghost Writer</span> (d. Roman Polanski, France/Germany/UK)<br />
Polanski may still be the best director in the world at infusing seemingly simple stories with dry, acerbic sociopolitical commentary, a skill that may reach its pinnacle in the half-silly, completely off-kilter <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ghost Writer</span>. This isn't just a movie that's as funny as it is suspenseful (which isn't really all that rare in the movies); its bizarre achievement is that the forces of evil in this movie are so unexpected, so pervasive, so phantasmic, and at the same time so stolidly mundane that the overpowering sense of dread reaches levels of sinister farce.<br />
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Ewan McGregor's modestly successful writer is tasked with ghostwriting the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan—the casting is so obvious it's sublime). Lang has moved his family from the UK to the perpetually gray coasts of a New England island, allowing Polanski to frame a seemingly unending series of masterfully atmospheric widescreen compositions: a lone, baffled McGregor in the sharp foreground, and a whole morass of unknowable peril in the misty background. McGregor's writer seems to accept the assignment not because he believes in it (he seems, at least at the beginning of the movie, totally apolitical), nor because it will allow him to flex his intellectual muscles (he regards the assignment as hackwork); more than anything, his character seems capricious and aimless, and may be attracted to the mystique of an army of security guards and the suspicious circumstances of his predecessor's death (the corpse of Lang's first ghostwriter washes up on the New England coast at the beginning of the movie).<br />
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Polanski has, of course, always embraced the darkly comic, but what's surprising about <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ghost Writer</span> is how willfully tongue-in-cheek it is. It sometimes resembles a workmanlike cable-TV political thriller, or an adaptation of a seedy paperback thriller: wives, mistresses, and menacing politicos recite crackling dialogue; Eli Wallach shows up as a grizzled old witness spouting conspiracy theories; late-night rendezvous at tiny seaside motels pulsate with spy-movie intrigue; there are secret files and cryptic messages, and everyone, at one point or another, seems absolutely villainous (besides our beleaguered hero). The grandest joke comes at the end of the movie, a brilliant gag that slyly treats the film's main character as its punchline.<br />
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The fact that the movie is not self-serious, and is sometimes indulgently cheesy, should be taken as a stroke of comedic genius. After all, the parallels to reality are obvious: a British PM whose zealous war on terror and close ties with the American government simultaneously makes him a political superstar and a travesty of modern diplomacy. The name Adam Lang even echoes that of Tony Blair, and Brosnan's Cheshire Cat-charm makes for a fascinatingly contradictory character. (He may be a villain, but we're attracted to him anyway.) Torture is a predominant theme, and one of the main villains is a noted American scholar from an Ivy League university. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ghost Writer</span> seems like a tawdry spy show (albeit an exceptionally intelligent one), and because of this it makes international politics of the last decade seem like a farcical potboiler. I like it when movies treat real-life intrigue with the zippy over-the-topness of pulp fiction, especially when their subject is international politics (which often seem so hollowly convoluted anyway).<br />
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Mostly, though, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ghost Writer </span>functions as Polanski's incredibly clever exercise in aesthetics-as-theme—the entire thing is staged, shot, and edited to evoke a litany of real-world parallels and satirical commentaries that otherwise may have been completely absent from the movie, in a lesser director's hands. Again, a perfect example is the final shot of the movie, an extremely complex snapshot of basically all of the movie's predominant themes that could function as a lesson plan in Film Studies classes: how to present an idea visually, solely through form, without relying on a didactic screenplay. This may well be the most cinematic movie of the year.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">3. Let Me In</span> (d. Matt Reeves, USA)<br />
A remake (slash-adaptation) that's infinitely better than anyone could have expected it to be, <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span> is a like-minded but subtly different sibling to the already-excellent 2008 Swedish film <span style="font-style: italic;">Let the Right One In</span>. How to describe the small but significant differences in personality between the two movies? If the Swedish film resembles, in part, a grungy, rough, fiery punk mini-masterpiece (even its quieter moments have a burning hostility to them), Reeves' American remake is like its lonelier, more melancholy, more plaintive cousin. Imagine a lush symphony covering a Black Flag song; the sentiment is the same, it just affects you differently.<br />
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Casting is key in <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span>, not only for the two young protagonists (Owen, an alienated young boy whose parents are divorced, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee; and Chloe Moretz as Abby, a world-weary centuries-old vampire trapped in the body of a young girl) but for the supporting characters as well. Richard Jenkins has never been better as her human father-figure-slash-lover: he has aged and watched her remain a young woman, and now simply provides fresh corpses for her to feed off of. (In one of the movie's most powerful unspoken moments, Owen—helplessly in love with Abby—learns the painful backstory between her and her pseudo-father, and he seems to wonder if, decades from now, he will meet the same lonely fate.) Elias Koteas plays a detective who has the misfortune of investigating the girl's victims; a peerless character actor, his mournful delivery and quiet dismay at the carnage that surrounds him provides a vital emotional entryway for the audience. <br />
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Just as importantly, though, <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span> marks a triumph for director Matt Reeves: the meticulous style and flawless pacing of the movie mark him as an undeniable new American talent (and not only in the horror genre). After working in television, Reeves made 2008's gimmicky monster movie <span style="font-style: italic;">Cloverfield</span>—a solid feature debut, but its stylistic conceit (the film is ostensibly all a first-person account shot on digital video of a catastrophic invasion in New York) told us little about Reeves' proficiency as a storyteller, stylist, or commentator. <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span> nails all three categories. It's a wonder of digital video composition, with razor-sharp blacks, reds, and glowing yellows creating a gorgeous (and haunting) kaleidoscopic backdrop; Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser frame their actors more tightly than many filmmakers seem comfortable with, which emphasizes the emotional intensity of this story more than its grisly horror tropes. (The best and saddest example: Owen forces Abby to enter his house without explicitly inviting her in, dubious of her claim that she can't enter unless he directly asks her to. She enters, in an apparently extreme self-sacrifice, and in an unforgettable medium close-up begins bleeding from her scalp and her facial orifices. The boy begins to cry and hugs her in desperation. Horror has rarely seemed so poignant; this scene was effective in the original, but it's absolutely devastating here.)<br />
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Arguably the distinguishing feature of both <span style="font-style: italic;">Let the Right One In </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span> is its scary-sweet genre hybridization: they're essentially love stories, though the bonds forged between characters arise from extremely distressing, bleak situations. This may be even more subtly evoked in Reeves' film: Owen is severely disturbed before he even meets Abby, as he spies on his neighbors, dons a Hannibal Lecter-ish mask and poses with a butcher knife before the mirror, and withdraws anxiously from his school swimming team (he doesn't want to reveal the bruises on his back to other students—a brief and frightening touch that points to some kind of domestic abuse). Companionship in <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span> is a vital escape from violence and ugliness, though the desperation of these relationships doesn't make them any less sincere.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span>, if it is a genre movie (it <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> horrific, but there's more than horror going on), reveals how expertly-made films can transcend their genres, using the tropes and styles of their genealogies as a springboard and bursting forth into unexpected emotional and thematic territory. (An interesting undercurrent in <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Me In</span> is its transplantation of the story from Sweden to late-Reagan era Midwestern America: Reagan's notorious Evil Empire speech even plays over an incredible early scene, suggesting that forces of evil in our world are more amorphous and ambiguous than we might assume them to be.) Passionate, intelligent, beautiful, and unshakeable, it almost makes up for the preponderance of abysmal American horror remakes that have been made over the last decade.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;"> 4. Carlos</span> (d. Olivier Assayas, France/Germany)<br />
The version of <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> that I saw is 330 minutes long (that's the one that premiered at Cannes and showed on French television; there's also a 165-minute “roadshow” version that was distributed last year), but it still might be the most entertaining movie of 2010. This epic biography of Venezuelan-born terrorist Carlos “the Jackal”—who came to represent the Palestinian, anti-Zionist cause seemingly by happenstance—is kinetic, visceral, multilayered filmmaking. Early in the film (it seems most appropriate to call it a film, even though it was commissioned for television), Carlos tells a lover that he will deliver “with every bullet, an idea”; while we don't quite buy his claim in the context of the movie (Carlos regularly spouts revolutionary aphorisms that, usually, he does not follow through on), it seems apt to apply Carlos's quote to Olivier Assayas's filmmaking: this is action cinema at its best, but each scene comes loaded with its own set of contemporary socio-political parallels and divisive attitudes towards terrorist violence and counterterrorist retribution.<br />
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Assayas's filmmaking prowess shouldn't be too surprising: even when his movies fail to follow through on their extravagant premises (as in <span style="font-style: italic;">Demonlover</span>, for example), they're never less than fascinating. (And when his movies <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span> follow through on their ideas, as in <span style="font-style: italic;">Irma Vep</span>, he makes the strangest, most electrifying cinematic concoctions imaginable.) What may be most surprising about Assayas's approach to <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> is how heavily he tones down his own auteurist touches in bringing this story to life; aside from the use of a number of grimy, propulsive New Wave punk songs in the soundtrack, Assayas pre-dominantly allows the narrative to play out without obtrusion. The political interpretations are entirely up to the audience; Assayas doesn't impose his own morality upon us.<br />
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There's no way <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> could be confused for a movie that glorifies terrorism: throughout the entire thing, Carlos is a narcissistic, pompous, self-made celebrity who uses revolutionary dogma to justify his bloodlust and his shallow carnality. Early in the movie, Carlos is ordered by “the armed branch of the Palestinian Liberation Struggle” to toss a bomb into a crowded streetside cafe; as he walks away from the ensuing blast, a shudder of remorse seems to pass over him, and we wonder how Carlos feels about the carnage he creates. But in the following scene, we see Carlos fondling himself, naked, in front a full-length mirror, and we recognize the primary concern that always motivates Carlos: himself, his own notoriety, his own celebrity.<br />
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This becomes unavoidably true by the end of the movie. The third part of the miniseries details Carlos' devolution into a bloated, power-hungry has-been who relies upon the unquestioning obedience of a few cronies. This last part of the movie is the least engrossing and the most repugnant, but this seems to be purposeful: by the end of <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span>, we can't really see the main character as anything but a desperate self-promoter. (Even this third act, though, comes with its own astonishing set-pieces, like a scene in which Germans from both the Eastern and Western parts of the country storm Stasi headquarters in liberation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, trashing its hallways and offices to the invigorating strains of an angry punk band. I need to get my hands on this soundtrack.)<br />
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Carlos isn't the only character to indulge in the hedonistic pleasures of a terrorist lifestyle; the compelling theory that underlines the often-slapdash carnage in <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> is that, for audiences today, terrorism is rock and roll. (In a way, <span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> is like the cinematic manifestation of the theories elucidated in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dream Life</span>, J. Hoberman's fantastic book on how politics and the media have become inextricably intertwined over the last six decades.) Most obviously besides Carlos, there is his East German counterpart Johannes, both of whom supply arms to the East German government. Debilitatingly drunk most of the time, Johannes enjoys the sexual favors of two prostitutes obviously hired by the Stasi to act as spies on him and Carlos (the movie's ugliest scene: Carlos sexually manhandling one of these unwitting political courtesans), but he sporadically also seems to realize how fully he is betraying the well-being of his home country. <br />
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Just as tellingly, Carlos's cravings for notorious celebrity are reflected by his cohorts during the sprawling OPEC raid that comprises the movie's centerpiece. During this ninety-minute sequence, Carlos is tasked with leading a mission that would result in the kidnapping of OPEC ambassadors from Middle Eastern nations during a conference in Copenhagen, thus forcing the ambassadors' home nations to abide by the Palestinian Liberation Struggle's demands. Ultimately finding themselves in an unmanageable situation, Carlos gives in to the compromises offered by Algeria's moderate government (and accepts their hefty financial compensation) to the vociferous protests of his terrorist cohorts. But, almost inevitably, as they are driven to an airport in limousines, Carlos as well as his previously outraged compatriots smile and wave for the ubiquitous cameras of newspapers and TV stations, apparently unable to resist the fame that accompanies grandiose bloodshed carried out under the name of “liberation.”<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> is careful not to decry the Palestinian struggle itself—it prefers to withhold any explicit interjection regarding the validity of their mission (or of other contemporary armed revolutionaries). The movie is, instead, a criticism of murderers (or “executioners,” as Carlos is called at one point by his Palestinian superior) who use political slogans to justify their actions. By the end of the movie, even Carlos seems to realize this: after undergoing foolishly vain liposuction surgery and suffering from horrendously painful testicular cancer, he appears to breathe a sigh of relief as he's finally apprehended by the French police, seemingly happy that the entire charade has come to an end. <br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Carlos</span> could have suffered from its central contradiction: how to ruthlessly condemn its main character for almost six hours and simultaneously make him irresistibly attractive? (The movie would fail if we weren't repulsed by and enamored with Carlos at the same time.) Much of the credit, of course, goes to Edgar Ramirez's lead performance, which is naturally magnetic but unafraid to take the character into extremely unpleasant depths of chauvinism and violence. And Assayas, too, orchestrating this sprawling firestorm, walks this tightrope with sublime dexterity: he conveys violence and terrorism with all of their necessary absurdity, revulsion, cruelty, romanticism, energy, sexiness, and evil; he makes us realize that real-world sociopolitical intrigue carries more weight and intensity than any fictional action movie, and reminds us that happy endings (in this context) are fabrications unavailable to us in reality.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">5. I Am Love</span> (d. Luca Guadagnino, Italy)<br />
<span style="font-style: italic;">I Am Love</span> has the best performance given by anybody in 2010 (by Tilda Swinton), the best musical score (comprised of snippets from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams' works), the best opening credits sequence, and the best sex scenes. (That last distinction may seem like a juvenile compliment, but Roger Ebert makes the point that Tilda Swinton, often called upon to portray sexually active women onscreen, embodies that sexuality differently with each character, realizing that carnality is as deeply personal as speech or gesticulation or subtle indicators of emotion. The sex in <span style="font-style: italic;">I Am Love</span> is so overpowering because it makes us realize <span style="font-style: italic;">more</span> about these characters, unlike the sex scenes in most movies.) If the movie's not higher on this list, that's mostly because it's the kind of film that is transfixing when you watch it but kind of silly in retrospect; your esteem for it will likely depend on how willing you are to forgive the filmmakers for their unabashed indulgence in cinematic sensationalism.<br />
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Parallels to earlier masterworks are unavoidable: most obvious, perhaps, is Luchino Visconti's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Leopard</span> (also a movie about the collapse of traditional Italian bourgeois morality), but <span style="font-style: italic;">I Am Love</span> also tips its hat towards the operatic melodramas of Douglas Sirk. At first, I thought this comparison was unflattering towards <span style="font-style: italic;">I Am Love</span>; after all, beyond his candy-colored visuals and sweeping über-romantic tone, Sirk's real achievement was his passionate subversiveness, his ability to convey unspeakable sexual desires solely through form and elusive symbolism. <span style="font-style: italic;">I Am Love</span> at first seems to contain little subversiveness (it is, essentially, the tale of a Russian-born matriarch of a wealthy Italian family who irresistibly gives in to an affair with a much younger, and much poorer, friend of her son's), but it may require a second look. Repressed homosexuality, xenophobia, incest, helpless lust towards something that one knows is unattainable: these things are hinted at, suggested through brief looks and certain inflections in dialogue readings, but rarely exposited clearly. Subversive, indeed.<br />
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What makes the movie silly (if it is)? Maybe, I thought initially, its complete emotional extravagance, its giddily dramatic evocations of lustful human relationships, the kind of grandiloquent symbolism that includes flowers waving and bees pollinating as two characters have sex on a field of grass. On the other hand, after all, the film's director, Luca Guadagnino, and Swinton had been intending to make what they deemed a “sensation film” for years (that intention is right there in the title), and that kind of hyperbolic sensationalism does evoke, quite nicely, the singleminded bliss that accompanies a new sexual relationship. Maybe, then, the movie isn't silly at all—maybe what's off-putting about it is the result of the audience (that is to say, me) and not the film. So few movies now are willing to convey love or sex unabashedly, without restraint, without some kind of ironic self-commentary; perhaps we've become inured to a postmodern cynicism that teaches us to respond to sincere proclamations of love skeptically (at least in cinema). <span style="font-style: italic;">I Am Love</span> may be trying to rectify that, and even though its ending is too grandiose, too schematic, and too aggressively climactic for my tastes, it nonetheless has a point: love <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span> make any kind of sacrifice worth it, even the kind of sacrifice that dissolves familial, financial, and social well-being. I realize how hokey that sounds, and I could try to contradict such an emphatically romantic conclusion with some cold-hearted postmodern rationale, but what's the point? The title is apt; the movie is love; I can't compete with that.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">6. Blue Valentine</span> (d. Derek Cianfrance, USA)<br />
On paper, <span style="font-style: italic;">Blue Valentine</span> may have read more like a blueprint than a movie: its achronological structure, which shuffles back and forth in time to relate to us the violent collapse of a relationship, is a little too schematic. These painful (or, sometimes, blissful) domestic scenes could have come off as little more than pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. So the fact that the finished product is overwhelmingly emotional—the whole thing teems with passionate sincerity—is a testament to the care, creativity, and dedication brought to the filmmaking process by everyone involved.<br />
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I remember seeing <span style="font-style: italic;">Scenes from a Marriage</span> years ago at a time in my life when, personally, its sentiments and motivations resonated deeply with me. I'm not always the greatest Ingmar Bergman fan and, admittedly, <span style="font-style: italic;">Scenes from a Marriage</span> displays some of the greatest faults I find in his filmmaking (like a stagebound theatricality, an overly-scripted nature that contradicts his attempted profound impressionism, and a redundant and didactic enunciation of themes that could be conveyed more succinctly through visuals). But no one watches movies with complete objectivity (nor should they)—especially not a movie as unabashedly emotional as Bergman's. The flaws I detected meant nothing to me when I watched the film; what really mattered was that Bergman, it seemed, empathized with a very recent and very difficult experience of my own, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Scenes from a Marriage</span> constituted a compassionate and humane form of reassurance. The movie is raw, passionate, turbulent (at least in Bergman's own highbrow way); it felt like it was made to console viewers who were dealing with their own recent emotional wounds, to let them know that they were not alone.<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Blue Valentine</span> represented almost the same exact experience for me when I watched it last November: I can complain of its overly scripted nature, but that means nothing in comparison to the semi-cathartic experience I had while watching it. I've never been married, and no relationship I've been in has disintegrated as violently as the one between Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams' characters; but a recent breakup after a long relationship meant that I could relate, with almost uncanny and painful intimacy, to much of what happened onscreen. This is a difficult, and ultimately a bravely sincere, endeavor for a filmmaker to undertake: the cinematic equivalent of tough love. You may not enjoy watching it, but when it's over, the scars it inflicts feel liberating.<br />
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Much of the credit goes to Gosling and Williams, two of the best actors working today, who embody these characters with a lived-in subtlety that allows their relationship to avoid grungy sentimentality. And while I usually don't like the kind of shaky handheld 16mm camerawork employed here (by cinematographer Andrij Parekh)—it sometimes feels like a too-lazy substitution for gritty naturalism—it must be admitted that it's the perfect visual manifestation for these characters' states of mind. (It also turns the lengthy sequence set in an outer-space-themed suite at a fantasy hotel into the most hellish embodiment of despair and anger seen in any movie from 2010.) So even viewers who don't have any recent emotional traumas to reflect back onto the film have much to appreciate: a rawness and a sincerity that are uncommon for movies of any kind (but especially for American indie dramas, which are too often defined by cutesiness and predictability). <br />
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The end of the movie is more than simply ambiguous: it barely seems to be an ending at all, as it leaves these characters in an almost-cruel state of suspended animation. But, if the ending is at first disappointing (either because of or despite the fact that it's so tragically sad), its brutal open-endedness ultimately seems appropriate: whatever happens to them after the movie is over, they will suffer, they will recover, and the cycle will repeat itself again.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">7. Vincere</span> (d. Marco Bellocchio, Italy/France)<br />
The second great Italian movie of the year is veteran filmmaker Marco Bellocchio's opulent historical biography of Ida Dalser—a passionate, proud woman who (nobly and foolishly) dedicates herself singlemindedly to those whom she loves. Her tragedy was to fall hopelessly in love with Benito Mussollini in the years before the first World War, when he was dark and handsome and politically idealistic. She bears him a son; Mussollini goes off to fight for the army, then returns to lead Italy into turmoil and tyranny. They are reunited years later, after he has become a political demigod and (more tragically in Ida's view) after he has married someone else and started a family. Ida—still enamored with the dictator despite his loathsome transformation—is not content to part ways, nor simply to be his mistress. She demands recognition for herself and for their son; before long, with the powers of Italy's fascist state behind him, Mussollini has her locked up in an insane asylum, and has their son shipped off to an orphanage.<br />
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Bellocchio's sympathy is entirely with Ida: she may be self-destructively in love, but she's also resourceful, proud, carrying herself with dignity even through suffering. (I've never seen another performance that so closely resembles Maria Falconetti's in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Passion of Joan of Arc</span>—as Ida Dalser, Giovanna Mezzogiorno owns every single close-up she's given.) When, during a dreamlike snowfall, she climbs the gates of the mental institution that has imprisoned her, disseminating pamphlets that declaim her true identity as Mussollini's lover, Bellocchio treats it as her own (small) personal victory: a triumphant declaration of the truth that is a testament to both her love and her ferocity. Her greatest self-sacrifice comes later in the film, though, when she realizes that she must behave timidly in the insane asylum in order to be released and reunite with her son—a sacrifice she makes in the name of familial love.<br />
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Bellocchio treats Mussollini with palpable disdain; he's not at all concerned with this character, with the insecurities and delusions that led him to play second fiddle to Hitler. This could have been a shortcoming in other, more historically-minded dramas, but Bellocchio isn't exactly concerned with the sociohistorical circumstances of Italian fascism per se. He's more fascinated by emotional and sexual fascism, and by political chauvinism in general: Mussollini is portrayed predominantly as a self-involved bully, whose callous treatment of Ida points towards his desire to inflate his own self-importance in any way possible (politically and sexually most of all). This is firmly established in the movie's opening scene: during a political meeting early in his career, Mussollini gives God three minutes to strike him dead; his survival is presumably proof of God's nonexistence, or of Mussollini's self-perceived superiority over Him. Bellocchio's underlying theme is actually pretty ballsy, especially for a political state that continues to be mired in corruption and nepotism: men in positions of political power may use their authority merely as extensions of their personal and social egoism.<br />
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Cleverly, in the second half of the film, we only see Mussollini in newsreels and film footage, as the actor portraying him, Filippo Timi, vanishes from the film for a while. (He returns towards the end as Mussollini and Ida's full-grown son, Benito Albino—which is itself a canny reflection of how tragically and how completely the son has transformed into a warped byproduct of his father's cruelties and dementias.) By portraying Mussollini only as a black-and-white mediated image, Bellocchio not only gets around the problematic issue of portraying an older, bloated, more rabid incarnation of Mussolini's earlier self; he also indicates the significant role that the cinema plays in the personal and political lives of Italian citizens post-World War II (or for any modern society since the early twentieth century). Early in the movie, a propaganda short at a small theater in Rome instigates a violent riot between Mussollini's supporters and opponents; later in the film, a screening of Chaplin's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Kid</span> at Ida's mental institution brings her to tears. Other snippets of early silent cinema make their way into <span style="font-style: italic;">Vincere</span>. This isn't even to mention how unabashedly Bellocchio models this movie after the opulent, larger-than-life qualities of silent cinema (including long dialogue-free stretches, booming orchestral music, titles and icons splayed across the screen—only slightly distracting in their obvious computer-generated origins—and, again, Mezzogiorno's iconic performance, delivered through an uncommonly high number of close-ups). The cinematic audiences in <span style="font-style: italic;">Vincere</span>, to a large extent, base their opinions on contemporary Italian politics on the portrayals and images they see in newsreels and movies. Cinema also constitutes the only link between Ida and Mussollini for the second half of their lives—it's her way to see and hear him, to “be with him”—and, as Rob Nelson points out in his <span style="font-style: italic;">Village Voice</span> review, the cinema may mark Ida's real victory at the end of the film, as she finally is able to tell her story via the attention of a film camera. <span style="font-style: italic;">Vincere</span> acts as an unexpected corollary to <span style="font-style: italic;">Inglourious Basterds</span>, then—another pseudo-historical movie about the extent to which we fashion ourselves and our societies' pasts (and presents) based on things we see on movie screens. But while both movies are equally bombastic, Tarantino's sincerity towards his characters (scant though it may be, he <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span> identify with the character of Shosanna) can't compare to Bellocchio's idolizing commemoration of Ida Dalser. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Pby-zLGxYgMidLkHlHXvaDNsBzqk68loUEdLLpgDYCN6d-07FMH0PggoeAFNiml3gdAcl1cwkBQtDghEaj7km5X9lbyaH_Cw4U67VwsQmoEIBh82iLVuMKhYEebz8ZKIH-7Ikvmy_g4/s1600/mother.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Pby-zLGxYgMidLkHlHXvaDNsBzqk68loUEdLLpgDYCN6d-07FMH0PggoeAFNiml3gdAcl1cwkBQtDghEaj7km5X9lbyaH_Cw4U67VwsQmoEIBh82iLVuMKhYEebz8ZKIH-7Ikvmy_g4/s400/mother.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7JaZkynVv5VaNsWOoDsyw0fqvmvmr8aGjB0T77rYoV9OP50nLX3NtGWxxUvSWJlD0hl8SvsQPZpSlSEmedknyhNn07Y-cs7P1XGhq8wHB5btvh0jY1VsCROobmhh84k07KP2rWXSB1dw/s1600/mother.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><span style="font-weight: bold;">8. Mother</span> (d. Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)<br />
If a classicist of dramatic irony—say, O. Henry or Guy de Maupassant—wrote violent crime stories, they may have resembled Bong Joon-ho's <span style="font-style: italic;">Mother</span>, a movie that seems like a typical (though stylish) genre exercise until its painfully ironic final half-hour. The celebrated director of <span style="font-style: italic;">Memories of Murder</span> (which I haven't seen, sadly) and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Host </span>(a gleefully subversive monster movie) takes us to a sordid small town where a neighborhood girl has recently been murdered. All evidence points to a mentally-challenged young man who responds to the mocking taunts of neighborhood kids with sudden spurts of violence. But the movie is really about the attempts by the man's severely-devoted mother to prove his innocence, especially after the local police force and a surreally smarmy defense lawyer prove unwilling to seriously investigate the case.<br />
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Incest is suggested between mother and son (they sleep in the same twin-sized bed on the floor), and her devotion towards him borders on the maniacal: in the opening scene, for example, she nearly slices off her finger while cutting up some roots because she's so concerned with her son crossing the street safely. But she's never really vilified: we see her primarily as a single mother doing what she can to protect her child, who has been dealt a difficult life. Hence the ironic twist at the end of the movie, which I wouldn't dream of giving away: an unforgivable act of violence, a torrent of shame and confusion and self-victimization. The preponderance of idiotic twist endings over the last decade can make you forget how powerful they can be when they're done well: everything you thought you knew about the characters and their relationships for 90 minutes is overturned by the ensuing thirty.<br />
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More than anything else, <span style="font-style: italic;">Mother</span> is a stylistic achievement for Bong: he veers from off-kilter surrealism to gritty naturalism to poetic despair sometimes within a single scene, and he handles the movie's suspenseful setpieces with flawless precision. (A scene in which the mother hides in the closet of her son's best friend while he and a lover sleep on the floor might make you forget to breathe; a flashback to the murder of the young girl that instigates this story is at once fantastically gorgeous and absolutely horrific.) It's style over substance, at times to its detriment: the opening and closing scenes, which act as bookends, are beautiful and strange but don't really say very much about what the titular character has gone through. Most of the time, though, Bong's film is ingenious, unique, clever, and haunting—thrilling as much for its sheer entertainment as for its audacious manipulations of form and narrative.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">9. Restrepo</span> (d. Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger, USA)<br />
The scariest movie of the year? <span style="font-style: italic;">Restrepo</span> addresses the War in Afghanistan through distanced observation, following a single company of the American military stationed in Afghanistan's Korangal Valley (described by a number of authoritative voices as the scariest place on earth) throughout its fifteen-month assignment. We bear witness to firefights, although the Taliban fighters remain almost entirely unseen throughout the movie (as they do, in fact, for the American soldiers themselves); we observe the Americans biding time, tensely venturing through the arid valley, bonding, talking about the war and their families, going through daily routines; we watch the captain of the regiment try to relate to a group of local farmers (who themselves are caught in a tug-of-war between the American military and the omnipresent Taliban) and we are shocked and dismayed by the seemingly unbridgeable rift between the captain and the beleaguered Afghans. <br />
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These observations are assembled into seemingly chronological order, aside from a series of first-person interviews conducted with the American soldiers at an Italian base after the end of their service. Things happen—at times traumatic, hopeless things—and in the very next scene the soldiers are simply moving on, doing what they have to do. What other choice do they have? There is no narrative arc to the movie, no convenient logic (rising action, climax, denouement, etc.) to systematize the order of events. This is mostly a benefit rather than a drawback: while the movie is not structured like most narrative films (and the majority of documentaries, it must be said, <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span> act as narrative films), this somewhat disorganized feel, this most basic compounding of events, places us in an aimless swath of time that parallels the uncertainty experienced by the soldiers onscreen.<br />
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This organizing structure, along with Tim Hetherington's and Sebastian Junger's unwillingness to impose their own editorial voices into the film, also means that <span style="font-style: italic;">Restrepo</span> is not political in nature. It doesn't rationalize or condemn the things that the soldiers have to do; conservatives and liberals could watch the movie and presumably walk away from it with their opinions unchanged (although the opposite response is certainly also feasible). The approach taken by Hetherington and Junger is more sympathetic: they identify with the soldiers being placed in this drastic situation, having no choice but to survive and defend themselves. Political motivations have little credence for them; even the captain of their outfit motivates them not by convincing them of the justness of their cause, but by reminding them that they are surrounded by enemies who want to kill them, and that they simply have to survive. <br />
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The movie almost automatically carries with it immense sociological and historical value. I can think of few war documentaries that simply hope to place us alongside the soldiers, to make us experience their anxieties without explaining or editorializing them; most documentarians approaching a project like this would develop their thematic talking points and organize their movies around them. (Even a movie as great as <span style="font-style: italic;">No End in Sight</span> adopts this technique.) <span style="font-style: italic;">Restrepo</span> is even trickier because it tackles the War in Afghanistan, an issue that seems more abstract—less fathomable—among the American populace than the War in Iraq. The War in Iraq may be defended by conservatives or lambasted by liberals for its vague motives (preemptive strike? war on tyranny? terror?) and neo-imperialism; the War in Afghanistan, though, seems to have arisen out of clear and verifiable facts, yet simultaneously seems unresolvable. Again, these opinions are neither voiced nor refuted by <span style="font-style: italic;">Restrepo</span>; it simply hopes to provide us with empirical evidence, and (perhaps) to encourage political debate once the movie is over.<br />
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It seems tacky to lionize the efforts of the filmmakers when the entire movie is about the valor and courage of the soldiers—and, of course, our admiration and respect should go predominantly to the men and women onscreen, and thereafter to those behind the camera—but it still should be said that journalistic photographer Hetherington and author Junger undertook this project at great personal risk, and furthermore completely eliminate themselves as explicit authorial voices from the movie itself. (Unlike, say, Michael Moore, Bill Maher, or even Sacha Baron Cohen, all of whom would call emphatic attention to the dangerous and confrontational situations in which they place themselves.) The risks undergone by Hetherington and Junger for the sake of objective journalistic reporting are sadly reified by Hetherington's recent death while covering the rebellion in Misrata, Libya (in an attack that also killed photographer Chris Hondros). At a time when most documentaries feel compelled to offer self-involved opinions on divisive issues, <span style="font-style: italic;">Restrepo</span>'s main achievement may be its resolute desire to remain objective, to observe and convey—to provide photojournalism of the most vital and respectful sort.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">10. A Prophet </span>(d. Jacques Audiard, France/Italy)<br />
I don't know if we really need more gritty crime stories about small-time hoods who rise to gangster stardom in microcosmic prisons, but if such stories are done as well as <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span>, I guess we can't complain. Jacques Audiard—the propulsive, stylish, intuitive director of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Beat That My Heart Skipped</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Read My Lips</span>—helms <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span> as though it were his <span style="font-style: italic;">Mean Streets</span>: in every scene, with every shot, it's as though Audiard is trying to make a name for himself. He's directed six movies, but he treats <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span> like it's his breakthrough—and, given the moderate stateside success of the movie, maybe it is (in a monetary sense, anyway).<br />
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Tahar Rahim gives an incredible performance as Malik El Djebena, a poor Parisian Muslim of Arab descent who is sentenced to six years in prison for, it seems, scuffling with some cops (a petty offense he nonetheless claims he did not commit). In <span style="font-style: italic;">The Shawshank Redemption</span>, Tim Robbins's character claims it took going to prison to actually turn him into a criminal; too bad there's not a single believable moment in that entire movie. <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span>, though, gives actualization to that idea (as have numerous other prison movies and TV shows): an insecure loser outside of the joint, Malik is approached by a group of menacing Corsican thugs almost as soon as he's imprisoned, and is forced to do their bidding by a terrifyingly unpredictable crimelord named César (who simultaneously serves as the movie's supervillain and father figure). At first a gutless errand boy who is manipulated due to his inexperience and his desperation to survive, Malik quickly ascends to the top of this prison hierarchy, thanks to the movie's most grueling scene: the assassination of a fellow Muslim inmate, carried out by a razor blade concealed in Malik's mouth. <br />
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In epic fashion, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet </span>details Malik's transformation from ordinary street kid to indomitable gangster. Beyond this compelling story and Audiard's incredible stylistic verve, there's actually little going on in <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span>: if the movie is going for an allegorical portrayal of ethnic strife in modern Paris, it doesn't achieve it, and it doesn't really say anything about the allure or capitalistic motivation of violence, aside from the fact that you do what you have to do to survive. (One late scene, in which Malik solidifies his super-criminal status, actually seems to unequivocally glorify violence.) Thematically speaking, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span> is most interesting when it establishes how completely criminals are made by societal and economic forces, not by inherent personality: there's no doubt, by the end of the movie, that Malik is pressured into drug-dealing, assassination, and coldhearted brutality simply because the economic and ethnic stratification of modern Paris have led him into a situation where no other recourses are available to him. <br />
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If the movie is somewhat simple conceptually, it is endlessly compelling on a narrative and aesthetic level. At times, we may accuse Audiard (perhaps unfairly) of trying too hard: some of his stylistic flourishes (such as surreal visitations by the ghost of a man he's killed, or dreamlike visions of wild deer) come off as hokey and distracting instead of powerful. (At the same time, such sporadic surrealism distinguishes <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet </span>from the glut of prison-set films and television shows that are already available to us.) But most often, this is a story told as powerfully and viscerally as powerful, observing characters' actions with a claustrophobic intensity (the cells that comprise the movie's setting are fully felt) yet hesitant to vilify or glamorize them. When César—who commits hideous acts of brutality throughout much of the movie—realizes that his reign over this prison kingdom has come to an end, we are surprised to find ourselves suddenly sympathizing with him; and when Malik kills his fellow prisoner (who is at first vilified, in predictably homophobic fashion, because of his predilection for screwing young male inmates), this victim reveals a shy, tender side that makes Malik's messy attempted throat-slitting that much more unbearable. The characterizations are almost too convenient, too heavily mapped-out to come off as realistic; but in the larger-than-life, bombastic style of <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span>, they seem to work nonetheless.<br />
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In retrospect, <span style="font-style: italic;">A Prophet</span> seems to work so well almost in spite of itself. It makes numerous mistakes, it missteps too often, and its moralism is almost adolescently pat. So why do I still remember it as such a powerful experience? The main reason, I think, is Tahar Rahim's lead performance, which is awkward, timid, shy, internalized—the exact opposite of what we would expect from such a violent and visceral character study. We watch him and we're willing to overlook the flaws that Audiard commits behind the camera: we believe that we're watching a genuine character's transformation, almost against our better judgment. It may not be an exaggeration to claim that Rahim singlehandedly turns a mediocre movie into an almost-great one, and if he doesn't experience a long and stellar career, it will be a travesty. (I was going to say a crime; then thought better about ending this short response with such a hideous pun...)<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">The Next Ten:</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Winter's Bone</span> walks the difficult tightrope of offering us access into a gritty, poverty-stricken, violent world without indulging in sordid slum glamour. It excels particularly as an unflinching character study, elevated by a knockout performance by Jennifer Lawrence.<br />
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It feels almost routine by now to place <span style="font-weight: bold;">Toy Story 3 </span>so high on this list: the reliably solid craftsmanship and heartfelt emotion of Pixar's films continue at an impressive level, even if this sequel feels less ambitious or influential than <span style="font-style: italic;">Wall-E</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Up</span>. But it's nonetheless a perfect conclusion to the trilogy, with an appropriately wistful finale and a melancholy world-weariness that would be affecting in any film (but especially so in one that centers around an ensemble of plastic figurines).<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">White Material</span> may be a subpar Claire Denis movie (in my opinion), but a lesser film made by her is still better than most other movies out there. She and Isabelle Huppert, incredible as always, make an ideal pair: they turn the central character in <span style="font-style: italic;">White Material</span>, a French heiress to a wealthy coffee plantation in an unnamed African country, into a fascinating, enigmatic contradiction. As Civil War erupts around her plantation, Huppert's headstrong businesswoman remains behind to rescue the floundering company: she's naïve and brilliant at the same time, manipulative and sensitive, a Frenchwoman and an expatriate deeply in love with her adopted land. The spell that Denis casts here may be less transfixing (perhaps because it's more direct) than in <span style="font-style: italic;">L'Intrus</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">35 Shots of Rum</span>, but it's still a haunting, gorgeous dreamscape of a movie. <br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">The King's Speech</span> may have won Best Picture at the Oscars this year—an achievement that would usually inspire severe skepticism on my behalf—but what's pleasantly surprising about the movie is how small and tightly focused it is. It may turn a momentous and destructive period of modern history into the inspiring story of one man's self-actualization, but it also intelligently comprehends the vital role that mediation plays in modern politics, and admirably allows its central character to remain difficult and unapproachable for much of its running time. Also, a rousing and inspirational climax is usually not a selling point with me, but this king's speech, when it finally arrives, is a flawless lesson in how to use aural and visual cinematic form in order to evoke an emotional response in an audience.<br />
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David O. Russell's <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Fighter</span> should be nothing more than a cliched biopic about a boxer who struggles against the odds; its storyline and screenplay suggest a rote, rousing sports movie that offers its cast a number of meaty showboating performances. But Russell and his crew are too sensitive, and his cast is too attuned to the subtleties of this story, to let the movie lapse into mindless predictability. At its best it portrays a complex and ambitious intersection of themes—athleticism, visual self-mediation, drug addiction, the self-destructive (and potentially redemptive) nature of family, class stratification, the elusive nature of memory—with a visceral force that makes it into the year's most rousing hybridization of genre entertainment and self-proclaimed ideas. <br />
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The best parts of <span style="font-weight: bold;">Exit Through the Gift Shop</span> are the least self-consciously clever ones: moments that simply allow us to observe the practice, appreciation, and precarious nature of street art, made by somebody who should know these topics better than anyone else (the notorious and ingenious street artist Banksy, who appears in this movie's interviews as a shadowy, voice-manipulated cypher). But even the less exciting parts of <span style="font-style: italic;">Exit Through the Gift Shop </span>are intellectually stimulating, as this pseudo-documentary turns into a pranksterish commentary on the facile nature of artistic celebrity. Of all the documentaries this year that pondered the fact-and-fiction dichotomy, this may be the only one that has a clear, thought-provoking motivation for its sly manipulation of the truth.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Shutter Island</span> basically amounts to Martin Scorsese dicking around in the stylistic sandbox that Hollywood has to offer: despite its artsy (and viscerally invigorating) flashbacks to the traumas of World War II, the movie is really just an excuse for Scorsese to deconstruct the editing and narrative structures that American movies are so accustomed to. As such, it's incredibly exciting—a trippy indulgence in formal insanity that's most successful only if it's never taken remotely seriously. In other words, the Rubik's-cube apex of style over substance, and maybe only Scorsese could make this tomfoolery so effective.<br />
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I'm not buying what the critics have told us: <span style="font-weight: bold;">The Social Network</span> is not an age-defining encapsulation of what it means to be a young person born in the digital generation. I'm not even entirely sure the movie tells us anything that any regular Facebook user couldn't already acknowledge intuitively. But the movie is a stylish, intense, perfectly-acted tragedy of self-destructive hubris and capitalistic competition. Aaron Sorkin's script sometimes seems a little too clever (in real life, I don't think anyone ever recites one-liners that conveniently summarize their characters' emotional mindstates and psychological motivations, snappy though those one-liners may be), but even that indulgent cleverness may have a purpose: only on social networking sites can people formulate their own snappy dialogue for hours before they recite it.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Marwencol</span> doesn't do anything new with the documentary format, but its story is enough to make it immensely powerful: it's about Mark Hogancamp, a man who suffered a brutal beating from five assailants outside of a bar, and (after months of recovering from severe brain damage) creates an alternate world named “Marwencol” in his backyard. Marwencol is a one-sixth-scale recreation of a (wholly fabricated) small French town during World War II, populated by dolls and plastic toys (most of whom are modeled after Mark's loved ones and acquaintances) who enact a fantasy story involving villainous S.S. agents and voluptuous Belgian witches, dreamy love stories and violent, torturous treachery. To the movie's credit, it never tries to psychologize Mark's artistic “second life,” as he terms it: it simply observes Mark after this recovery, trying to deal with the anger and fear that have afflicted him since the attack, and it quietly appreciates the redemptive power of art. It may be formally unspectacular, but it does what more documentaries should do: it makes us fully experience the complex and overwhelming mysteries of human life, without trying to simplistically explain them away.<br />
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Finally, <span style="font-weight: bold;">Splice</span> distinguishes itself as the best cheesy idea-driven horror movie of the year: fans of <span style="font-style: italic;">Black Swan</span> should watch this movie to discover what trippy psychosexual monstrosities actually look like. Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley play two genetic scientists, an unmarried couple who successfully infuse human DNA with that of other organisms in order to make an entirely new creature. The movie's ideas about parenthood, incest, human ingenuity and divine retribution are only half-formulated, but they're fascinating nonetheless. The director, Vincenzo Natali, also made 1997's <span style="font-style: italic;">Cube</span>, another film marked by a fantastic idea that was only partly realized; <span style="font-style: italic;">Splice</span> at least marks a maturation in the director's career, though he has yet to make a movie in which the execution equals the potential of its premise.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7820304927160662339.post-26612775171747939642011-03-21T13:55:00.038-05:002012-01-25T17:24:58.197-06:00Confessing to the Camera: Ulrich Seidl's 'Jesus, You Know'<span style="font-style: italic;">While recently perusing some past papers, I came across this essay, which I delivered at a conference at Columbia University in March 2010. I decided to post it here, mostly since Seidl's film continues to fascinate me, though it's been at least a year since I've seen it.</span><br />
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<blockquote>Lord, I want to thank you for this film. I want to thank you for the shoot. Everything went so well. I want to thank you for all the happiness involved. We all made this film in honor of you. Let me pray for every single person who watches this film, may they be willing to encounter you in a new way. May they gain a new vision of you. </blockquote> – Elfriede Ahmad, <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span><br />
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<blockquote>Lord, I dedicate this project to your cross, the cross of victory... I profess that you, Jesus Christ, you are our Lord and our living God, that are you are the master of this film, the master of Austria. I profess that you want to do something completely new with this film, something that no one can foresee or predict. Lord, you can do it.</blockquote> – Hans-Jurgen Eder, <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Ulrich Seidl's 2003 documentary (or docudrama, or docu-something) <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> begins with these words, intoned by two supplicants addressing the camera. In both instances, the speakers are viewed in a static shot from a frontal perspective, forming a rigidly symmetrical composition that places each individual in the midst of a network of vanishing parallel lines (pews stretching into the distance in the first case, two sets of votive candles in the second). This is an overarching aesthetic stricture that will reappear often in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>—a stylistic motif suggesting, perhaps, that a rigorous and coldly composed graphic network is the clearest way to denote the presence of a divine being. <br />
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But what divine being is this? If one detects a certain narcissism in the conflation between omniscient auteur and omniscient God in the film's opening lines, this, too, is a theme that will reappear often in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> (albeit implicitly). While the film is ostensibly a somber look at increasing secularization in Austrian Catholic churches in the modern age—it observes the prayers of devout individuals in an age that increasingly devalues religious morality—there is also the sense that Seidl smuggles editorial subversion of these themes into the film, positing traditional religious icons and rituals as empty objects offering nothing but emptiness and false hope. Indeed, the minimalist, spare aesthetic of the film—entirely static shots filming individuals from a close frontal perspective as they offer prayers to Jesus (or more accurately, to the audience; or even more accurately, to the camera)—would seem to suppress Seidl's authorial intervention entirely, allowing viewers to come to their own conclusions about his sincerity (or lack thereof) regarding his religious subjects. But as we will see, <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> offers an extraordinary play with spectatorial identification, the act of visual mediation, and the role of the cinematic author, all of which serve to form an incredibly multivalent view of modern religion.<br />
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The sociohistorical context of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> is a continuing and accelerating trend of secularization in Austria. In 2001, a census report listed 11.5 percent of Austria's population (approximately 915,000 citizens) as regularly attending Sunday mass. As of the end of 2005, according to a report released by the Catholic Church of Austria itself, that number had fallen to nine percent of the total population, or approximately 750,000 citizens, a number that has continued to decline over the last five years. <br />
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Ulrich Seidl, the director of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>, is himself the product of a traditional Catholic upbringing, yet he's also a controversial maverick on the European art cinema scene. His 2007 fiction film <span style="font-style: italic;">Import/Export </span>concerns two Ukrainian emigrants who experience brutal sexual degradation during their life-changing journeys; his 2001 fiction debut <span style="font-style: italic;">Dog Days</span> was described by the <span style="font-style: italic;">Village Voice</span> as a shining example of sadomiserablism; and his 1995 documentary <span style="font-style: italic;">Animal Love</span> was described by fellow provocateur Werner Herzog as “looking directly into hell in the cinema.” In addition to his willful wallowing in sadistic and shocking human behavior, Seidl is controversial for his aggressive blurring of the boundaries between fiction and documentary. “I don't make any difference between feature films and documentaries,” Seidl said in an interview printed in <span style="font-style: italic;">taz</span> magazine. “That's why the term 'staged reality' was coined. That means the people in my film are non-actors, but sometimes don't act that way. And that irritates some people. They want to think and see in tidy categories.”<br />
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<span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> as a whole will likely also irritate people who want to conceive of film in tidy categories. Although this “staged reality” offers no direct judgment upon its subjects as nobly devout or as foolishly naïve, Seidl's rigorous aesthetic and editing structures do convey subtle subversions of the characters' beliefs in an omnipresent and attentive deity. Seidl's editorial evasion is made doubly discomforting because we are offered access to such disturbingly personal information. The film is almost entirely a series of prayers delivered directly to the camera by real-life churchgoers (that is, as “real-life” as we may expect from a Seidl film). For them, during the act of filming, the presence of the camera has miraculously substituted itself for the presence of God. One woman tells the camera—tells us—about the crisis of faith experienced by her and her Muslim husband, a religious antagonism that is destroying their marriage; another distraughtly discusses her husband's infidelity and confesses that she has considered administering a lethal dose of poison to him; a man regrets how infrequently he saw his daughter after he and his wife divorced; and so on. The obvious emotional charge these prayers have for their speakers (and undoubtedly for the audience as well) makes it especially troubling when Seidl develops a sly exegetic counterpoint to his subjects' faith-based proclamations.<br />
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The primary way in which he achieves this subversion is by intercutting static (indeed, the camera never moves in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>) medium shots or close-ups of statues, altars, sculptures, murals, and other religious iconography into the subjects' prayers. Now, even such cut-ins could be interpreted as either affirmations of a benevolent divine force (represented through crucifixes, portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, etc.) or as evidence that modern organized religion (or at least the Roman Catholic Church in Austria) amounts to no more than empty signs and objects, mediated constructs, simulacra of religious forces that are meant to simplistically stand in for the real thing. We <span style="font-style: italic;">want</span> to believe in the presence of a divine listener because the plight of these individuals is so palpably real. During one man's discussion of the collapse of his family after he and his wife divorce, for example, Seidl cuts to a portrait of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, and we can hear church bells reverberating on the soundtrack; we want to believe that <span style="font-style: italic;">someone</span> is listening to this man's supplication (staged or no, there's nothing phony about it). We want to believe that those church bells are some kind of divine rejoinder to this man's prayer. Maybe they are.<br />
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But more often Seidl juxtaposes these onscreen prayers with ironic editorial counterpoints. For example, after one woman voices her desire to call her cheating husband and pose as her own imaginary paramour, Seidl cuts to an image of a man carefully unrolling a plush red carpet before a church's pulpit, suggesting that the operations of this church amount to no more than a meticulous performance, a show of religious ceremony. This idea is similarly, though more enigmatically, represented in several scenes that act as “interludes” between subjects' prayers: performances by church choirs staged (like almost every shot in the film) in a static, frontally direct, rigidly symmetrical composition. Though the performances of these hymns and chants are beautiful and sincerely performed—on their own, we would have no reason to question their sense of religious affirmation—within the context of the film they serve as simply more performances, staged in front of grandiose altars and reredos. But the clearest example of Seidl's veiled religion-as-performance subtext arrives when one of the onscreen supplicants, who also serves as caretaker at her church, begins scrubbing a large crucifix with a rag. At this moment, the divine import of religious imagery and the more pragmatic concerns that keep religious institutions functioning smoothly could not be more distantly separated. Furthermore, the existence of the crucifix here as an <span style="font-style: italic;">object</span>, a <span style="font-style: italic;">construct</span>, an adornment in need of constant upkeep, reminds us of the film itself as a mediated construct. While <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> is concerned with increasing secularization in Austria, with the emotional and ethical value of prayer, and with the very real hardships experienced by the individuals onscreen, it too ultimately cannot amount to more than an object—a thing—pieced together into a very specific arrangement by a sole overriding author. It cannot be a religious film, then; indeed, taken most purely, no film can be a religious film, since the transplantation of religious subjects into mediated objects necessitates an elimination of the theological ambiguity that must define every spiritual relic or experience. <br />
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This theological ambiguity may also be termed the “aura,” a concept that has been discussed by Walter Benjamin and Andre Bazin, among others. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin warns us of the loss of the artistic aura necessitated by the cinematic form. Since film, at both the level of production (the recording function) and of exhibition (the function of the projector), operates through an automatic mechanism rather than through human reproduction (or its context in a culturally validated gallery space), it loses the “aura” that had once been attained by painting, by sculpture, even by theatrical performance, with its actual presence of flesh-and-blood thespians. This aura that is conveyed by art (or, in Benjamin's estimation, <span style="font-style: italic;">used</span> to be) is akin to the aura that surrounds the religious icon: an awe in the presence of a symbolically-weighted artifact—in the first case, an awe for the transcendental skill of the painter or the sculptor; in the second case, an awe for the divine and intangible force the exists <span style="font-style: italic;">beyond</span> or is represented by the religious icon. Benjamin would likely agree with the interpretation that I have drawn from <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>: that no film can truly be a religious film, since the one necessarily dissipates the aura, while the other relies upon it for its existence.<br />
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Bazin would disagree, however. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he correlates the relatively young art form of cinema to the ancient Egyptian practice of “mummification”—not only as a literal practice, but also a figurative one, through painting and sculpture. In his theory, both cinema and ancient Egyptian art forms serve to immortalize the human body through art, to preserve one's physical presence through a visual likeness. Indeed, Bazin argues that in the fifteenth century, Western painting sought to achieve its fullest spiritual expression by imitating as closely as possible the outside world. Given this philosophy, cinema was not the <span style="font-style: italic;">loss</span> of the aura in art but the fullest achievement of it, the manner in which artists could most closely correlate their spiritual (creative) expression with an imitative likeness of reality. So, we have another contradiction which does not help us to resolve the ambivalence in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>: the visual representation of religious iconography in the film could either be a Benjaminesque condemnation of the loss of the aura through reproduction, or a Bazinesque respect for the transcendental power that can be attained through reproduction. (It is my interpretation, however, that Seidl aligns himself more closely to Benjamin, undercutting the potential “aura” these icons and supplicants <span style="font-style: italic;">could</span> have by juxtaposing them editorially.)<br />
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The question of the loss of the aura in visual reproduction is even further complicated by the fact that <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> is shot on digital video. In a way, this stylistic choice is necessitated by the shooting conditions of the film: recording extremely long takes in the low-light levels of church interiors (often at night), shooting on celluloid would have required elaborate lighting setups and cuts between reel changes that are counterintuitive to Seidl's spare aesthetic. But shooting on video achieves an added, some would say deleterious, effect. Cinematic purists have proclaimed, since the rise of videography especially in the 1990s but as early as the late 1970s, that only on celluloid can the “aura” of cinema actually be achieved. This art form was conceived and developed as the rapid movement of still frames imbued with a physical and chemical thickness struck by the interplay of light and matter itself; the projection of light through this physically thick, tangible substance miraculously embodied the movement of reality. It was (and is), then, an art form not only striking in its closeness to the physical world but powerful in its deviations from reality, in its graphic interplay of light and shadow and motion. Digital video, celluloid purists would say, removes cinema of its painterly aura by flattening its physical thickness (no longer chemicals reacting within a strip of celluloid, we now have only pixels logging binary information) and, unless the video is transferred back onto celluloid in postproduction, by removing it of its very tangibility and physicality during projection. Of course, a digital video when recorded or projected would still exist on a disc, a mini-cassette, etc., but this physicality is obviously different from a strip of celluloid several thousand feet in length. If my sympathies with the celluloid purists are noticeable here, so be it: even supporters of the digital revolution would likely concede that viewing celluloid through a film projector is a more “transcendental,” more oneiric, experience than seeing an image recorded and projected digitally. What's striking in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> is that Seidl seems to use the flatness and the muted colors of digital video as an essential component of the movie's bleak, spare aesthetic. Aided by his tyrannically symmetrical compositions, Seidl and his cameramen, Wolfgang Thaler and Jerzy Palacz, achieve a world that is oppressive, unexciting, and alienating. We may <span style="font-style: italic;">want</span> a certain aura to manifest itself for the subjects who pray onscreen, but we must admit that, even with its close-up cutaways to religious icons, this never happens throughout the course of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>.<br />
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Indeed, the gap between visual mediation and traditional religious morality is a recurring theme in the movie. If its opening words, quoted above, seem somewhat absurd in attributing authorship of this decidedly problematic film to Jesus, this unsettling disjunction, this disharmonious cohabitation, of religion and mediation is constantly reiterated by Seidl and by the supplicants onscreen. One woman claims that her husband “simply does not have the gift” for choosing the right television program while channel-surfing; he often turns to titillating talk shows that act as a “legitimization of sins and redemption” (she says). “The aura on those shows is just plain negative,” concludes this woman in a serendipitous coincidence. Later, a young man confesses that he watches television solely for the “pretty actresses” on the programs; these shows instill in him immoral thoughts that further make him question his purity and his faith, especially since these television-fueled fantasies inspire him to find sexual gratification in many biblical stories. The suggestion implicit within these prayers is that television—or the visual media more generally, given that the young man later claims that he envisions himself as a vengeful and absurdly virile hero from a Hollywood action movie—has replaced the church as the modern discourse for questions of morality, sexuality, and other existential crises. “Problems don't get discussed anymore,” says the woman whose husband watches those tawdry exposès, “but watched on TV.”<br />
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Perhaps one reason that visual mediation and traditional religious morality cannot coexist is the conflation of an omniscient auteur with an omniscient deity. It is a commonplace that the cinematic auteur reigns over his or her set with an all-powerful omnipotence, and in orchestrating a world that commonly dismantles the real-world “rules” of spatiotemporal linearity, it must be said that the filmmaker does act something like a microcosmic God, deciding for the audience what we will see (and hear), when, and in what manner. Seidl constantly troubles this notion throughout <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>, most simply through the ambiguous address of the prayers themselves. To whom are they addressed? Jesus, or a divine being, most directly—this is the basic mode of address in any prayer. Yet the supplicants in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> also direct their prayers towards the camera; although most of them look slightly offscreen while speaking (only one churchgoer directly, and unnervingly, returns the camera's gaze), the camera is nonetheless the only “presence” in the church during all of these individuals' monologues. So the camera and a divine presence are equated, but of course the audience and the camera are equated in <span style="font-style: italic;">any</span> act of cinematic spectatorship; this is what Christian Metz termed “primary identification” in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Imaginary Signifier</span>, the idea that the cinematic spectator regularly identifies with the disembodied camera as a distinct and sensing entity in itself. Yet if the spectator in the case of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> identifies with the disembodied camera through primary identification, we also identify with the “character” of Jesus Himself, whose perspective as addressee we inhabit during the onscreen supplications. This form of identification—our alliance with the perspective of not only the disembodied camera apparatus but with a distinct character's point of view—is termed by Metz “secondary identification.” The simultaneous coexistence of a primary and secondary mode of identification in <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>—a coexistence which is usually considered incredibly improbable in the cinema (a character <span style="font-style: italic;">as</span> the camera)—further refutes our unshakeable faith in the presence of a distinct and omnipotent receptive deity.<br />
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The prayers, then, are directed not only to a divine presence, not only to the camera, but resultantly to the cinematic audience as well, asserting <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span> as a divine and omniscient force. The supplicants' mode of address collapses into a spectatorial triumvirate of identification. Yet we must add one more overarching addressee to this already-complex system: Ulrich Seidl himself, who controls and observes their prayers, who (given his penchant for “staging” documentary material) perhaps had a hand in articulating the prayers themselves. It is he who, in editing these prayers together and infusing them with cutaways, truncating them, extending them, forming juxtapositional commentaries, receives and responds to their prayers. Regardless of the opening words with which I began this presentation, Jesus Christ is not the master of this film; Ulrich Seidl is.<br />
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The most definite manner in which we may notice Seidl's authorial predominance is, of course, through the rigid, unchanging, almost dogmatic aesthetic of the film. The camera does not move once during the entire documentary. Almost every composition observes the supplicants, choirs, or religious iconography from a frontally direct perspective, meticulously creating a symmetrical design that suffocates, dwarfs, and oppresses the onscreen subject. Most takes are very lengthy, with some single-shot supplications taking up over five minutes of screen time. <br />
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Why this draconic self-imposed aesthetic stricture? This kind of slow, cold, resolutely balanced style has often been equated with an inquiry into human despair or spiritual doubt in the history of the so-called “art cinema”; we may think of Carl Theodor Dreyer's austere philosophical penetration in <span style="font-style: italic;">Gertrud</span> (1964), Stanley Kubrick's bemused observations of societies going to hell in <span style="font-style: italic;">A Clockwork Orange</span> (1971) or <span style="font-style: italic;">Eyes Wide Shut</span> (1999), or Carlos Reygadas' compassionate yet distanced analyses of individuals tormented by a lack of faith in <span style="font-style: italic;">Japon</span> (2002) or <span style="font-style: italic;">Silent Light</span> (2007). (Indeed, Reygadas is likely the most spiritually rigorous filmmaker working today.) Such aesthetics equate the magisterial control of the auteur with the omniscient bird's-eye perspective of a divine being; they embody, to be overly aphoristic, symmetry-as-spirituality.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXcnuYt6QCB6SEpIHthXpult51SnDbz0uDPbmzK8i9eD_IbruOa0u-xi97TQT224-suXx_ceH3OPoKsPzdptku2gYP8TKj8xBi6MRQ5rUK9bYom-XoIKKZb4W2jwco_O5XnE4VDw4xAHs/s1600/Eyes+Wide+Shut+%25281999%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXcnuYt6QCB6SEpIHthXpult51SnDbz0uDPbmzK8i9eD_IbruOa0u-xi97TQT224-suXx_ceH3OPoKsPzdptku2gYP8TKj8xBi6MRQ5rUK9bYom-XoIKKZb4W2jwco_O5XnE4VDw4xAHs/s1600/Eyes+Wide+Shut+%25281999%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>The equation of such an aesthetic with cinematic spirituality is somewhat ironic, given Jean-Louis Baudry's assertion that it was precisely the cinema's multi-perspectivalism that inaugurated, for the first time, a transcendental spectator in the visual arts. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Baudry argues that, following the Cartesian perspectivalism that dominated the paintings of the Italian Renaissance—a perspective that grants a linear viewpoint of a closed-off insular compositional space, in which the dominant objects or subjects in the painting are placed most conspicuously in the center of the canvas (or frame)—the cinema made possible a shattering of the rules of spatiotemporal cohesiveness within which traditional human vision operates. This sudden ability to jump through time and space through a mere edit—to flash back decades through a dissolve, to leap to a different continent through a jump cut—established a spectator who could see “through” the supreme omniscience of a divine being. Bazin similarly cites the cinema's “new” three-dimensional perspective as the fullest articulation of more traditional spiritual expression in the visual arts. It would seem, then, that a truly transcendental spectator is achieved through a seamless interrelation of disparate perspectives and temporal sequences. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg21O8fRqY5WG2tuCTMjShYiwHRdyafgvDiALiKBwfiLRAX3JbhRG7qRRNpY-S21I5_s7KPpvHtlMPPHB4UQsMcs0WYL2BmmaANLA8YOXsSCZD-8fPGwSoHQyJzrRDIeiq3Jo7xQw-EU-0/s1600/a+Carl+Theodor+Dreyer+Gertrud+Criterion+DVD+Review+PDVD_015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg21O8fRqY5WG2tuCTMjShYiwHRdyafgvDiALiKBwfiLRAX3JbhRG7qRRNpY-S21I5_s7KPpvHtlMPPHB4UQsMcs0WYL2BmmaANLA8YOXsSCZD-8fPGwSoHQyJzrRDIeiq3Jo7xQw-EU-0/s400/a+Carl+Theodor+Dreyer+Gertrud+Criterion+DVD+Review+PDVD_015.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsIo5MTsIOKONBBRtY54v-An6x9OqCCCkrEz5AV9iV1H6giHGFNqa1Hv-lZamWkIIphJk_WzZloIZ1ZDH1b48cFcQZ_hg7JZmVg1PMBpiiYubxQngFOwZN7aUN4P2nLOQVjeioLyczJzY/s1600/Eyes+Wide+Shut+%25281999%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsIo5MTsIOKONBBRtY54v-An6x9OqCCCkrEz5AV9iV1H6giHGFNqa1Hv-lZamWkIIphJk_WzZloIZ1ZDH1b48cFcQZ_hg7JZmVg1PMBpiiYubxQngFOwZN7aUN4P2nLOQVjeioLyczJzY/s400/Eyes+Wide+Shut+%25281999%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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Strange, then, that <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>—which consists entirely of lengthy static shots, conveyed in absolute temporal linearity—equates the cinematic spectator with Jesus Himself, a direct result of equating the spectator with the camera. The film constantly and disturbingly questions whatever faith we may have had in a divine presence, yet it simultaneously posits <span style="font-style: italic;">us</span>, the audience, <span style="font-style: italic;">as</span> that divine presence in listening to, addressing, and responding to its subjects' onscreen prayers. Though our perspective is unrelentingly confined to a bleak, static aesthetic, we are nonetheless offered the opportunity (by the videocamera directly, and by Seidl indirectly) to unwaveringly confront individuals' religious, moral, and existential angst. If we are unsettled by our inability to mollify their unease, we are consequently reminded of the inability for any omniscient divine entity (should one exist) to directly affect the lives of human individuals, and perhaps we are similarly reminded of the essential distance between the cinematic spectator and the filmic text. Indeed, the disjunction between presence and absence that is so often conceived as the crux of the cinema's effect on its audience—the seemingly incontrovertible visual reality of the images we see, juxtaposed with our unflagging awareness that we are simply watching three-dimensional images splayed upon a two-dimensional plane—is likewise the duality that leads one to question his or her religious faith. One may be convinced of a transcendental force, or at least wholly committed to believing in the possibility of such a presence, but the complete lack of tangible and visual evidence of such a deity may lead to severe doubt and existential alienation—the predominating themes, in fact, of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span>.<br />
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Given all of this, it may seem like <span style="font-style: italic;">Jesus, You Know</span> is a cold, inhumane, condescending, postmodern conundrum that does not take the prayers of its subjects seriously. Such accusations are not off-base, but ultimately, despite its agnosticism, I think the documentary exhibits a compassionate empathy for its subjects' crises. I would like to close my paper with an example of this reserved, melancholy compassion. The last individual we see onscreen in an elderly woman who has voiced her fears regarding an irregular heartbeat and an overwhelming lethargy; she tells Jesus, the camera, and the audience that she feels that her time is near at hand. In the second last scene, she addresses this emotionally devastating prayer to a deceased uncle:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">When I die, maybe there will be somebody with me. It helps when someone is with you. Just being by yourself, that's hard—though you have to pass away by yourself, anyway. Maybe you are already waiting for me. Maybe I really will go to some pleasant, eternal world when I die. I wonder if my father has a pleasant life now. I don't know. But I hope so and pray for him. </blockquote><br />
Our sympathies, of course, lie entirely with this individual during her prayer, and we desire more adamantly than we have throughout the entire preceding film that Seidl give us some <span style="font-style: italic;">proof</span> that these prayers are not in vain, that some divine being is listening. We suspect, perhaps, that the film will end on a bleak note of despair and doubt, since these are the emotional wavelengths of Seidl's aesthetic and of the bewildering conflux of spectatorial modes within which we've been operating. But Seidl does offer us an allegorical alleviation of our fears, albeit an enigmatic one open to polarized interpretation. For one of the few moments in the movie, the camera journeys outside of a church, to the home of the woman we've just observed with such aggrieved concern. This leap from the film's typical religious space to the private domicile makes us aware of the staginess of this reenactment, of the fact that (characteristic of Seidl's genre-bending deconstructionism) we are no longer in the realm of the documentary. In a static long shot, this woman—Waltraute Bartel is her name—slowly approaches her open screen door from within her apartment, as we observe her distantly from outside. A dog barks and passes across the frame. Waltraute swiftly brushes aside a flowing white curtain drifting in the breeze. She steps outside, halts, and stares directly at the camera, only for a moment. And we cut, immediately, jarringly, to another performance by a church choir—tellingly, the hymn they perform is “Hallelujah.” We are asked to draw the implicit correlations between these three cinematic spaces and surmise that Waltraute has indeed passed on.<br />
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This ending—a symbolic and fictional conclusion fabricated by Seidl (indeed, Miss Bartel is, in reality, still quite alive)—is undoubtedly problematic. Most troublesome to me is Seidl's sudden intrusion as a distinct authorial agent, the belated introduction of an entirely new cinematic plane of fiction, allegory, and ambiguous visual symbolism (although, again, such blurring of boundaries is typical of Seidl). And of course we may draw from this conclusion a brutally hopeless interpretation: that Waltraute's prayers have not been answered, that her death was sudden and solitary. Yet the tranquility of this scene, its brevity and its swiftness, and Waltraute's sudden perspectival agency in confronting the camera's gaze (which she had not done in her previous monologues)—not to mention the decision to end the film with a performance of “Hallelujah”—suggests to me that her prayers have been answered (either by Jesus or by Seidl—in any case, by some omniscient force). I believe, perhaps because I so firmly want to believe, that an attentive deity has indeed allowed her a swift and painless passing into a new world. The uncertainty that lingers over this interpretation echoes the uncertainty we feel over<span style="font-style: italic;"> Jesus, You Know</span> as a whole—an agnosticism over the presence of a divine force, over the mode of spectatorial identification we inhabit, over the effects achieved by Seidl's rigid, symmetrical, yet still somehow transcendental aesthetic. The movie confronts, embraces, and maintains that overwhelming doubt. That may have been its benevolent mission all along.Matt Levinehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15959674229487604062noreply@blogger.com0