Listen Eggroll

15 November 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 14-20 Nov

LEST YOU BE CONFUSED: Films in /brackets/ I had previously seen. The ratings are on a 100-point scale that merely signifies my personal and highly subjective degree of enthusiasm, and I use the entire damn scale, e.g. 65 is equivalent to 6.5/10, a mild thumbs-up. Anything 70+ I really liked, and 80+ is generally top ten for any given non-phenomenal year.

The Debt (2010, John Madden): 60
Fails almost completely as the sober examination of moral reckoning intended, but works surprisingly well as a straightforward espionage potboiler, to the point where I kinda got sucked into it against my will. (Every awards screener sent to me gets at least 10 courtesy minutes, no matter how hopeless its cause appears to be.) Madden still isn't much of a stylist (hadn't seen anything since Shakespeare in Love), but he stages the lengthy flashback's various setpieces with an effective nuts-and-bolts simplicity that feels pleasingly retro; the sequence at the disused train station, classically composed and edited for maximum tension, likely put me in the wrong frame of mind for Scorsese's CGI-vertiginous Hugo, which I happened to see the next day. And while it may well derive from the original Israeli version, the big plot twist's reveal, via what appears at first to be formal ineptitude, is inspired—first time I've tumbled to something by thinking "This is so excruciatingly pointless there has to be a reason f...OHHHHHH." Chastain admittedly seems a little wispy for a badass covert op (not to mention the young Helen Mirren), but nonetheless finally earns the hype in my eyes with an entirely reactive performance that somehow conveys enormous strength and determination primarily through fear and anxiety; her duets with Jesper Christensen as Mengele manqué, both before and after the abduction, are miniature epics of power conceded and seized. By the time the movie shifted back to the late '90s and went all self-righteous and soggy, it was much too late for me to bail.

Like Crazy (2011, Drake Doremus): 43Or Sundance Jury on Crack. Vaguely fragmented style aims for lyricism, but its true function, I suspect, is to ensure that Doremus can just skip past all the dramatic scenes that would expose his Idiot Plot (which by some reports is based on personal experience...but if that's true, and things went down as depicted here, he and his girlfriend were truly blithering idiots). I for one am dying to eavesdrop on the phone call Anna must have made to her parents to tell them she wasn't coming home after all, even though her mum had just got all in her face (telephonically speaking) the previous day reminding her what a disaster it would be if she overstayed her student visa. Instead, we get a cute rapid-fire still-frame montage of all the various positions and combinations of nightwear involved in the couple sharing the same bed for the summer, which montage also conveniently substitutes for the sexual chemistry we literally never see the tiniest inkling of. Then there's the conversation, also conveniently hopscotched, in which they announce to their respective families (Jacob still has a mom somewhere, right?) that they're now getting married, despite having had only sporadic contact for several years and being fresh out of respective serious relationships with other people, on the grounds that this will supposedly clear up the visa problem (but not until six months later), which means we never find out whether their stupidity is congenital or whether they were told in no uncertain terms that that's a retarded idea but went ahead with it anyway. Sadly, Doremus neglected to omit the scene in which Anna's new beau presents her with the deeply romantic gift of...a new chair, to hey just coincidentally replace the handmade chair Jacob made for her at college (a gesture that actually made sense). And he forgot not to cross-cut Jacob boning someone else with Anna boning someone else—a juxtaposition made even more head-slappingly obvious when the PATIENCE bracelet Jacob had given Anna somehow breaks (from the sheer force of New Guy's thrustin', I guess). Like (500) Days of Summer, Like Crazy strives to be harshly realistic about romance's capacity for disappointment and self-delusion, but it's even less tethered to anything remotely resembling actual human behavior, so its good intentions are entirely for naught. Felicity Jones makes a fetching Zooey U.K., though.

/The Big Lebowski/ (1998, Joel Coen): 64All the best moments are in the first hour. Everyone will have their exceptions (and I'll concede the "Just Dropped In" dream sequence), but I've seen this four times now and it always seems like one of the greatest comedies ever made until suddenly it doesn't anymore, right about the time the Dude's car gets stolen. Originally I thought that was because the narrative deliberately goes limp, but now that I have a sense, courtesy The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, of what weak-ass Coen Bros. comedy looks like, I can see a lot of it in Lebowski's weirdly bloated second half, which just plain runs out of creative steam. Granted, this is highly subjective—I've seen people roar at the whole "this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" routine, which to me plays like a rejected scene from an Adam Sandler movie, and there are probably folks who are tickled by the nihilists and their sketch-comedy accents. But I start out convulsed and wind up at best mildly amused...and then completely flummoxed by Donnie's death, which just seems like a random curveball thrown out of sheer desperation. Might not seem like such a huge stumble were that first hour not a sustained cavalcade of laid-back madcap genius; some of the best bits aren't even jokes per se, just hilarious insights into the way people's minds work. (I'm thinking in particular of the way the Dude parrots whatever he's heard recently, regardless of whether it makes much sense in context: "This aggression will not stand, man"; "A young trophy wife, in the parlance of our times..."; "You mean coitus?") And if the Skandies has no other justification for its existence, we were in fact the only voting body in the world who correctly recognized Jeff Bridges as 1998's Best Actor—not since Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye has anyone been so dazzlingly befuddled.

/The Fisher King/ (1991, Terry Gilliam): 54Starts out very DIE ROBIN WILLIAMS DIE!, equating severe mental illness with improvisational stand-up—even if he's performing the script verbatim, which I doubt, it just comes across as his usual shtick—and enabling Williams' most grotesque pleas for audience sympathy. (I'd also repressed for 20 years the memory of his squat hairy body prancing naked in Central Park.) Nor is Bridges, playing a shock jock, really able to compensate in the other direction, as Bruce Willis did so beautifully opposite Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys. And of course Gilliam is the very last person who's gonna be temperamentally inclined to tug the leash. Just when the movie threatens to become completely insufferable, though, Amanda Plummer shows up and somehow imposes her own controlled spaciness onto everybody else, even managing to calm Williams way down. The film's midsection is an improbably charming portrait of two spastics in love, so unfussy and sincere that those qualities bleed into the previously nondescript relationship between Jack and Anne, whose break-up scene is the most emotionally truthful few minutes of Gilliam's career. (Ruehl didn't deserve to beat Juliette Lewis in Cape Fear, but she's much more direct and less showbiz-brassy than I'd remembered. So demoralizing to check her filmography and realize her career effectively ended just two years later.) It doesn't last, and the whole third act—Perry's catatonia, Jack's backslide into tooldom, the Grail break-in—fizzles, mostly because Plummer and Ruehl are both absent until the final few minutes. But just as the lovely waltz sequence temporarily makes Grand Central seem magical, so too does everything surrounding Perry and Lydia's date transform The Fisher King, however briefly.

Carnage (2011, Roman Polanski): 39In which we discover why Albee didn't make both couples George and Martha. As smartly directed and capably acted as you'd expect, but the play itself is just wretched—the sort of gleefully scabrous chamber piece that delights in exposing its characters as ugly, self-absorbed assholes hiding beneath a thin veneer of civilized behavior. This sort of ping-pong hostility represents everything I dislike about contemporary theater; Reza makes it worse by calling attention to the situation's artificiality, repeatedly sending the visiting couple out the door and then engineering some unpersuasive reason why they'd turn around for further abuse. (I honestly couldn't tell whether this was meant as a postmodern wink to the audience or a sincere attempt at narrative plausibility. Either way, it failed.) Everything about Carnage felt surpassingly phony to me, in a way designed to flatter one's self-image rather than inspire productive discomfort—only a person with antisocial personality disorder would identify with these cartoon versions of flawed humanity (assuming that said person experienced an unprecedented spasm of empathy). Waltz has the juiciest role, by virtue of starting out pretty close to the openly contemptuous zone where all four end up, but it's Winslet who comes closest to escaping Reza's moralistic straitjacket, working with Polanski (who keeps minimizing her in the frame) to create one tiny pocket of soiled dignity. The film's finest moment has her quietly retching into a bucket on the far end of the couch as the others snipe back and forth in the foreground; I was right there with her in spirit.

Benda Bilili! (2010, Renaud Barret & Florent de la Tullaye): W/OThere might be a documentary about disabled street musicians I could get behind, but it'd be a lot less blatantly celebratory and up-with-people than this one, which actually opens with the filmmakers declaring love at first sight for the musicians and deciding to fund their first recording session. Got briefly interested when the kid who plays that single-string tin-can lute-thing joined the group, as he seemed almost maniacally creative, but then suddenly a fire broke out and the group disbanded and the kid went back home to another village and "one year later we tried again" and this is the inherent danger of just following folks around with a camera hoping a film will magically come together. Sometimes they do, but more often you wind up with a random hodgepodge of disconnected anecdotes. In this case I'm pretty sure I'd be happier with the album that resulted.

One-Eyed Jacks (1961, Marlon Brando): 69Title alludes to two-faced deceit, and there really are an exceptional number of casual lies tossed around in this cold-hearted Western, which shows unmistakable signs of having been gutted (although Brando must have approved the happy ending on some level, given that he's standing there speaking the lines). I can't really imagine it at five hours, given its elemental nature, but Brando was clearly striving for a tragic purposelessness from which the release version ultimately retreats—it's the same sort of tonal whiplash you get at the conclusion of L.A. Confidential (the movie), when the abrupt restoration of order seems contrary to everything that's previously occurred. Otherwise quite pungent, with enough signs of a controlling intelligence to make you wish that he'd directed more than one film; if he errs on the side of making Rio as taciturnly badass as possible whenever directly confronted, in an almost proto-Clint way, he also declines to make excuses for the dude's craven backstabbing, which turns almost literal (wrong weapon) at the film's deliberately sorry excuse for a climactic showdown. At the same time, though, One-Eyed Jacks frequently does deliver on a basic popcorn level, generating old-fashioned suspense from an attempt to reach a gun from a prison cell (only to find it unloaded) and providing Timothy Carey as a loudmouthed bully for Rio to beat the crap out of when the pace starts to flag. It's a film half-beholden to the traditional Westerns of the '40s and '50s that also half-anticipates the more nihilistic approach that would soon be embraced by Leone and Peckinpah—emphasis on the latter, obviously, since he was one of this film's original directors (along with Kubrick) and some claim that many of his contributions to the script survive. A compromised triumph, paving the way.

10 November 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 7-13 Oct

Higher Ground (2011, Vera Farmiga): W/O

Now and then someone will suggest that I bailed on a film too early, insisting that it gets more interesting later. But while that may well be true—and almost certainly is true in this case, seeing as how the protagonist hadn't even begun questioning her faith yet—it doesn't much matter, because I'm not really sitting there waiting for something to "happen." A talented filmmaker will grab and hold my attention almost immediately, whereas long experience has taught me that if the first two reels are utterly pedestrian, there's virtually no hope. And I saw no evidence that Farmiga, whose work as an actor I generally love, possesses a shred of camera sense, rhythmic intuition or even basic storytelling brio. Nobody's thought this material through in cinematic terms, and so it comes across as a series of Illustrative Moments—each scene a little self-contained step on a mapped-out journey, serving its function and then giving way to the next dramatic bullet point. Not that I needed it to be The Rapture, but there's only so much flatline I can take.

/The Loneliest Planet/ (2011, Julia Loktev): 84

[Pedigree: Locarno '11, TIFF; NYFF; AFI Fest. Opens 2012.]

Previously addressed at Toronto. Feared I might find the first half a little get-to-the-Incident enervating this time, but Loktev has an uncanny knack—also on display in Day Night Day Night—for making the eventless eventful, mostly via attention to arresting details that are unusual without being "quirky." (I was about to note that the "chimpanzee" headstand arguably crosses that line, but then suddenly suspected that that's an actual alternative to e.g. "Mississippi" somewhere or other, and sure enough. Headstand itself's still a bit cute, though.) And I remain in awe of the high-wire act that constitutes the aftermath, in which any and all discussion of what happened gets postponed until after the credits roll—a stunt that only works because of how much goofy downtime we'd spent with this couple before the split-second D'oh! People are reading way too much into Nica needing to hurl near the end (and not enough into her willingness to let Alex tend to her as she does), but I'm happy Loktev opted to err on the side of being misinterpreted as either stridently feminist or anti-feminist (according to personal conviction) rather than signpost a resolution that's essentially unknowable, and may be for weeks or months to come.

/It's a Wonderful Life/ (1946, Frank Capra): 93

"Way darker than its holiday-classic rep" has become a truism since I was a kid, but this viewing (first in 14 years) made me long for the relative cheer and optimism of The Turin Horse. Just days later, the beaming smiles and wing-heralding bells of the finale have already faded, whereas I can't stop thinking of George stalking his house like a caged panther, viciously snapping at innocuous questions from his kids and generally behaving like patriarchy gone rancid. Truth is, for all his principles, George can often be something of a dick even before things go wrong: his reaction when Mary loses her robe is awesomely ungallant, and their subsequent love scene (on the phone with Sam) works primarily because he treats her house as if it were a dentist's waiting room, seemingly disgusted by his own ardor. (Capra beat both Mann and Hitchcock in recognizing the potential for seething anger beneath Stewart's folksy persona.) When the happy ending comes, it's moving in direct proportion to the depths of despondency the film has previously tunneled, and George's realization of how beloved he is by the community can't somehow magically erase a lifetime's worth of regret about all the dreams he abandoned to earn that gratitude. (This is one of those films where it can be provocative to imagine what happens the day after it ends.) Nearly perfect, all in all, though needless to say I'd much rather live in Pottersville than Bedford Falls (va-va-voom!) and don't recoil in horror as intended when it's revealed that without George in her life poor Mary would have wound up as—egad—a SPINSTER LIBRARIAN! Tap that.

/Dazed and Confused/ (1993, Richard Linklater): 78

Can't honestly say I lived this movie, as I was only eight years old in '76 and attended an all-male Jesuit high school, but it wields a powerful nostalgic grip all the same. (And let me note again that 1993 - 1976 = 17, while 2011 - 1993 = 18. Would a high-school movie set in 1994 feel even remotely as retro? Has time essentially stopped?) As a sign of how much my taste has evolved over the past couple decades, I was originally slightly put off by the film's apparent aimlessness, whereas now I'm primarily irked by its sole concession to narrative structure, viz. Pink's internal debate about whether to sign the football team's just-say-no pledge. Nickname notwithstanding, Pink is easily the least colorful of Linklater's gaggle of vividly drawn types, embodied by what really has to be the greatest young ensemble cast ever assembled; people justifiably marvel at how many future stars he discovered, but I'm equally gobsmacked by the performances he got from kids who were pretty much never seen again, like Christin Hinojosa as Sabrina (shy new hazing recruit who hooks up with Dude From Rent) and the amazing Sasha Jenson, who absolutely murders blonde jock Don Dawson's cheerful sense of entitlement (without making him repellent, somehow). This is a world that feels fully inhabited, as if the entire day had been staged in real time and the camera is just capturing bits and pieces of it at random. There's still a slight sense of weightlessness to it all—nobody experiences anything remotely like an epiphany, and next year will likely be much the same—but I'm thankful that Linklater didn't go the American Graffiti route and make some last-ditch bid for Significance by relating the characters' ultimate fates. The final slow fade to black, on the open road as seen through the windshield of Wooderson's car, conveys the same idea far more eloquently.

/Harakiri/ (1962, Masaki Kobayashi): 83

Wish I'd revisited this right before seeing Miike's 3-D remake, so I'd have a better sense of how Kobayashi prevents the woe-is-me flashback from bogging down the entire movie. That's still the weakest element by far, but I think its potential bathos gets forestalled by (a) starker, more elemental direction in the flashback scenes themselves, but even more crucially (b) constant leaps back to Nakadai telling the story in his creepy dead-eyed affectless manner. (If memory serves, Miike lets the entire flashback play out in a single tedious movement.) Everything else is heart-stopping in its meticulous, procedural way, from the excruciating account of Motome's bamboo-blade travesty to the windswept faceoff between merciless avenger and remorseless enforcer. And while Miike's finale merely reprises Nakadai's crazed recklessness in The Sword of Doom, Kobayashi's is notable for how contained and cautious it is—this may be the only remotely credible depiction of a single swordsman doing battle with a small army, a skirmish that lasts as long as it does only because no member of the small army is especially eager to be the dude who gets sliced up so the others can move in behind him. Institutional effacement plays much more bleak and cynical in the original, too—indeed, the entire movie hinges on perverse decorum (on both sides), which is what makes its ugliness so uniquely unnerving. But then, we're talking about a culture that chose to ritualize one of the most painful suicide methods imaginable, treating self-inflicted disembowelment as if it were a trip to the notary public. In that sense, the American title—Harakiri (better known in the West, but more vulgar) rather than Seppuku—couldn't be less appropriate.

03 November 2011

Viewing Journal: 31 Oct - 6 Nov

Here's my standard top-of-the-month reminder that if you read these entries on a regular basis, find them in any way valuable, want to ensure that I don't get discouraged and give up, you should throw me a few bucks (link's at the top of the main page)—whatever you think a month's worth of near-daily capsules is worth to you. The amount is unimportant. (I suggested as little as $2; $5-10 is more common.) Just let me know you give a damn.

Haywire (2011, Steven Soderbergh): 71

[Pedigree: AFI Fest '11. Opens January 2012.]

Fuse this stoic piledriver with Schizopolis and you'd have an outright masterpiece (and guaranteed box-office flop, but oh well): Bravura running/driving/asskicking sequences occasionally leavened by the espionage equivalent of "Generic greeting returned!" and "Imminent sustenance" rather than actual tedious expository plot bullshit. There's enough of the latter clogging Haywire's first act that I briefly thought it had lost me, but once Fassbender shows up for one of the all-time great beatdowns—normally it takes an entire wasted '70s rock band to inflict that much damage on a hotel room—the movie settles into a blissfully workmanlike groove, serving up one old-school, unspectacular setpiece after another. (That last adjective is a compliment.) Carano isn't necessarily much of an actor, but even her slight stiffness has a certain appeal in this context, and the role doesn't demand anything she can't credibly deliver; I'm also susceptible to how much her nose-crinkle makes her resemble the young Ellen Barkin on the rare occasions when she smiles. Mostly, though, she's just a superbly conditioned body in constant motion, anchoring a film that feels like a throwback without going the Good German pastiche route (though I still think that one's underrated). Hard to imagine Dobbs having much to bitch about on the commentary track this time, though it's possible that Soderbergh imposed the flashback structure on him—apart from the opportunity it affords for a nicely disorienting opening scene, not much is gained by having the entire first half take the form of an unlikely story-so-far monologue (told to a civilian, no less). David Holmes, on the other hand, will once again have good reason to bellyache when his superlative, Schifrinesque score gets totally ignored come awards season. If only the music had drowned out some of the more cumbersome dialogue. Don't expend that much effort on the MacGuffin, people. We really don't care.

/A Separation/ (2011, Asghar Farhadi): 95

[Pedigree: Berlin '11 (Golden Bear, Actor, Actress), TIFF; NYFF; AFI Fest. Opens NY/LA 30 Dec.]

Previously addressed here, though I now repudiate my assessment of its visual scheme as "purely functional"—Farhadi has an elegant, fluid sense of how to organize chaotic human behavior for maximum expressiveness, one that extends well beyond his rather obvious (but still effective) strategy of placing physical barriers (usually glass) between characters in nearly every shot. (I think it seemed less impressive to me than About Elly the first time simply because this one takes place in the city, mostly indoors; it's hard to beat the seaside for ready-made grandeur.) Second viewing turned it into a slow-motion disaster movie, as I was even more cruelly aware of various points at which the entire mess could have been happily or at least tentatively resolved, if only various people were capable of looking past the blinders of their wounded pride or crippling fear. "I find that your problem is a small one," rules the judge in the opening scene, unwittingly opening the floodgates for an escalating series of ostensibly larger problems to muddy and distract; only Termeh, the teenage daughter, seems capable of cutting through all the self-involved bullshit and seeing what's really at stake, though even she winds up compromised when forced to join the adult world prematurely. Simply one of the most heartbreaking movies I've ever seen.

/Martha Marcy May Marlene/ (2011, Sean Durkin): 82

Previously addressed at Cannes. Quite the backlash has since kicked in, but detractors have some confused ideas about what the film is trying (or should be trying) to do, somehow writing lengthy reviews that never mention post-traumatic stress disorder or deprogramming. Durkin doesn't employ match cuts and deliberately ambiguous visual syntax in order to draw some fatuous false equivalence between bourgeois society and a dangerous cult—he's giving us the deeply disoriented psyche of someone for whom the recent past is still bleeding into the present. It's a psychological horror film in which the horror stems less from the subjugation, rape and murder seen in flashback than from the present-tense sight of a young woman permanently losing her mooring because she can't bring herself to ask for help. (How people can see the sister and her husband as villains, or even as unsympathetic, is beyond my comprehension. Such is the kneejerk assumption that wealthy = hideous, apparently. Makes for a nice subversion of expectations, but you're not supposed to cling to it until the bitter end, especially when the bitter end strongly implies that the refusal to answer the question "What happened to you?" may get M's only family killed.) Marlene isn't some throwaway identity added to make the title scan better: Olsen is playing neither Martha nor Marcy May at the lakehouse, and if her brilliant performance registers as "opaque" it's because we never actually meet the person trapped underneath all those abortive disguises (with the possible exception of the few seconds right before she gets rechristened by Patrick, but even there I sense that Zoe's primed the pump already). So, no, the movie isn't particularly deep or plausible or character-driven, but then neither is, say, Repulsion. That Durkin creates a similar sense of nightmarish anxiety in a naturalistic context is little short of miraculous.

/Casablanca/ (1942, Michael Curtiz): 80

Reduced to its essence, Casablanca has three crucial scenes: Ilsa's arrival at Rick's, her plea for the letters of transit and subsequent surrender, and the runway finale. Two are among the greatest and most iconic examples of concentrated star power in cinema history; this is the first time I've noticed that the third doesn't really work at all. Her sudden decision to abandon Laszlo seems motivated less by passion for Rick (the happy-in-Paris flashback montage is only missing him pushing her on a swing) than by her marriage to a man so tediously noble that he can't dredge up the tiniest twinge of jealousy or concern about the nature of his wife's apparently tempestuous history with this stumpy saloon owner. Consequently, I actually found the Rick/Ilsa story less moving this time around than I did Rick trying to warn the Bulgarian newlywed away from Renault and then fixing the roulette wheel to save her. Viewed with a critical eye, the film skews a little too baldly manipulative, tossing aside logic to create false suspense (there's no sensible reason for Rick to wait until he's apparently sold Laszlo out to pull the gun on Renault, except to fool us) and leaning hard on catchphrases ("I stick my neck out for nobody" twice; "Here's looking at you, kid" three times). And yet it's still mostly magnificent, with so many great lines that even the ones nobody ever quotes kick like a mule: "I wouldn't bring up Paris if I were you, it's poor salesmanship"; "You despise me, don't you?" --> "If I gave you any thought I probably would"; "And remember, this gun is pointed straight at your heart" --> "That is my least vulnerable spot." If not quite the accidental masterpiece of enduring myth, it's certainly the most rousingly entertaining pseudo-political romantic potboiler of its era.

Green (2011, Sophia Takal): W/O

[Pedigree: SxSW '11, AFI Fest.]

On the one hand, it's inspiring to see this loose collective of DIY filmmakers who all support each other and seem completely uninterested in building any sort of traditional "career"; on the other hand, so far I don't like any of the actual films, so maybe hey-let's-put-on-a-show! has its limitations. One problem is they either all think they can act or are all convinced that traditional notions of acting are a crutch (I'm not sure which—could be both, actually), so there's a lot of artless awkwardness on display, as if nobody understands that what Greta Gerwig does isn't elementary. Here, Takal seems to be attempting Shelley Duvall in 3 Women, and while she doesn't embarrass herself (which is an achievement of some sort), neither does she locate a character within the affectation, at least in the portion I saw. And the other two actors, one of whom is (needless to say) a filmmaker himself, are so thin and reedy—by which I mean their dynamic range as performers, not (just) their appearance—as to make virtually no impression. These kids work fast, and no doubt they're learning a lot, and I expect we'll see some terrific work from them down the road...unless being celebrated for their juvenilia permanently stunts their growth. Calm down, tastemakers.

/Cape Fear/ (1991, Martin Scorsese): 57

Really surprised in retrospect that Scorsese allowed Max Cady to be turned into an unstoppable inhuman supervillain, even if that was all the rage at the time. (Most recent credit for screenwriter Wesley Strick: the Nightmare on Elm Street reboot.) De Niro hams it up unmercifully, substituting a sneering drawl for character; I never saw his Fearless Leader, but it could hardly be much more cartoonish. Which is a shame, because the unnatural order he's so garishly upsetting has real bite. Even if Cady is now meant to be just a projection of this family's unspoken anxieties, they deserve a richer avatar; Juliette Lewis in particular is every bit as freakishly unguarded as I remembered, her halting self-consciousness the perfect distillation of adolescent curiosity and confusion. (She's so good that she even manages to briefly settle De Niro down a bit.) Scorsese, for his part, seems to be working hard to live up to Herrmann's score, which was arguably too fervent for the '62 version (a rather modest thriller, as I recall). Yet the film works best at its most restrained, as with the monofilament tied to the teddy bear, whereas grandiose flourishes like Cady on the wall beneath a fireworks display come across as overexertion. Ultimately this seems less like a remake of a (very) minor classic than like Scorsese's game contribution to the then-burgeoning [Whatever]-From-Hell genre—it could just as easily have been The Hand That Rocks the Cradle instead, really. Once the bad guy gets set on fire and returns scarred but unfazed to wreak further havoc, any pretense of consequence is pretty much shot.

27 October 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 24-30 Oct

Deep Red (1975, Dario Argento): 53

I'm clearly never gonna get the hang of savoring this genre's stunning setpieces and just ignoring, forgiving or at least tolerating everything else (which is why I love the nonstop abstraction of Amer). Once Hemmings finds the house and starts wandering through its rooms accompanied by Goblin, it's goosebump time; the final 45 minutes are undeniably masterful, an elegant tour de force of sustained apprehension. (They also feature one of the most freaky-disturbing shocks I've ever experienced, when that...thing suddenly prances into the room, not so much without warning as without even the tiniest hint of preparation or foreshadowing. And indeed it doesn't make a whole lot of retroactive sense once the killer's identity is revealed, but somehow I don't think my next several decades of cardiac-arrest nightmares are gonna split those hairs.) But the preceding hour-plus, with the exception of two brief gory interludes, is deadly in entirely the wrong way. Argento simply cannot shoot a non-stuporous scene of two people having an ordinary conversation; his logy notion of sexual tension is especially laughable, which is a bit sad considering that he was banging Nicolodi himself. (Was Asia conceived during this shoot? The timing is right, born September '75.) Consequently, long stretches of the ultra-expository first half are completely flavorless, reminiscent of the filler scenes in any number of made-for-TV mysteries from the era. If you disagree, and actually find the film enthralling from start to finish, that's one thing—baffling to me, but defensible. But I found several reviews that more or less admit that it's 70% tedium, yet still give it the highest possible rating and deem it a classic or a masterpiece or both, entirely on the basis of the 30% that (literally) kills. That way lies the impending canonization of Red Eye.

/Shit Year/ (2010, Cam Archer): 77

Not sure a movie could get much more fragmentary and diffuse and still hold together. Obviously it helps to have an actor like Ellen Barkin at the center—her performance is all the more extraordinary when you consider that she has no conventional "arc" to play, just a series of disconnected moments ranging all over the map in tone and intensity. But Archer (whose Wild Tigers I Have Known I didn't just W/O of but actively fled; seems he just needed a less callow vehicle for his anxieties) provides a stunning free-associative context for her mercurial wandering, constructing a state of mind via jagged shards of pure emotion juxtaposed with shaggy digressions, all of it edited in a clipped, brusque way that catches you continually off guard. I can see how the sci-fi element strikes many as pretentious, but those scenes work for me precisely because they're given no more emphasis than anything else, just as the ending seems absolutely right in its offhanded playfulness. And I'd think even dissenters (who are actually in the majority, but I'm sick of the word "haters") would have to concede that this is one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films in recent memory, if largely by virtue of not trying to be ostentatiously gorgeous. In all honesty, I'd expected to be less impressed on second viewing, figuring my low expectations had influenced my judgment, but its amalgam of formal bravado, sardonic humor, refractory inconclusiveness and unapologetic solipsism (which, again, seems way more palatable when transferred to an actress in her mid 50s) knocked me out all over again. Nobody else seems to agree, but that's okay—given all the wildly acclaimed movies I find disappointing, it's refreshing to have a beat-up orphan to defend for a change.

Obsession (1976, Brian De Palma): 54

Wow, he even gets Herrmann to rip off his own score! Given the relative inaccessibility of Vertigo at the time, I'm not particularly hostile to the notion of a feature-length homage—especially one that veers as far afield from its source as this ultimately does. And I was unprepared for De Palma's magnificently classical approach to this material: lush, studied (imagine how alien Robertson's performance must have seemed in the midst of the '70s post-Method heyday), unironically italicized. But apparently there's a law requiring every De Palma movie to go full retard at some point, and the big twist here, when it finally arrives, is so completely preposterous that you can only gape in disbelief—that's the longest fucking con on record, I believe, by the world's most patient rapscallion. And I can't even blame Schrader, as all reports indicate he was livid about how his script had been trashed. De Palma very nearly pulls it all out in the finale, with fevered slow-motion cross-cutting—on second thought, fuck classicalism!—building to a ending so operatically tragic that I was prepared to forgive every contrivance necessary to arrive at it...and then he (or somebody) totally chickens out, just as he (or somebody) previously did by turning the marriage into a corny rippling-effect dream in order to duck the whole [SPOILER!] angle. Basically, yet another De Palma film I would love were it not so fucking dumb. But I guess that's my problem.

Weekend (2011, Andrew Haigh): 66

Two men stand on a train platform, sharing an emotional farewell kiss; as their lips part, with the intensity of the moment still very much lingering, we hear indistinct catcalls from off in the distance. One of the men glares furiously in the dickwads' direction. "Just ignore them," the other says, but he can't quite yet, keeps glaring, looks as if he might walk over and start a confrontation, then finally turns his attention back to his lover. I've made that exchange sound longer than it plays—it's maybe ten seconds of screen time, a quick blip. But it represents everything I wanted this movie to be, and briefly thought that it actually might be. Whereas the earlier scene in which the same two men animatedly argue about how the straight world conspires to make them hide their sexuality represents everything I feared this movie might be, based on queer cinema's mediocre track record. Perhaps what I'm asking for is simply impossible—maybe there's no way to be truthful about the gay experience without having the characters talk nonstop about being gay. Certainly I have no right to demand that marginalized voices edit themselves for my sake. And I recognize that if society found some significant aspect of my identity repugnant, that would probably be a frequent topic of conversation when among peers. But still. These two actors are so fantastic (especially Chris New, who gives Glen exactly the right quotient of relaxed arrogance), and the first lengthy scene between them, involving the tape-recorded interview recounting the previous night, hits so many gorgeously inquisitive and frankly erotic notes, that my heart just sank when the coming-out anecdotes and gay-marriage debates kicked in. What had begun as an offbeat romance in which gender/orientation seem incidental (without their particulars being elided—quite the contrary) turned into a very well-acted and refreshingly low-key tract. Which is still far superior to most of what I've seen come out of NewFest and Outfest and etc., but I hope I live to see the day when a gay filmmaker can truly make something like Before Sunrise, taking the characters' attraction to each other for granted.

/Dead Alive/ (1992, Peter Jackson): 70

Funny to recall how apprehensive I was about seeing this the first time, based on its reputation as the goriest movie ever made—one might as well live in fear of "Rabbit Seasoning" after learning that Daffy gets his beak shot off again and again. Jackson leans too hard on the gross-out for my (uh) taste, but his slapstick violence owes so much more to Mack Sennett than to George Romero that you can't help but giggle, even as "people" (read: living mannequins) are repeatedly stripped of all flesh like Thanksgiving turkeys. Perhaps perversely, I prefer the first two acts, when Lionel is valiantly attempting to pretend this zombie apocalypse isn't happening, to the extended bloodsoaked finale; Paquita's wide-eyed, broken-English optimism bounces off bits of casual ghastliness, creating a winning comic tension that gets a bit lost once the party gets underway and heads start to roll (or rather to slide). And the film loses me completely at the rooftop climax, with Mum for some reason re-emerging as a lucid behemoth that resembles the ugly puppets in Genesis' "Land of Confusion" video. For the most part, though, there's no other word for it than "delightful," as sick as that adjective may seem in this context. Certainly I'd rather see Jackson return to making this kind of cheerful throwaway nonsense than continue to bid for sustained respectability via grotesquely ill-conceived prestige-lit adaptations. If Raimi could make it home again, surely so can he.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981, Frank De Felitta): 49

Easy to see how this could have been terrifying to an impressionable youngster who saw it when it first aired (I was 13 at the time, perfect age, just didn't happen to tune in), but it seems pretty tame now—not just in the explicit-gore sense mandated by network TV, but in the bizarre way that it marginalizes its bogeyman, who has less screen time than that sorrowful-looking dude who pops up in most of the Decalogue films. Indeed, I was convinced for most of the second half that there was no killer, and was becoming more and more impressed with what appeared to be a multi-character slasher variant on "The Telltale Heart," even if Charles Durning is the only one of the four principals with the capacity to pull that off. Ending pretty much squashes my interpretation, alas, though there are still elements I don't understand, e.g. when they dig up the grave and confirm that the body 's actually in the casket, why don't we see it? I'd assumed the inconclusive camera angle was Significant, but in retrospect I wonder whether it was just a budgetary issue, or if Larry Drake wasn't available that day. Once revealed as straightforwardly vengeful, it's a fairly tepid affair, notable primarily for how loathsome it makes all of its victims; De Felitta has little feel for generating tension or anxiety, and while the film is handsomely shot, its rhythms are unmistakably televisual (in a plodding '80s way). Also, scarecrows are not creepy. Being up on a post makes you look vulnerable, not menacing.

19 October 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 17–23 Oct

Kuroneko (1968, Kaneto Shindô): 68

Plays to my love of the overtly theatrical in an otherwise naturalistic context—it's often hard to tell where the actual forest leaves off and the set design begins, in part because those are the spindliest damn trees I've ever seen. One uncanny effect in particular I can't recall ever seeing elsewhere, though it's so striking you'd think people would have pilfered it like mad: motionless medium shot of a dude sitting in a house, but the view through open doors to his left (taking up roughly the right third of the frame) is a traveling rear projection through the woods, carefully composited to make it appear (though not at all realistically) as if the house itself is moving. And Shindô finds numerous other ways to enliven what's really a pretty pedestrian ghostly-revenge tale, complicated by carnal interludes that seem to presage a heady reckoning that never quite arrives. Or it does, sort of, but for the wrong character, and entirely offscreen. Given all that conjugal intensity, the climactic mother-son battle feels like a non sequitur, albeit one involving the awesome sight of a middle-aged woman performing proto-wire-fu with her own severed cat arm clutched between her teeth. (I may also have been slightly distracted by Mom's method of getting Junior to let her inside, which is only one step up from the land shark's "Uh...candygram!") Stronger on atmosphere than narrative, in short, which tends to be a liability of the genre; I'll have forgotten the story a few years from now, but will vividly remember the woman's ponytail that flips back and forth in a way unmistakably suggesting a feline readying for the pounce.

Margin Call (2011, J.C. Chandor): 58

Intelligent, gripping, utterly persuasive...except that roughly every ten minutes Chandor fears we might not be getting it and applies the sledgehammer, to severely alienating effect. At times I started to wonder whether the self-aware monologues were intended as comedy, given the absurdly specific figures being casually tossed around: Paul Bettany knows off the top of his head precisely how much money he's blown on hookers and strip clubs in the past year ($76,520), while Stanley Tucci has no trouble mentally calculating that the bridge he once built has to date saved residents of the communities it spans 1,531 man-years of driving time. It's as if every so often the movie plays a game called But What Would This Character Say If Briefly Possessed By The Spirit Of Paul Krugman? Just let them be venal and short-sighted (yet human) and allow us to fill in the part about how the country's wealth has been almost completely disengaged from goods and services. When Chandor actually does so, which is much of the time, Margin Call makes the spectre of economic annihilation look both perversely thrilling (Scott Tobias aptly called it "the Fail-Safe of our time") and discomfitingly beautiful, bathing tight-lipped recriminations and hasty cost-benefit analyses in the dim purplish light of the firm's glowing monitors. As in Contagion, one gets a sense of the frightening swiftness with which lives and livelihoods can be demolished, in this case by the self-interested decision of a single individual*—admittedly one who looks like Claus von Bulow and sounds like Scar from The Lion King. And speaking of the uniformly fine cast, who woke Kevin Spacey up? His final speech to the troops is stupendous, blending sincere respect and concern with barely concealed self-loathing until you can't distinguish between the two; it's the least showboat-y, most delectably nuanced performance he's given in at least a decade (in a theatrical release, anyway—I haven't seen Recount). If only the screenplay had been so firmly committed to impassioned understatement.

* The implication that Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns or whoever this is meant to be could have prevented the current crisis by behaving more ethically at the eleventh hour seems pretty untenable, though I should note that I've never really been able to comprehend how the market works and had trouble following even the parts of this film that were clearly dumbed down expressly for the sake of folks like me.

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011, Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman): 62

Suffers, like Beats Being Dead, from being part of a weak triptych—had this been a stand-alone film (minus the retcon prologue, of course), I'd be even more enthusiastic. Granted, most of its best bits are derivative: Toby's straight out of The Shining; babysitter stalked by thing wearing a sheet nods to Halloween (and one-ups that particular scare, if you'll permit me a moment of blasphemy); finale plays like Rosemary's Baby as shot by Brakhage, etc. But Joost & Schulman, despite owing this gig to a movie that demonstrates zero formal expertise, prove far more adept than their predecessors at exploiting the surveillance-camera conceit to maximum effect. Everybody's crazy for the fan-cam, with good reason—nothing more effective than being forced to look away from what you're frightened to see—but that's only the most spectacular example; placement of the camera in the girls' room renders it magnificently useless (it's as if Zapruder had been in the limousine's front seat, trained on the road ahead), and even simple, obvious ideas that had been inexplicably ignored in the earlier films, e.g. having people in danger obscure the view with their bodies, do the job quite nicely. A pleasure to see wit make an appearance, too, in such knowing touches as the Teddy Ruxpin doll (introduced early so that we'll be eyeing it suspiciously throughout) and the tea party (with our hero indulgently patting his invisible tormentor on the shoulder by way of chumming it up with Kristi). Knowledge of how various elements fit into the series' mythology renders them less unnerving than they would have been in a vacuum, alas, and once again we can relax to a certain extent because we know both girls will survive to be haunted anew as adults; I'm not eager to see Paranormal Activity 4, by any means. Nice to see that even a mediocre franchise like this can be redeemed by intelligence and fundamental craft, though.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010, Tod Williams): 45

Same basic structural weakness as the original, but that proved to be of little consequence, because I wound up watching this not as a horror film but as a perverse extratextual mystery: How the hell can anything remotely terrifying happen to this family, given that Katie and Micah never once mention it just a few weeks later? That there is, eventually, an answer (both logical and ludicrous) to that question doesn't much mitigate the fact that I remained blithely unconcerned for the protagonists throughout, secure in the knowledge that the only real danger was a ferocious retcon. (Some of you may recall that I had the same basic issue with Ringu/The Ring—if I know you're not scheduled to die until Thursday, Monday's ostensible threats are gonna leave me yawning.) And while you'd think that the money angle in Hunter's nursery features a view of a mirrored closet door and a smaller mirror in a room across the hall for a reason, Williams can't be bothered with formal ingenuity—the cameras are strictly an established gimmick, employed in the most dully functional manner imaginable. (Honest, I was grumbling to myself about this even before seeing the new one, though admittedly I had caught wind of the fan-cam on Twitter.) Had I been watching this series in real time, I would have concluded that it's creatively exhausted (not that it had demonstrated that much creativity to begin with) and vowed to keep well away from any third installment. Unless of course they hire somebody interesting to direct...

Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli): 49

Got briefly excited when the opening scene revealed that there would be no establishment of false tranquility: Spooky shit's already happening, that's why he bought the camera. Hallelujah! And I immediately dug both actors, who handle light improv quite ably. So hell yeah, bring on the terror. Or the emotional meltdown. Or the, I dunno, the far-fetched sociopolitical allegory, maybe. Something, fer chrissakes, other than just a monotonous rhythm of increasingly nervous conversation by day and standard-issue poltergeist shenanigans by night. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, which was essentially a brutal character study disguised as a found-footage horror film (perhaps not by design, but it doesn't really matter), Paranormal Activity has nothing on its mind except BOO!, and apparently works reasonably well on that level for many; I only get frightened by the utterly inexplicable, so the sole moment that truly creeped me out was Katie standing at the foot of the bed watching Micah sleep for several hours, which Peli found mild enough to place during one of the first few nights. (He does circle back to it for the finale, but that only raises inadvisable questions about the roundabout nature of this demon's three-week possession strategy.) Having the ghost expert return only to flee before he even gets in the door was a witty touch, but it's the only real divergence from the film's cycle of mostly banal visitations, which sorta kinda escalate in degree but are generally so disconnected from each other that they seem interchangeable. After a while it was just, Okay, what's tonight's booga-booga gonna be?

/Last Exit to Brooklyn/ (1989, Uli Edel): 43

This might have been my first experience with what we now call miserablism, though I can't for the life of me remember whether I saw it or before or after reading the novel. Either way, it was immediately clear that the power of Selby's work resides almost entirely in his use of English vernacular syntax as a battering ram, which has no analogue in Edel's thoroughly normative adaptation. (I'm not in love with Requiem for a Dream either, but Aronofsky at least made an effort.) Screenwriter Desmond Nakano, who would go on to write and direct White Man's Burden, threads the book's barely-related chapters into something approximating a single narrative, though characters still tend to appear and disappear at what seems like random—Georgette's story in particular seems baffling in this context, as (s)he's utterly forgotten once killed. Faithfully punishing and grim otherwise, to no real purpose except by way of noting that life sucks for the marginalized; the various downward spirals are staggered a bit here, rather than melding into one horrific montage as in Requiem, but the effect is still the same: POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND POUND. Even the comparatively lighthearted storyline involving the shotgun wedding seems despairing in this context, since it's effectively offered as a best-case scenario. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jerry Orbach manage to shove partway through the oppressive doominess, and there's a weird fascination, carried over from the novel, in the amalgam of open flirtation and contempt with which neighborhood toughs (including a very young Sam Rockwell!) regard the drag queens...as distinctly opposed to Harry's pathetic closet case, rendered a cliché before his time by bug-eyed Stephen Lang, desperately telegraphing everything. Can't say I'm sorry I've avoided Edel ever since, though.

/Beginners/ (2010, Mike Mills): 75

Raved about this previously (I really need to devise a format for repeat viewings of new films, of which there are gonna be a lot in the next few months), and am happy to find that it remains quietly affecting even when not subverting my low expectations. Amazing how many elements that sound nauseatingly quirky à la Gigantic on paper—the subtitled Jack Russell, Ewan and Mélanie's meet-mute, The History of Sadness—Mills manages to pull off just by taking them seriously, resisting his wife's penchant for quasi-comedic exaggeration. On the flip side, Ms. July gave her couple the considered estrangement they needed, whereas the corresponding crisis in Beginners gets rushed to the point of incoherence: Girl moves in, girl instantly starts crying, boy instantly feels miserable and says so, girl instantly moves out, boy instantly repents, the instant end. Having them confess their commitment-phobia during earlier pillow talk does not absolve you from dramatizing the actual dissolution, and neither does depicting the genesis of that fear on Oliver's side, however brilliantly. (Mary Page Keller remains my top pick for Supporting Actress.) Detail that had to come from real life: "You don't know what a camisole is?"

13 October 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 10-16 Oct

/Sid and Nancy/ (1986, Alex Cox): 60

Never would have guessed at the time that it'd be Oldman, not Webb, who'd go on to become a major star—he turns in a solid impersonation whereas she embodies a screeching reservoir of bottomless need, miraculously making you feel protective of someone who's all but unbearable. Thing is, though, they're both miscast, simply by virtue of being 30 (or nearly so in Oldman's case). These were just babies, still largely unformed, and there's no way an actor, however accomplished, can completely eradicate visible evidence of life experience; you can see a trace of the real Nancy Spungen every time Courtney Love appears, looking genuinely unscarred and adrift at 21. Heroic effort nonetheless, with the film gaining power as it moves away from the pro forma biopic scene-setting of the first couple reels (Lydon gets a particularly raw deal) and settles into the duo's toxic codependency. That they were also junkies inevitably means a certain amount of tiresome wheel-spinning—all drug addicts are tedious in exactly the same way; only options are bore us or lie—but Cox counters with increasing surrealism, culminating in that iconic slo-mo kiss amidst falling garbage (which I'd nominate for a place among the 25 or so greatest shots of all time). Film as a whole romanticizes its subjects and their milieu without pretending the ugliness didn't exist, which is an impressively tricky line to walk; I don't think it ultimately earns its fairy-tale wish-fulfillment ending, but Sid dancing to K.C. and the Sunshine Band with the black kids just beforehand somehow almost sells it, even if I'm not quite sure why.

/Leap Year (Año bisiesto)/ (2010, Michael Rowe): 73

Previously addressed here. I'm generally unreceptive to films about sexual masochism, but Rowe takes precisely the opposite approach from most, employing "shock cuts" from degradation to extreme tenderness and contentment; for the first time, I actually feel like I sort of understand the S&M mindset. (Though I imagine many folks in that community would insist that one need not be lonely, miserable and/or an abuse victim to find such a relationship fulfilling.) And while I was impressed anew by Del Carmen's perfectly uninflected performance, the most riveting moment this time came courtesy of Gustavo Sánchez Parra, who wordlessly conveys Arturo's sheer horror at the realization that Laura is describing a bona-fide plan, not a fantasy. Still not in love with the titular countdown, though—this wasn't a scenario that needed a tidy structure imposed upon it.

The Three Musketeers (1973, Richard Lester): 48

"Musketeers? Seriously? No, it's just...I really could've sworn you said Three Stooges. We were just about to shave Oliver's head. No, no, that's fine, we'll make it work somehow." A bizarre approach to classic lit, and one that I'd surely treasure if it actually made me laugh consistently. Trouble is, Lester's cast the film almost exclusively with actors who just aren't funny, some of whom apparently weren't informed that certain tonal liberties would be taken. Reed and Chamberlain have roughly the correct proportion of drollness and brio, but because the film follows Dumas père pretty closely (apart from splitting the novel into two films—I have Four Musketeers here as well, will get to it at some point, probably right after Conan the Destroyer), the title characters wind up sidelined for the entire back half of the movie, stranding us with Michael York and his perpetual expression of wide-eyed idiocy. Some scenes are handsome, earnest and functional in the standard costume-drama mode, while others would fit comfortably in Start the Revolution Without Me (a film I desperately want to revisit); action setpieces frequently straddle both approaches, to the point where many duels involve planks of wood or even wet towels rather than swords. If you described this film to me—even using my own words—it would sound delightfully bold and unconventional. Somehow, though, the actual experience of watching it was mostly frustrating and dull. Bummer.

Incendies (2010, Denis Villeneuve): W/O

No shortage of high drama here, yet I never got remotely involved. Maybe I've been spoiled by Margaret: Opening scene finds two siblings discovering, courtesy of their late mother's employer (the executor of her will), that their father, who they believed dead, may in fact be alive, and that they may have an unknown brother to boot. Daughter sheds silent tears. Son sits there impassively, then declares his intention of ignoring this revelation plus all Mom's wishes concerning her interment. Are we meant to be intrigued by the question of which of these reactions is the more contrived? Flashbacks kick in shortly thereafter but appear no less clunky and unidimensional than the present-day material. This was a foreign-language Oscar nominee, right? [Checks.] Biutiful, Outside the Law, In a Better World, Incendies. How the hell did Dogtooth get a slot alongside all this worthiness?

/Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella)/ (1997, Roberto Benigni): 72

Still an audacious, pitch-black parable of denial, not the grotesquely sentimental ode to the human spirit that both partisans and detractors mistook it for; I stand by most of my epic defense of 13 years ago. But I have to admit now that Benigni seems unwilling to commit wholeheartedly to his conceit (which is almost certainly what won him multiple Oscars, so timid like a fox). Nicoletta Braschi's performance doesn't bother me as much as it apparently did at the time, but the decision to have Dora follow Guido and Giosué to the camp could scarcely be more misguided—that she's segregated from them only undermines Guido's fantasy, and every interlude involving communication between them stops the movie cold to no intelligible purpose apart from giving Braschi something to do in the second half. And then there's the German doctor, whose inevitable reappearance, though powerful in itself, writes a check that the final act not only can't cash but fails to even recognize as a conveyance for legal tender. It can't be coincidence that Guido's look of dawning horror, as he's offered not a means of escape or assistance but a pointless riddle, is immediately followed by the only visual evidence of mass murder in the entire film (stylized in a way that some found tasteless, but it's clearly intended to represent everything he's chosen to ignore prior to this moment)...and yet Guido neither snaps out of it and acknowledges the nightmare he's entered nor deliberately retreats into willful blindness. He just forges on as if those two scenes had never happened, with the finale precipitated only by the end of the war and impending liberation. These lapses aren't fatal, but they are damaging, especially given how susceptible to misinterpretation the film was in the first place. I'd perhaps be more forgiving had Benigni used his crossover success for good rather than (by all appearances; I've steered clear) unholy evil; as is, I can see his tailspin beginning right here.

/The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!/ (1988, David Zucker): 67

Here's a genre (or subgenre, I suppose) that's deader than the Western and the Musical combined, surviving only in stuff like the Scary Movie franchise that regularly turns up on worst-of-the-year lists. (Even the two sequels to this film were pretty patchy, actually.) As ever, I tune out during the toilet humor—literal in the case of Drebin hitting the bathroom with his radio mic still on—and there are too many baseball jokes in the third act for my personal sports-apathetic taste. But it was here that ZAZ truly perfected the escalating-absurdity gag that just keeps on giving: opening-credits "cop car" that invades a women's locker room and rides a rollercoaster; the litany of subsidiary disasters that befall Nordberg after he's shot (that Simpson does nothing except take punishment is now oddly cathartic); gasoline truck --> rocket launcher -- > fireworks factory; etc. And while Leslie Nielsen rocking the deadpan is a given, I'd forgotten how deftly Priscilla Presley underplays all of her silliness -- even her recoveries from pratfalls are nonchalant. Not as inspired as the show, which had the advantage of brevity (per episode, I mean; I was heartbroken by its cancellation), but anyone who doesn't convulse at the sight of Drebin taking a pillow to the face might as well just give up on the concept of joy altogether.

05 October 2011

Viewing Journal: Week of 3-9 Oct

/Scarface/ (1983, Brian DePalma): 52

Considerably more nuanced than one would guess based on its cultural legacy, though that's still no excuse for it being three hours long. As usual with rise/fall narratives, the rise consistently thrills but the fall is kind of a drag; Tony never comes across as someone who'd wind up face-diving into giant mounds of cocaine, and it's borderline offensive, to say nothing of ridiculous, that he's ultimately toppled not by greed or envy or hubris—or even by his token Hecht-derived overprotectiveness toward his sister—but by his refusal to allow innocent women and children to be murdered. Montana the Martyr, {spit-take}. By powerful contrast, the film takes amazingly realistic pains, just for example, in depicting his conquest of Pfeiffer's empty beauty, having her tacitly encourage him by not protesting when he declares his intentions, but also acknowledging that she'd stick to Loggia's kingpin until he's actually killed, then just gather her things in resignation. Combination of Stone and De Palma can be bracing, too, most notably of course in the infamous chainsaw scene—for two decades, I'd remembered only the actual hideousness (which isn't all that explicit, turns out), but henceforth I'm more likely to recall the camera elegantly turning away from the approaching carnage, drifting out the window and across the street to where Tony's buddies wait in the car, listening to music and flirting with some random girl who's wandered by. As for Pacino, either you enjoy him making "cockroach" a three-syllable word or you don't. It's an absurd performance but riveting nonetheless, the unapologetic embodiment of all things uncouth; every sentence and gesture, no matter how fleeting or casual, amounts to "fuck you."

The Color Wheel (2011, Alex Ross Perry): 41

[Pedigree: Sarasota '11; Locarno.]

"There are people who watch this film and say they find the characters uninteresting or overly irritating. Those people are assholes who either have the most inexplicably charmed lives or a deluded sense of self-satisfaction for crafting a world free of conflict, larger-than-life personalities, or actual human beings." Or maybe we assholes just don't enjoy watching people who talk exactly like that at 500 wpm in allegedly casual conversation. Barely tolerable protagonists aren't the problem here—I adore Margaret, Buffalo '66, The Forest for the Trees, and numerous other deliberately off-putting films, and I fully respect what Perry and Altman are trying to do. I just don't think they do it very well, either as writers or as actors. Their dynamic feels almost Borscht Belt, like Henny Youngman doing mumblecore: no actual jokes, but nonstop belligerent patter that falls into an unrewarding chasm between verisimilitude and comedy. On paper that may sound intriguing, but as executed it often plays as if Saturday Night Live had decided to allot 12:50 a.m. sketch time to a couple of microindie film geeks. (The scene with the motel clerk, in particular, is cringeworthy in all the wrong ways.) Intended to W/O, but various admiring reviews more or less conceded the film's insufferability and spoke vaguely of some climactic coup de cinéma that justifies the ordeal, so I forged on; what actually happens is that Perry and Altman make a blatant bid for sympathy by surrounding their merely irritating fuckups with cartoon cretins (I gave up hope when one dude poured a glass of wine into Colin's shirt pocket for no reason and he just stood there blankly watching), then conclude with an ostensibly shocking turn of events that frankly just feels like a Hail Mary pass—the kindest adjective that comes to mind is "unpersuasive." (Yes, it's foreshadowed, and no, that doesn't help.) I'm not writing Perry off yet, but judging from The Color Wheel he's got more ideas than chops.

/Bullets Over Broadway/ (1994, Woody Allen): 75

Pretty much the last gasp of Allen as a prodigious comic voice—he's made some movies I like since, but none primarily because they're hilarious. "Yeah, I did a musical revue in Wichita. Maybe you heard of it, it was called Leave a Specimen." He just ran out of those at some point. Wish he didn't state the film's theme quite so bluntly, with multiple discussions of whether artists do/should create their own moral universe—much more than Husbands and Wives, this film feels like a direct response to the Soon-Yi scandal—but the fact that it's couched within such a broad, goofy comedy makes it go down fairly easy, especially since the premise itself doesn't exactly qualify as subtle (yet still works like gangbusters). Cusack makes for one of the more successful pseudo-Woodys, and has a fabulous rapport with Palminteri—their scene together in the bar may be unique in Allen's filmography, in that it genuinely looks like two people having a conversation rather than reciting dialogue. (There's even a non-strategic lull!) But then, the entire cast excels. Terrific though Wiest is, I'd have given the Oscar to Tilly, whose riff on Lina Lamont threatens to out-screech the original; Broadbent, for his part, deserves some sort of special award for making his character more than just the lazy, slow-fuse fat joke that existed on paper (and unfortunately portended the wit quotient of crap like Small Time Crooks and Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Not one of Woody's greatest, by any means, but so much sharper, funnier and more assured than most of what's followed (including this year's inexplicably well-regarded mediocrity) that in retrospect it looks nigh-well miraculous. Had I known what was coming, I wouldn't have shrugged.

/Wings of Desire/ (1987, Wim Wenders): 54

Think I'd love this as a silent film, as it's mostly the poetic language that puts me off. Whenever human thoughts are just an indecipherable buzz in a language I don't speak, as in crowd scenes, I mentally project myself into the lives of those random faces, sometimes to deeply moving effect...but then Damiel or Cassiel will zero in on somebody in particular, and we'll hear her saying things like "Longing. Longing for a wave of love that would stir in me. That's what makes me clumsy. The absence of pleasure. Desire for love. Desire to love," and the spell is immediately broken. (Peter Falk's internal monologue is so comparatively mundane that I wonder whether he wrote much or all of it himself.) Also, Damiel's decision to "fall" seems either under- or overdramatized—I don't need the entire movie to be about his transition from spirit to flesh (as I gather is the case in City of Angels, which I never saw), but having him take the plunge 3/4 of the way through, only to watch Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and listen to Solveig Dommartin's (sigh) poetic monologue (thankfully only about five minutes long, rather than the 15 or so it had become in my memory), seems like a half-assed attempt to impose some sort of structure upon what's really just an unusual specimen of city-symphony. Everybody just shut up, stop doing things, and let the camera glide through the Staatsbibliothek and alongside the Wall that would no longer exist just two years later. Can you not see that you're creating a beautiful time capsule, not a drama? (Or a goddamn poem?)

/Margaret/ (2011, Kenneth Lonergan): 80

Now that I've read a draft of the screenplay (184 pages, dated 15 July 2003), it's clear that Lonergan was in no way attempting to "find the movie" in the editing room, as various news stories have suggested—what's onscreen is pretty much exactly what he conceived, except that giant chunks of it are missing. He evidently spent years trying to figure out how to cut the film down to less than 150 minutes without totally crippling it. Which was in fact a near-impossible task, as its meaning is encoded in its sheer muddled sprawl—it's as if someone had forced Akerman to bring Jeanne Dielman in at 149:59. What's amazing is how close it nonetheless comes to magnificence, which is in part a testament to how stubbornly Lonergan clung to various semantic debates ("bravo/a/i," "strident," Lear IV.i) that would surely seem like obvious cuts to Searchlight suits. And what I previously wrote about him using messiness as an organizing principle turns out to be an understatement. At the (minor, I think) risk of getting into trouble, let me share with you two pages from a scene that didn't make it into the release version, just by way of demonstrating what Lonergan's intentions were, and how fortunate we probably are to have even this long-delayed, heavily bleeding remnant. If I handed these pages in to my agent, he would have me committed.

Candyman (1992, Bernard Rose): 37

See, I skipped this in first-run because I'd already been burned twice by Rose—Paperhouse in particular being a textbook case of narrative incoherence defeating conceptual promise. And sure enough, Candyman tosses urban legend, racial hostility/condescension, encroaching madness, Clive Barker's obsession with pain-as-ecstasy, and various other elements into a shock-cut gumbo that makes no damn sense whatsoever. What's more, that fuzziness actually works against the film's effectiveness as horror, rather than for it—there's a reason kids don't sit around the campfire whispering "and if you say his name five times, somebody else will get viciously murdered and the police will have every reason to think you did it...and maybe you did!" Some cut-rate Mr. Señor Love Daddy with bees buzzing inside his guts doesn't get me shivering, and I'm damned if I can work out what Candyman's origin as a lynching victim of sorts has to do with the heroine's gradual metamorphosis into an avenging paranormal figure (completely unrelated to urban legend; Xander Berkeley isn't deliberately summoning her in the final scene), or what either has to do with the notion of bogeymen as modern-day gods in need of worshippers (an intriguing idea that's merely pronounced in echo-treated voiceover, never actually explored). It's more overtly thoughtful and ambitious than the average horror movie, certainly, but that doesn't make it smart; far better to focus on actually horrifying and let the sociological subtext take care of itself.

/Amadeus/ (1984, Milos Forman): 69

Not bad as Best Picture winners go—apart from Rain Man, for which I have a perhaps unaccountable soft spot, this is probably my favorite from the '80s. (Need to see Terms of Endearment again, but I'd be surprised.) Frustrated mediocrity's clash with vulgar genius makes for an inherently compelling subject, and Abraham sinks his teeth into the pointedly non-title role, keeping it a little reptilian in the flashback scenes in order to heighten the rapture he conveys when describing Mozart's music to the priest—he even manages not to be upstaged by his old-age makeup, which is exceedingly rare. (Hulce is sporadically good too, but leans way too hard on the obscene giggle.) Strong location work, refreshing absence of period stuffiness, sharp supporting turns by Jeffrey Jones and Elizabeth Berridge, one tour de force (dictating K.626), score doesn't suck. But the gulf between Mozart and Salieri has been dumbed down so much that the latter's anguish isn't nearly as powerful as it should be. I don't overly mind that Shaffer has Mozart hold Salieri's work in contempt, contrary to historical record—that at least allows for memorable flourishes both visual (Salieri unmoved by a thunderous ovation, desirous only of Mozart's approval) and verbal (best pseudo-compliment ever: "One hears such sounds and what can one say but...Salieri!"). But there's a difference between mediocre and feeble. Depicting Mozart's gift by stripping some of Figaro down to bare bones, assigning the kindergarten version to Salieri, and then letting Mozart rebuild it impromptu...I mean, come on. That's like making the case for Shakespeare by having him rewrite a rival's speech that begins "So, should I kill myself or not? I can kind of see both sides." It only cheapens an otherwise arresting portrait of unendurable envy.