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Short Film Reviews
Alias Betty
dir. Claude Miller
Wow! You don't often come across a film so exhilarating and so
resolutely dark as this French adaptation of Ruth Rendell's 1985
suspense novel, The Tree of Hands. It's a film equally full of
life and death, love and neglect, passion and frigidity—and director Claude Miller revels in
the dusky overlap. The plot is fraught with twists that not only surprise
the viewer but fundamentally change the thriller's progress; the film's
neatest trick lies in never letting us know whose story we're actually
watching. I know this sounds vague, but really, to synopsize this movie
just feels irresponsible. The ever-shifting narrative positively relies
on the audience not knowing what comes next (whereas most film narratives
just lean on it); to reveal much of anything would be a violation.
What I can say (other than "trust me")
is that Alias Betty is a film about the constant environmental and
human dangers that threaten the safety of young children, and the unforeseeable
ways that parents can (often simultaneously) both embody and combat
those dangers. The only other thing I feel comfortable revealing is
that Miller's film is the nearest thing to a response to the captivating,
candy-colored whimsy of Amélie the French cinema has created yet. SEAN
NELSON
Assassination Tango
dir. Robert Duvall
The last film written and directed by Robert Duvall was The
Apostle, a heroic effort in which one of the greatest
American actors of all time wrote a simple moral drama
about a complicated, deeply conflicted man. It was a plum
of a part, which played to all of Duvall's strengths as
an actor, particularly his ability to convey the zeal of
a flawed man's convictions, and the ever-so-subtle cracks
that appear in those convictions when things begin to fall
apart. The style of the film was restrained and serious,
but most of all, the film felt written; with the
exception of Duvall's Pentecostal rants, when the glory
of GAWD-uh seemed to take him over body and soul, every
scene in the film was measured and intentional, leading
through conflicts, toward a conclusion. The Apostle was
a bracing surprise that gave one faith that actors might
have a capacity for self-knowledge greater than any other
artists.
Assassination Tango is another matter altogether,
a disappointment of such magnitude that you almost can't
believe your eyes. The film is piss poor, specifically because
all the choices made by Duvall in creating his last film
seem to have been reversed. The story rambles in one direction,
then veers into a blind alley—the performances wind
on and on like improv class in the seventh circle of Cassavetes
hell, and the characters are wafer-thin excuses for the worst
kind of cinematic vanity.
Duvall plays a grizzly, aging hit man with a younger girlfriend
(Kathy Baker, in a role that almost doesn't exist) whose
pre-teen daughter is clearly the raison d'être for
the relationship. He's the kind of career criminal who lives
by a set of inflexible "rules" that keep him alive and his
makeshift family safe. When he is called away to Argentina
to kill a politician (Why? I don't know. Why do you ask?),
he finds himself captivated by the rhythms of the tango,
and falls in with a beautiful Argentine mother (Luciana Pedraza),
also much younger. Needless to say, he soon violates his "rules," imperiling
his life and the safety of the seemingly helpless, ultraneedy
ladies he left behind.
Duvall hams his way through the film in search, seemingly,
of a meaningful direction for the story. Though he tries
several (domestic drama, crime potboiler, character study,
cross-cultural musical), he never makes a choice, settling
instead on a series of improvisations whose only justification
is an extended series of dance scenes. Though Assassination
Tango might sound good on paper (lousy title notwithstanding),
it's lost from the very first scene. SEAN NELSON
Beauty and the Beast
dir. Jean Cocteau
Fri Jan 3-Thurs Jan 9 at the Grand Illusion
Before this fairy tale was bludgeoned into mediocre musical
whimsy by the hacks and whores of Walt Disney Studios, it
inspired a film of conspicuous beauty and ambivalent uplift
from the pan-talented artist Jean Cocteau. In Disney's version,
the story of a monster ennobled by the love of a fair maiden
is all computer-graphic surfaces and obvious transformations,
with a clear-cut message that ugliness can be redeemed by
the grace of beauty. For Cocteau, a sensualist with surreal
sensibilities, the story of the Beast's gradual taming is
packed with fragile ironies that float through its fairy-tale
landscape like the strands of a spider web. The Beast's nobility
is part and parcel with his gruesomeness, and the love to
which his Beauty eventually yields brings with it questions
of sacrifice and compromise that contemporary fables have
entirely forgotten how to grapple with. Cocteau's story is
tied up in the Beast's searing, defining agony—the
agony of displacement, and of humanity locked behind a disfigured
façade. The climactic transformation, in which we
finally see the handsome face of Jean Marais (Cocteau's lover)
alongside the angelic Josette Day, registers as a loss just
as much as a romantic triumph. It's hokey to say that we
too have fallen in love with the Beast, but that hokiness
doesn't keep us from feeling haunted by the palpable swoon
of this gorgeous piece of filmmaking. In French, with subtitles, naturellement.
SEAN NELSON
Broken Wings
dir. Nir Bergman
Plays Fri-Thurs April 2-8 at the Varsity
It's difficult to say whether this kitchen sinky melodrama
is inherently political because it was made in Israel by
an Israeli filmmaker and is about a contemporary Israeli
family. If Broken Wings is political, however, the
politics reveal themselves by their complete absence from
the narrative, rather than (as in most films that have anything
to do with Israel) by their blunt, didactic foregrounding. Wings tells
the story of the working-class Ulman family—a single
mother, two teenagers, and two younger kids—who live
out their days in the bourgeois doldrums. Daughter Maya has
high hopes for her rock band, but when her nurse mother is
called to work a night shift at the hospital, Maya has to
bail on a gig so she can baby-sit. This causes her to curse
her mother's name, like any teenager would. Brother Yair,
meanwhile, has given up his dreams of being a basketball
player in favor of nihilism and a night job handing out fliers
while dressed in a mouse costume. The younger sister is a
bed-wetter. The younger brother likes to jump into the deep
end of empty swimming pools. The mother sleepwalks through
a soul-killing job. The entire family, it seems, is as racked
with ennui as any American suburbanite clan—but then
we learn that the recent death of the father/husband is what's
keeping them so morose, and the picture comes into focus.
The politics of this film are personal—though the very
act of telling a story of a bourgeois family in Haifa without
any mention of suicide bombs might qualify as political—and
are only as affecting as your ability to invest yourself
in the actors. They do a fine job, and the conflicts that
arise are harrowing, but no more so than in any other halfway
decent film about coping families. As Yair tells Maya after
she runs away, "It could be worse." If that's the film's
subversive message, he's absolutely right. SEAN NELSON
The Butterfly Effect
dir. Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber
Opens Fri Jan 23.
Johnny: I'm readin' about the Butterfly Effect.
Louise: What's the Butterfly Effect?
Johnny: Every time a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo,
this old granny in Salford has a bilious attack.
Louise: What happens if a butterfly flaps its wings in Salford?
Johnny: That's not the point.
Louise: Oh, is it not?
—from the movie Naked by Mike Leigh
It would be a stretch to relate anything in Naked,
Mike Leigh's masterpiece of misanthropy, to The Butterfly
Effect, the latest feature-length advertisement for
Ashton Kutcher's bone structure. Even citing Naked at
the front of this review feels sacrilegious. I've included
the above exchange in an attempt to communicate the experience
of watching Butterfly, a film so stultifyingly poor
on every level that unless you're (a) 12 years old, (b) a
sadly desperate gay man/straight woman with a thing for hunky
morons, or (c) 13 years old, you really have no business
watching. It's not that the Naked excerpt sheds
light on the Kutcher movie; it's that the Kutcher movie is
such torture that you find yourself running through dialogue
from other films to pass the interminable 100 minutes until
it finally ends.
To synopsize: Kutcher plays Evan, a genius psychology student
(just play along) whose area of expertise is memory, specifically
the way memories are stored in the cerebral cortex. It stands
to reason that he'd be obsessed with "the complexity of the
human brain" (just hearing Ashton Kutcher say that phrase
was enough to send the entire theater into a fit of giggles,
by the way); ever since he was a little kid, Evan has had
a stress-related affliction that causes him to black out,
or "lose time," in moments of trauma. Naturally, these traumatic
moments are many in little Evan's world; by the age of 13,
he's beset by an institutionalized father who tries to kill
him, a child-molesting neighbor who tries to videotape him,
and a sociopathic playmate who sets his dog on fire. And
the hits just keep on coming.
Seven years later, Evan discovers that by rereading the
journals he was required to keep as a kid, he can recover
his lost time, revisiting the sites of his childhood traumas
and, one by one, reversing them. So, the kiddie pornographer
(Eric Stoltz, in a what-the-hell-is-HE-doing-here? role)
gets a moralizing lecture—Evan calls him a "fuckbag"—and
mends his evil ways. The only problem is that the changing
of that one incident changes everything that has happened
since. Hence, duh, the Butterfly Effect. One second, Evan
is a shaggy-haired, scruffy-bearded braniac reading a journal,
and the next thing you know—POW!—he's a goateed
frat boy running around the halls of a sorority house wearing
nothing but a towel. Which of course leads him to accidentally
murder somebody. And almost have to perform fellatio on not
one but two white supremacists in prison. Every time he goes
back in time to change something for the better, he winds
up screwing the future in some way he never could have predicted.
Dude, where's my chaos theory?
Never mind the convenient science, or the inane dialogue
("You can't hate yourself because your dad is a twisted freak!"),
or the trendy visual effects. As with quantum physics, you
can't reduce The Butterfly Effect to mere elements.
Occasionally, it comes close to having the kind of self-awareness
that might save it from its own preposterousness—like
when Kutcher channels the frat boy we all know lurks within
him—but the film invariably drowns these opportunities
in a sea of neglected-teen revenge porn dotted by atolls
of morbid violence. Ultimately, Butterfly is pure hybrid:
the latest exponent of the growing sub-subgenre of suburban
gothic supernatural thrillers in which all the suspense gets
used up on wondering when the protagonist will wake up from
his bad dream. You could call it a crypto-reactionary/Republican/Christian
wish-fulfillment morality play, but that would be giving
it too much credit. Really, it's just Donnie Darko for
morons. SEAN NELSON
Comedian
dir. Christian Charles
The reason this documentary will stand as a work of greatness
for decades to come is simple: It absolutely nails the psychology
of the standup comic, the most narcissistic, petty, self-obsessed,
hateful, and bitter breed of entertainer known to mankind.
And though Jerry Seinfeld is the film's chief subject—Comedian documents
his arduous quest to write and perform a brand-new set of
material for club audiences—he is not the prime exemplar
of the vile strain of comic mentioned above. That honor belongs
to Orny Adams, a young up-and-comer whose ruthless self-absorption
and sense of entitlement make a beautiful counterpoint to
Seinfeld's more craft-driven professionalism. And not surprisingly,
it's Adams, despite his despicable presence, who emerges
as the more fascinating subject. As Seinfeld himself says
to an audience, "You don't get any bigger than me." He's
out to prove to himself that he's still a comic at heart
after being a TV star for the last 10 years. For Adams, every
minute of every living day is another minute that he hasn't
yet made it, and hence, every person he encounters is either
a mark or an obstacle on the road to fame. He's such a prick,
and so singularly driven, that you just know he's going to
make it. SEAN NELSON
Culture Jam: Hijacking Commercial Culture
dir. Jill Sharpe
Thurs-Fri Dec 12-13 at the Little Theatre
Ultra, the Northwest Film Forum's series of anti-consumerism
documentaries, continues with this well-meant, well-made,
but essentially amateurish and cheerleading look inside the
world of "drive-by cultural criticism." The one-hour video
features three practitioners of the art of creative rebuttal,
each of whom represents a different facet of performance
protest—from beautiful absurdism to wince-worthy credulity.
San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front is an inspired
group of yippie vandals who deface, or reface, public advertisements
with ironic slogans—changing a cigarette billboard
to read "Am I Dead Yet?" etc.—and revel in the quixotic
nature of their quest. They change the signs, a bunch of
people see them, then the owners change them back. In Toronto,
we meet Carly Stasko, a "Media Tigress," who teaches classes
in culture jamming and posts stickers with epigrams like "enjoy
debt" and "the product is you" on cash machines and fast-food
drive-through windows. Stasko also raps about freeing one's
mind from the enslavement of advertising; and while she really
means it, she's as compelling as a college sophomore who
just found out that the government is bad.
Next up is Reverend Billy, a theater actor in a priest costume
who leads his "Church of Stop Shopping" into the Disney Store
in Times Square and demands that people boycott Disney for
its sweatshop labor practices. Billy is the most troubling
subject—not because what he says isn't true, but because
he's an insufferable fame wraith, with one eye forever cocked,
looking for a camera. The billboard liberators are by far
the most entertaining of the lot, not just because their
art is the best (though it is), but because they seem to
be the only ones, filmmakers included, who get the big picture.
One would like to think we can all agree that advertising
is an affront to taste and language, but we can't. One would
like to think that we will all rise to the challenge of reclaiming
our portion of the corporate "mindshare," but we won't. When "Jack
Napier," the spokesman of the Billboard Liberation Front,
asserts that "there is no free speech anymore; it's all bought
and paid for," he may be clever, but he's wrong. Still, he's
right on the money (as it were) when he says, "If you don't
believe they're going to put a Nike swoosh on the moon, you
obviously haven't been paying attention to what we're capable
of as a race." Somewhere in between these two statements
lies the challenge and the responsibility of the culture
jammer. Unlike its narcissistic counterparts, the BLF recognizes
and embraces the noble futility of its efforts, subverting
the eyeline monopoly of advertising the best and only way
it can: temporarily and anonymously. SEAN NELSON
The Daddy of Rock 'n' Roll
dir. Daniel Bitton
Wed Nov 13 at EMP.
The cult of Wesley Willis always made me a little queasy,
mainly because it carried with it the assumption that mental
disability was somehow funny if accompanied by a Casio keyboard
and a rock attitude. This video documentary goes a little
ways toward showing Willis as he is (schizophrenic, obese,
largely incoherent, vulgar, musical, charming), as opposed
to how the mid-'90s alternative irony racket portrayed him
(secretly brilliant, hilarious, ridiculous). Alas, it never
goes too deep into Willis' psychic history. There are glimpses,
but only after the bulk of the film has gone by, during which
the cameras follow him around Chicago and make him the narrator.
Much like his music, the novelty wears thin before much time
has elapsed. After all, there's only so many times you can
hear a person talk about the genitalia of zoo animals before
wanting to change the channel. SEAN NELSON
De-Lovely
dir. Irwin Winkler
Opens Fri July 2
Played with characteristic swagger by the great Kevin Kline,
Cole Porter is a great songwriter and prodigious homosexual
with a beautiful and rich wife (Ashley Judd) who not only
tolerates, but encourages, his same-sex dalliances. This
hyper-liberal approach to marriage is only one of the film's
flawed conceits. Another far more damning one is that Porter,
either moments before or after death, is watching his life
unfold as a stage show in rehearsal, guided by guardian angel/director
Jonathan Pryce, in the thankless, interlocutory role typically
reserved for British actors in biography movies (cf. Anthony
Hopkins in Chaplin, et al.).
De-Lovely is perfumed with preciousness, and ultimately
suffers from the self-consciousness of its Hollywood gloss,
as well as the difficult-to-swallow progressiveness of its
characters. (Oddly enough, the sub rosa insinuation of Porter's
homosexuality in the 1946 biopic Night and Day rings
much truer to the life one imagines a gay man leading in
the '20s and '30s.) Still, the fine performances of Kline
and Judd diminish the film's more troublesome liberties.
And oh, yes, the songs are among the greatest ever written.
Never mind that many are sung by a stunt cast of pop semi-luminaries
like Elvis Costello, Mick Hucknall, and Sheryl Crow. (The
only real travesty is Alanis Morrisette's noxious, syllable-grinding
rendition of "Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love.") When Kline
sings—like Porter, his voice is thin, which makes his
performances all the more compelling—the emotional
complexity of these seemingly simple ditties comes vividly
to life. SEAN NELSON
Die Another Day
dir. Lee Tamahori
After about two hours of workmanlike action
and suspense, and a battery of sexual innuendo about as subtle
and charming as a herpes sore, the 20th James Bond film finally
surrenders to its own muddled identity. After being chased by
a giant laser across a vast ice tundra to a sheer cliff, James
Bond parachutes down onto the ocean surface, where he then parasurfs
to safety. The bluescreen effect (or whatever it is) is so all-fired
phony and dumb that it makes the whole film—indeed, the whole series of
films—ring retroactively camp. Likable Pierce Brosnan has long since
outlived his inevitability in the lead role, and takes a turn for the
Roger Moore with this film. His heroics, his sexual bravado, his body
hair—they all
seem to indicate an epic disjunction between the supersmooth ultraspy
we keep hearing about and the vaguely handsome tool we see onscreen
playing him. Predictably, this film's only real recommendation lies
in the stuffing of Halle Berry's wild bikini, but frankly, you can
get to that more easily by doing a Google search. SEAN NELSON
Divine Intervention
dir. Elia Suleiman
Fri-Thurs Feb 21-27 at the Varsity
If there is a common theme to the battery of recent films
about the Israel-Palestine "situation," it is earnestness.
Many a documentary has come along in the last few years to
examine the "problem" from one side or the other, or even
with a view toward admitting the complexity of the intractable
collision of two peoples defined by their irresolvable hatred
of one another, and doomed by their belief in God.
What is missing from these films, typically, is the mordant
sense of humor that distinguishes (and unites) both Arab
and Jewish culture: In the face of increasing misery, one
can always count on Arabs and Jews to laugh fatalistically.
This laughter, an embrace of the inherent absurdity of life
on Earth, is the chief element of Divine Intervention,
a film told in seemingly random, nearly silent vignettes
of Middle Eastern bizarreness. A man in a Santa suit runs
through Nazareth, pursued by teenage thugs. A man drives
down a busy street waving at strangers, even as he curses
each one with mounting hostility. A balloon with Arafat's
face on it confounds the guards at the Jerusalem-Ramallah
checkpoint, allowing two lovers to sneak through. It's hard
to know exactly what these Beckett-lite blackouts are aiming
toward, but it's refreshing to see that not everyone in the
goddamn world has lost a sense of humor. SEAN NELSON
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb
dir. Stanley Kubrick
You could argue that Dr. Strangelove represents,
if not the birth of contemporary irony, then certainly its
most successful prototype. Informed by the hysteria of nuclear-age
brinkmanship and fueled by caustic absurdism, the film's
satire of bureaucracy also contains a desperate pessimism
about the state of statesmanship—so desperate that
all you can do is laugh and wait for the bombs to drop.
Now that modern warfare is again at the front of the consciousness,
it seems a perfect time to revive Strangelove's
inspired nihilism. But somehow, watching it again recently,
I was struck by how quaint the humor seemed, and how shallow
and obvious the irony. Like every other Kubrick devotee,
I've seen the film dozens of times, having discovered it
in high school, where I embraced "Gentlemen, you can't fight
in here, this is the war room" as profound wisdom about
the insane nature of modern warfare and governments. It
was profound, I think, in 1964—and maybe even in 1990.
But the other day, I heard a college kid quote the line
at a bus stop, and it made me want to puke because it sounded
so complacent. It's difficult to gauge whether the picture's
evolution away from timelessness has more to do with its
familiarity—its centrality, even, to the contemporary
sense of humor—or with the inconvenient complexity
of the current state of international affairs. Either way, Dr.
Strangelove has changed. Or maybe it's just gotten
impossible to stop worrying. SEAN NELSON
Fight to the Max
dir. Simeon Soffer
Thurs-Sun Jan 9-12 at the Little Theatre
After a month-long series of documentaries devoted to hating
on consumer culture, and a killer program about "The Futility
of War" on the horizon (keep your eyes peeled for Duck
Soup!), the Northwest Film Forum now turns its attention
to the U.S. prison system with "Scars and Bars," a two-week
run of two documentaries at the Little Theatre. I haven't
seen The Farm: Angola, USA, but Fight to the
Max is essential viewing for anyone who even pretends
to still care about the word "liberal."
Despite its awkward title and a cinematographic tendency
toward Bruce Weber-style homoerotic black-body fetishism, Fight is
an amazingly uplifting story about prison boxing and the
ways it gives convicts not only an outlet for aggression,
but a vehicle for the order and reason absent from the rest
of their penitentiary regimen (to say nothing of their lives
outside). Through boxing, the prisoners (all of them black)
begin to feel of some use, not just to the world around them,
but to themselves. And as they grow in self-discipline, they
are entrusted with incremental doses of trust from their
guards and wardens. Pride and passion for life ensue. It's
not to be forgotten that these men are violent criminals
(armed robbers, drug dealers, kidnappers, rapists, murderers)
or that the sport they're being redeemed by is, on its best
nights, a monstrous exhibition of swift-footed brutality.
What Fight makes plain, however, is that the men
are men first—some witty, literate, and charming—and
that the violence inside them is crying out for a channel.
Boxing in prison is the best and perhaps only way to ensure
that channel is defined by a respect for rules.
The film's most harrowing moment comes not in the climactic
tournament, but during the training, when one fighter lies
on a mat while his trainer stands above him, hurling a medicine
ball against the boxer's impossibly ripped abdomen again
and again. Every time the ball comes down, the fighter crunches,
then heaves a breath, and shouts, "Bring it!" And the trainer
brings it. And the fighter asks for more. SEAN NELSON
Gaza Strip
dir. James Longley
Two major factors distinguish this almost unbearably powerful
documentary, which examines the social and psychological
conditions of life in the 28-mile Palestinian territory
whose borders are Israel and hell, where bombs, bullets,
and gas are as common as Seattle's raindrops. The first
is that, unlike most political video journalism, Gaza
Strip employs no voiceover, so the subjects are left
to speak for themselves while the images coalesce into desolate
poetry. The second is that the filmmaker has made no attempt
to "balance" his story with opposing viewpoints; the documentary
is adamantly subjective, depicting life only on one side
of the wall. Though this lends credence to the predictable
claim that Gaza Strip is a piece of anti-Israel propaganda,
and therefore anti-Semitic—a charge laid by an Israeli
official—it also protects the integrity of the film's
perspective and ensures director James Longley's stated
goal of showing a side of the second intifada typically
overlooked by Western media. But if Gaza Strip fails
to portray the complexity of the situation (i.e., any mention
of Palestinian provocation or accountability), it succeeds
at rendering the awful everyday truths of life in the region—as
gory as gas attacks and as pedestrian as closed roads.
Though his camera captures many incidents of damning violence
against civilians, Longley is after more than mere reportage.
What he's looking for is a clue into the inner life of Arab
children growing up under incrementally oppressive occupation.
What he finds is chilling: sweet-faced kids hardening into
pre-terrorists, full of hatred and impotent rage at having
to watch their friends and family killed and maimed by an
enemy who savagely flaunts the upper hand, an enemy against
whom they are all but defenseless. What's remarkable, however,
is the absence of despair in the face of such a hopeless
situation. Beset on all sides with governmental corruption
and the constant threat of random death, the young subjects
are far from surrender; energized by the fury of the oppressed,
they throw rocks at tanks, curse the Jews, declare their
desire for martyrdom.
While it's tempting to view all this (and I do mean all
of it) as the inevitable byproduct of the insanity of religious
belief, Gaza Strip makes it clear that despite
the ancient nature of the conflict, the suffering is entirely
modern, and demonstrably one-sided. Longley set out to make
a documentary about Palestinian stone-throwers. What he
has wound up with is a portrait of a brutalized collective
psyche, and a convincing argument that death is more appealing
than some versions of life. SEAN NELSON
Grey Gardens
dir. Albert & David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer
Fri-Sun May 2-4 at the Little Theatre
In the entire lexicon of impoverished American gentry, there
are no two more tragic, painful, and riveting figures than
Edith Bouvier Beale and her mother, uh, Edith Bouvier Beale.
Anyone who has seen this astonishing documentary can tell
you that these Kennedy satellites put the "crazy" back in "aristocracy."
Sitting around their decaying Hamptons manse, Big and Little
Edie confess—by means both unwitting and witting—that
they are agoraphobic doyennes who have spent so much time
cloistered together, ruing their fallen fortunes, that a
murder-suicide seems like the only possibility for a happy
ending.
The filmmakers' access is so complete that you can smell
the cat piss and feel the rising damp as Little Edie swoons
under the camera's gaze, while her mother barks out constant
disapproval of everything. Made in 1975, Grey Gardens was
the source of considerable controversy in its time, as much
for the invasiveness of its technique as the manipulations
of its story. In the end, the choice of victim belongs to
the viewer, but if you look closely, you can see the film
progress from exploitation to empathy, even as its subjects
regress from circumspection to pitiful vaudeville. SEAN NELSON
The Happiness of the Katakuris
dir. Takashi Miike
Rampant silliness is almost always a quality to be applauded,
especially in cinema. The problem is that in the absence
of a real point, inspired nonsense can all too easily devolve
into boring quirkiness. This, alas, seems to be the case
with this truly bizarre horror-comedy-musical-soap opera
by Takashi Miike (Audition, City of Lost Souls),
an auteur who clearly wanted to depart not only from his
oeuvre, but from all trace of his good senses. He succeeds
magnificently in places (the film's blend of Claymation
and live action recalls the genius of Pee-wee's Playhouse unloosed
from the censors' reins) but ultimately loses the plot so
completely that the picture becomes—like almost all
musicals—a stultifying endurance test. A synopsis
would be futile, but the story involves a hapless family
that buys a remote bed and breakfast that gets no customers.
Then it gets one and he dies, horribly. They hide the body.
Another guest, another grisly death, another hidden body.
Then, all hell really breaks loose, and so do the musical
numbers, as well as a camp sensibility that seems to want
to mock movie conventions that haven't actually been conventional
for 30 years or more. The goal would seem to be cinematic
anarchy. The reality, however, is more closely akin to a
Japanese Kentucky Fried Movie, with a few moments
of brilliance. Drag. SEAN NELSON
The Heart of Me
dir. Thaddeus O'Sullivan
Opens Fri July 11 at the Metro
Two immediate questions are posed at the beginning of this
melodramatic period piece. Question one: How long until the
upright husband (Paul Bettany) and the bohemian sister-in-law
(Helena Bonham Carter) break down and betray the prudish
wife (Olivia Williams), by giving in to their forbidden passion
and getting it on Edwardian-style? The answer is about 13
minutes, leaving another hour and 15 for the viewer to ponder
question two: How many of these movies can Helena Bonham
Carter possibly hope to star in before she dies? That answer
remains elusive, and though Carter is no longer a cherubic
ingenue, she manages to turn in yet another fine, if reflexive,
performance as a libertine among the eunuchs in between-the-wars
Britain.
All in all, The Heart of Me seems like your standard
sub-Merchant Ivory exercise, suitable for viewing in PBS
purgatory for eons to come. But a funny thing happens about
45 minutes in: The story one expects to see dragged out till
the credits roll suddenly exhausts itself, and the film becomes
interesting. Or complex, anyway. And Williams' concise, elegant
performance stands as a kind of emotional center for the
film; as her life unravels, she fights first for order, then
for revenge, settling by the end for whatever human closeness
the world will afford her. It's not a shining victory, but
it is a meaningful one. SEAN NELSON
How's Your News?
dir. Arthur Bradford
Thurs-Sun Nov 7-10 at the Little Theatre
The first 15 minutes of this documentary—which follows
a small group of mentally disabled adults armed with video
cameras on a cross-country road trip—were unsettling
and not a little depressing. I assumed I was in for a tale
of painful self-esteem-building and tear-jerking biography.
Once the RV hits the pavement, however, How's Your News? (named
for the imaginary news broadcast hosted by the travelers)
reveals itself to be a hilarious and deeply touching ride,
for none of the expected reasons. Watching the subjects—who
suffer maladies from mild Down syndrome to severe cerebral
palsy, some of whom are barely able to speak—interview
unsuspecting passersby results in an unusual viewing experience:
You laugh at them, then feel like you shouldn't be laughing
at them, then wonder why you shouldn't, then laugh all the
harder. The laughter, which we are trained to view as derisive,
is actually an embrace of the subjects' humanity, and a
far more resonant one than you'd find in some old empowerment
tract. Amazing. Doubly amazing is the fact that you can
see this film and Jackass—another brilliant
chronicle of a bunch of retards interacting with the real
world—in a single day. The parallels (and perpendiculars)
are astonishing. SEAN NELSON
I'm Going Home
dir. Manoel de Oliveira
Fri Nov 22-Tues Dec 3 (no show Mon Nov 25) at the Grand
Illusion
I'm Going Home is a film about being old, made by
a man who knows a thing or two about the subject. Portuguese
director Manoel de Oliveira is in his mid 90s, and still active
as a filmmaker, much like the octogenarian actor protagonist
of this meditative death rattle of a movie, who confronts tragedy
with work. We first see Gilbert Valence (the great Michel Piccoli)
on the stage; more to the point, what we mainly see is his back.
Oliveira is fixated on long takes of seemingly insignificant
objects—a pair of shoes, a street view through a shop window—which
mutely echo the deliberate progress of old age. After receiving
news of his family's death, Valence moves through life with an
added emphasis on what matters (respect for his craft, devotion
to his grandson). When an American director (John Malkovich)
offers him a last-minute role in a production of Ulysses, he
can't resist, but soon finds himself overmatched by the language
(Valence is French), and suddenly unmoored.
Nothing much happens in I'm Going Home (and it
takes its time), but the film's gentle sadness is gripping
nonetheless. SEAN NELSON
In Praise of Love
dir. Jean-Luc Godard
It's been more than 40 years since Breathless,
and Jean-Luc Godard is still arguing with himself about the
validity of cinema, which, alas, remains his one and only
calling. I've read that this is a film about a filmmaker
trying to steel himself to make a film with a reluctant star
(also the director's lover, hesitant because she senses that
he is ambivalent toward her). But I'll be damned if anything
like a plot revealed itself as the movie played. Shot in
glorious black and white, Love felt far more like
a random series of meditations on the natures of art, emotion,
language, Hollywood, and, of course, France. It's appropriate
that no story is apparent here, because the film spends so
much time pondering the very idea of Story, which, in French,
is the same word as history, which offers classic Godardian
inversions—double entendres that are also double negations.
In a way, the whole movie is such an inversion (after an
hour, the b&w switches to gorgeous color DV footage)—a
sign that not only is Godard not back, but that
he never went away. SEAN NELSON
John Cale: Beautiful Mistake
dir. Marc Evans
Wed Feb 19 at EMP.
In 2000, musician John Cale went home to his native Wales
for 10 days. During his visit, he hooked up with several
popular Welsh bands and solo artists to create this combination
scene document/meditative travelogue. The film plays like
an impressionistic spin on the celebrity-TV-special form,
with live studio performances broken up by extended footage
of industrial and natural Welsh landscapes, narrated by Cale's
dulcet ruminations about art and its machinery. These images
are enigmatic but cold, and they play like what they are:
artful filler.
The music, meanwhile, is also a bit of a mixed bag. Whatever
one makes of Cale's career as a solo artist and producer,
no one would deny that his work with the Velvet Underground—as
a collaborator and sideman—is where he has shone brightest.
So it follows with the performances in Beautiful Mistake.
When he plays with bands—Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Super
Furry Animals, and Catatonia, especially—he hangs back,
providing color and shade where necessary, blending. When
he performs alongside solo singers or takes center stage
himself, it's down to the strength of the songs, and some
of the ones represented here simply aren't all that special.
In all, this is the terrain of dedicated Calies (ceilidhs?),
Anglo-rock aficionados, and hardcore fans of the Welsh accent.
SEAN NELSON
Latter Days
dir. C. Jay Cox
Opens Fri March 12
As the battle for gay rights rages, in these pages and
elsewhere, it's refreshing to know that gays and straights
alike are still free to be condescended to and intellectually
assailed by unrelenting garbage like Latter Days.
With a concept that combines Trey Parker's Orgazmo (minus
the laughs) and every last cloying queer independent film
of the '90s (from Kiss Me, Guido to Billy's
Hollywood Screen Kiss and everything in between), Latter
Days tells the story of a shallow L.A. fag and the Mormon
missionary who enters his life (and more!) to teach him the
value not only of spiritual depth, but of patience. The first
half of the film is spent waiting for the inevitable moment
when the obviously gay Mormon will allow the party boy into
the kingdom of his underpants. The rest consists of wondering
how and why you could ever possibly be expected to care about
the travails and transformations of the two main characters.
As actors, they're appealing enough, and there's no denying
their physical aptitude. Unfortunately first-time writer/director
C. Jay Cox (who also wrote the Reese Witherspoon abortion Sweet
Home Alabama—who would've guessed he was
gay?) relies on the same dramatic devices employed by every
hetero soft-core movie I've ever seen (and I've seen a few),
leaving the fetching boys stranded in a quagmire of equal
parts Will & Grace and Squeeze Play.
After an hour or so, Latter Days takes a turn for
the melodramatic, and toward the very end, there are two
scenes that pay off the bathos, thanks mainly to the cameo
acting of Mary Kay Place (as an intolerant Mormon mom) and
Jacqueline Bisset (as a right-on restaurateur). Too little,
however, and far too late, as the preceding 90 minutes are
founded on screenwriting cliché (after a failed laundry-room
seduction, the mixing of "colors and whites" becomes a central
metaphor), drab DV camera work, and amateurish sound. SEAN
NELSON
Laurel Canyon
dir. Lisa Cholodenko
In Laurel Canyon, thoroughly modern young lovers
Sam and Alex (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale) are stranded
at the home of Sam's mother, Jane, a famous record producer,
played by Frances McDormand. During the course of the film,
the couple's uptight romance is threatened by Jane's swinging
lifestyle, which includes liberal pot-smoking and the free-ish
love of her musician boyfriend Ian (Alessandro Nivola). Alex
is tempted by both Ian and Jane, while Sam, still angry about
his mother's loose parenting style, seethes. Soon, however,
he too finds himself tempted by the fruit of another (Natascha
McElhone), and a bizarre love pentagon heats up.
Though this description might lead one to believe Laurel
Canyon is a bedroom farce between hippies and yuppies,
the film is in fact a smart, emotionally insightful exploration
of the multigenerational consequences of the quest to live
free. SEAN NELSON
La Bamba (1987)
PRODUCER: Bobbo
PLAYED BY: Joe Pantoliano
Bobbo of Del-Fi Records isn't a bad guy; he really believes in
Richard Valenzuela's music.... All he asks is that Richie change
his name (to Valens), fire his band, perform innumerable and indistinguishable
vocal takes, forsake his brother, and die in a plane crash. The
eternal question: How bad do you want it, kid? An essential film.
SEAN NELSON
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
dir. Stephen Norrington
Opens Fri July 11 at a buttload of theaters
From the looks of the opening scenes, this film should
have been called The League of Extraordinarily Old Gentlemen.
Sean Connery (as Allan Quartermaine, a role forever imprinted
with the unique musk of Richard Chamberlain) looks like he's
pushing 90, which makes him the obvious choice to lead a
pack of fictitious figures against some kind of technological
terrorist who is threatening the peace of 1890s Europe. Among
Connery's merry band are Captain Nemo (I didn't know he was
Indian), the Invisible Man, Tom Sawyer, Mina Harker (from
), DraculaDorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll, and Mr.
Hyde. First of all: DORIAN GRAY? What's he going to do, quip
them to death? If only. Instead, we get a lame exercise in
myth-historical revisionism in which the action is dull,
the dialogue witless, the effects absurd (Mr. Hyde looks
like the Hulk; Nemo's Nautilus looks like a binary code ejaculation),
and the story about as lucid as Ronald Reagan. While they
may never run out of comics to make into would-be summer
blockbusters, they certainly appear to have run out of good
ones. SEAN NELSON
Love Liza
dir. Todd Louiso
Films about grief usually come down to catharsis, for characters
and audience alike. We suffer together for 90 minutes and
then are invited to let go for a climactic gush as the movie—anything
from Stella Dallas to Leaving Las Vegas—hurtles
toward redemption. Love Liza is solely about grief,
but the needed emotional payoff doesn't solve anyone's problems.
That's not the only twist that makes the film so rewarding,
but it's high on the list. At the top of that list, predictably,
is Philip Seymour Hoffman (freed here from the shackles of
Paul Thomas Anderson's horrid dialogue). Hoffman plays a
widower who spirals into drug addiction and despair as his
grief goes unacknowledged, like the unopened suicide note
he carries around while huffing gasoline, sabotaging his
career, and alienating his friends. What distinguishes Love
Liza is the idea that unprocessed grief will fester
and consume the bereaved. It's not a new thought, but in
the hands of Hoffman, screenwriter Gordy Hoffman (his brother),
and director Todd Louiso (who played the gentle indie nerd
in High Fidelity), it is allowed not only to take
rich dramatic root, but also to be funny, at the expense
of people in pain. In a film full of misery, such humor is
the only hope. SEAN NELSON
The Man from Elysian Fields
dir. George Hickenlooper
Much like Hickenlooper's previous films, The Low Life and The
Big Brass Ring, Elysian Fields takes an intriguing
premise and mangles it beyond recognition. Andy Garcia
plays a novelist with a well-reviewed debut book currently
gathering dust in the remainder bin. Because he is eager
to keep his pregnant wife (Julianna Margulies, ugh) happy
and homebound, he becomes desperate for extra money, but
is too vain to get a job. Enter Mephistopheles, in the
crenelated form of Mick Jagger (looking every inch the
menopausal woman), playing Luther Fox, proprietor of a
tony escort service for lonely rich women. So our hero
becomes a gigolo; lucky for him, his first client just
happens to be a super-hottie (Olivia Williams), who just
happens to be married to an aging, impotent literary giant
(James Coburn), who just happens to be stuck on his farewell
novel. Unfortunately, the Faust trope runs out of gas,
because everyone starts playing this ludicrous scenario
so completely straight that all you can see are the wires.
Garcia is his usual impassive self, Jagger is his usual
self-conscious self, and Coburn is Coburn. The main problem
is that the film wants you to believe that writing is holy
work that ennobles its servants and renders their flaws
tragic, which is a bigger load of crap than an escort service
where males are hired to escort women. SEAN NELSON
The Mayor of the Sunset Strip
dir. George Hickenlooper
Plays Fri-Thurs April 16-22 at the Varsity
"What do you think is so special about mingling with celebrities?"
That question, and the failure by any of this film's many
interviewees to answer it even partially, is the bleeding
heart of a great documentary. Though the nominal subject
of this piece is faded Los Angeles deejay Rodney Bingenheimer,
the movie is a lot more interested in Bingenheimer's tattered
Hollywood milieu than in presenting a simple has-been's biography.
Since his arrival on the Strip in the mid-'60s, Rodney Bingenheimer
has been, variously, a teen-scene face, Davy Jones' body
double (!), a sycophant to the rich and famous, an impresario/pimp
for glitter-era rock stars, and the unquestionable avatar
of punk and new wave music on the SoCal airwaves. Now he's
a relic, a token weirdo relegated to a tiny corner of the
corporate-radio graveyard, with nothing to show for a life
spent in service to the star-maker machinery but an extensive
autograph collection. And while Rodney's story is definitely
sad, the film doesn't quite ask you to feel sorry for him
(even though you can't help but pity the guy). What it does
instead, fortunately, is peer into Bingenheimer's vacuous
soul, digging for insight into what is so goddamn special
about the proximity to fame—or conversely, what is
so goddamn terrible about distance from it—that a man
could dedicate his entire existence to being what he calls "the
bridge" between the glamorous few and the not-so-glamorous
rest of us.
The answers are as intriguing as they are predictable; director
Hickenlooper's delicate handling of personal matters that
could easily have become maudlin exploitation testifies to
his real area of interest. (He also has a laser eye for irony,
as when he frames professional corpse fuckers like Danny
Sugarman and Ray Manzarek talking about how "Rodney buys
into the whole 'rock star' myth.") Rodney is essentially
a metaphor for late-20th-century America. His obsessive belief
in celebrity as a way of filling the holes in his own self-conception
has led him to a melancholy twilight... but, you know, at
least he met David Bowie. SEAN NELSON
Mickey One
dir. Arthur Penn
Wed Jan 29 at EMP
A full two years before the pair went on to revolutionize
'60s cinema with Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and
Warren Beatty made this inspired, very-difficult-to-find
curio that attempted to integrate the fractured style of
the French new wave with Hollywood filmmaking. The results
are predictably bizarre, considering that in 1965 Warren
Beatty was basically a pretty-boy fop in search of a vehicle,
and Penn was a TV director with a couple of movies under
his belt. Employing a dash of Kafka and more than a modicum
of Godard, Penn and Beatty were attempting to make a jazz
film about fate, filmed in beautiful black and white. Though
the story concerns a two-bit nightclub comic on the run from
and—courtesy of some jazzy existentialism—straight
into the arms of the mob, the real story here is all about
jump cuts, narrative shorthand, and genuinely strange pidgin-Beckett
dialogue. Beatty, whose character is tellingly called "The
Comic," doesn't know why the gangsters are after him (though
it clearly has something to do with a girl), so he runs and
runs, adopts the name Mickey One, and becomes an absolute
sensation, so popular that his archenemies suddenly want
to hire him. This lands him in the spotlight glare of a fairly
ridiculous dilemma, and leads to the inevitable self-sacrifice
of the existential hero. The film is highly entertaining,
particularly for fans of Beatty at his most beautiful, but
mainly because it's such a pretentious botch job. Still,
it's a pretentious botch job that presaged Performance,
the best film of the '60s. So there. SEAN NELSON
Miracle
dir. Gavin O'Connor
Opens Fri Feb 6
The prominent display of muscular young men achieving glory
through physical exertion is not the only way in which sports
movies are like pornography. The other big similarity lies
in audience expectations; because the destination is a foregone
conclusion in both forms, the pleasure of watching has got
to be all about the journey. Miracle is a good sports
movie because it delivers a solid 90 minutes of credible
buildup to a finale that is a matter of public record. In
1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team beat the Soviet national
team, which was unarguably the greatest team in the history
of the sport at that time, and had 16 years' worth of gold
medals to prove it. The road to Lake Placid is beset with
endless drills run by the world's most hard-assed coach (Kurt
Russell, whose performance is as comically accurate as the
plaid pants grafted to his ass), but by the time our unlikely
heroes skate out to meet the commies, they're in great shape.
Not a lot of time gets wasted on their lives, their hardscrabble
backgrounds, or any of the usual accoutrements of movies
like this, which makes Miracle all the more satisfying.
Sports movies are better than sports; all you see are highlights.
The team sucks, then they work really hard, then they win.
Grown men cry. The end. Perfect. Which is why the end credits,
in which we learn that the heroic athletes we've just spent
two hours rooting for grew up to be total corporate whores—all
motivational speakers, bankers, and real estate agents—sting
like a stick-check. As with porn, sports films outlive their
usefulness as soon as your blood stops boiling, and it's
possible to feel dirtier on the way out than you did on the
way in. SEAN NELSON
Moonlight Mile
dir. Brad Silberling
Opens Fri Oct 4 at various theaters
I know this film looks like a sappy weeper, and it kind
of is, but as a story of bereavement, commitment, and coming
of age (and finding the limits of each), it is also funny,
smart, and exquisitely well acted by Dustin Hoffman, Susan
Sarandon, and Jake Gyllenhaal. The characters act out of
their grief (a daughter dies, her fiancé hangs around
just long enough for the parents to become addicted to his
presence), but the emotions remain real and affecting. Despite
its artificial origins, the dynamic that evolves between
the three leads is as fascinating, frustrating, and original
as any in memory, mirroring the complicated transitions of
a real family—Gyllenhaal's Joe secretly rebels, when
he could just leave—while maintaining the awkward distance
that no amount of will can close. SEAN NELSON
Mystic River
dir. Clint Eastwood
Opens Fri Oct 10 at various theaters
The question, friends, is not whether Clint Eastwood is
a great director. That debate should have been settled long
ago, by anyone who paid attention to Unforgiven, A
Perfect World, and The Bridges of Madison County.
The question that persists is: How can a great director like
Clint Eastwood turn in such shoddy, shallow garbage as Midnight
in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Rookie,
and last year's indefensible Blood Work as often
as he does? The answer may be contained in Eastwood's latest
work, Mystic River, a film that has been garnering
rave reviews for its sober treatment of Eastwood's favorite
subject, male violence. The movie—thanks largely to
the work of a very impressive cast, including Sean Penn,
Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins, Marcia Gay Harden, Laura Linney,
and Laurence Fishburne—is a compelling experience.
But all the passionate performances in Hollywood can't cover
over the fact that Mystic River's source material,
like almost all Eastwood pictures of the past 10 years, is
a supermarket-caliber novel. Therein lies the Eastwood dilemma.
I've long been under the impression that while great books
seem impossible to adapt to the screen, mediocre ones often
make the best films—witness The Bridges of Madison
County, a thin slice of divorce porn lit that Eastwood
rendered into a profoundly emotional piece of cinema. Unfortunately,
not all crappy books are thus redeemable. Mystic River (which,
in fairness, I haven't read) appears to be one of those.
The story involves a group of three friends whose Boston
childhoods were interrupted when one of them was kidnapped
and molested. All grown up now, and distant (though in the
same neighborhood), they are reunited when one of their daughters
is murdered. Through a none-too-elaborate series of circumstances,
the father (Sean Penn, utterly credible as a man whose raging
grief requires eight cops to restrain him) becomes convinced
that the killer is his own friend (Tim Robbins), the one
who was snatched as a boy. Fortunately, the cop in charge
of the investigation is the third friend (Kevin Bacon).
You may be able to guess where this all leads, because there
are only two possible outcomes for such a setup. It's to
Eastwood's credit that he mines the clichés and conveniences
for emotional resonance. Still, you can't help wondering
who the hell forgot to tell him that for all the "inexorability" and "meditation" of
its violence, Mystic River feels desperately contrived.
Whether Eastwood the artist has some deep understanding of
the nature of violence remains unclear. What is certain is
that he knows how to make a movie, even a dumb one, well
worth watching. I only wish someone would send him some better
books. SEAN NELSON
Naqoyqatsi
dir. Godfrey Reggio
The long-awaited third chapter of
his "life" trilogy
(Koyaanisqatsi—life out of balance, Powaqqatsi—life
in transition), Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi examines
life in war, or more generally, life as a constant
battle between the warring impulses of consumption
and conservation, technology and humanity, civilization
and earth. Like the other films in the series, Naqoyqatsi (the titles are taken from the language of the Hopi
Indians) is a barrage of tangentially related images,
set to an alternately numbing and rousing score by
Philip Glass, featuring Yo Yo Ma. Also like the other
films, this one requires a unique kind of attention:
The viewer submits to a kind of trance in which meaning
is not so much revealed or even suggested as offered
up to the unconscious. Where is Reggio going with these
pictures of ruined coliseums, roiling seas, car commercials?
Toward a 21st-century gestalt that accretes a monumental
despair as it moves pointedly, disassociatively onward.
Unlike the other films, Naqoyqatsi is awash with digital
manipulation; every image is either generated, or inflected
with the very technology it seeks to meditate on—adding
a layer of complexity to its hypnotic montage that
will keep your third eye blinking well after the credits
roll. SEAN NELSON
One Trick Pony (1980)
PRODUCER: Steve Kunelian
PLAYED BY: Lou Reed
The best joke in this Paul Simon vanity project (aside from Simon
and Mare Winningham's bathtub scene) is the casting of the great
and terrible Lou Reed as the company man record producer who insists
that Simon's character, a songwriter, dumb down his lyrics and
add superfluous horns to his production. Though Reed was never
far from a drug coma in those days, the famously "difficult" genius
clearly relishes the opportunity to say "fuck you" to the men
in the control booth. SEAN NELSON
Owning Mahowny
dir. Richard Kwietniowski
At last, a film dares to ask the question, "What is the
sound of one actor slumming?" Few men of the screen are as
compulsively watchable as Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has
made a career out of lending gravitas, pathos, and humor
to the bleak end of the human spectrum. Sadly, he is often
the best or only good thing about the films in which he appears
(here I cite the collected works of Paul Thomas Anderson,
whom history will remember as a phony auteur). Owning
Mahowny is another such poo pile, in which Hoffman's
knack for the sad sack is prostituted in the service of a
film concerned solely with cheap drama and boilerplate psychology.
This overwhelmingly Canadian portrait of one sweaty bank
manager's gambling addiction, and the enormous fraud he perpetrates
to sustain it, places Hoffman at the center of a story that
grows less plausible with each frame; that it's supposed
to be true doesn't help—the film is portentous and
humorless, and neither John Hurt as a greedy small-time casino
manager, nor Minnie Driver as the frumpy, bewigged girlfriend,
can elevate the proceedings. Hoffman is a great actor, but
the more he appears in ugly garbage like this, the closer
he comes to phoning it in. The only crucial difference between
this performance and other recent ones (e.g., Love Liza)
seems to be the mustache on his lip. SEAN NELSON
Rabbit-Proof Fence
dir. Phillip Noyce
Sincerest apologies are in order for the tardiness of this
review, though if Seattle audiences' embrace of the film
is any indication, it certainly didn't do any harm. Rabbit-Proof
Fence is a simple story of three little girls on the
run from their abductors, making their way across the wilds
of Western Australia on foot, trying to find their way home.
The film is powerful because of the unemotional straightforwardness
of the girls' quest: They get kidnapped, escape, elude capture,
and finally prevail. The unknown actresses who play the girls
are riveting in the way only little kids can be on-screen,
and Kenneth Branagh, as their bureaucrat antagonist, is exactly
perfect. What elevates the film to an entirely different
plane, however, is the historical and political context of
their journey. It's the 1930s. The girls are half-breed aborigines,
and hence subject to legal removal from their families and
placement into Christian encampments, where they will be
trained for lives as indentured servants or brides, in an
ultimate attempt to crossbreed them right out of existence.
Director Phillip Noyce makes all the right decisions in telling
what could have (justifiably) been a big slab of moist, liberal
liver and onions; a tale of indomitable metaphor and sackcloth
villainy. Instead it is a measured tale of a secret history,
and of basic human desires asserting themselves in the most
inspirational of ways. SEAN NELSON
Reverend Billy & the Church of Stop Shopping
dir. Dietmar Post
Sat Nov 30 at the Little Theatre
This documentary about a performance-art culture jammer
named Reverend Billy, who stages public protests against
everything from Starbucks to NYU's School of Law, contains
several scenes that reveal the filmmaker to be either credulous
or subversive. The camera holds on the tirelessly self-aggrandizing
Billy between his rabble-rousing "sermons"—which are
full of both useful information and maddeningly juvenile
rhetoric—allowing us to witness the very human frailty
behind his civil disobedience. Though it's hard not to sympathize
with his causes, at least morally, the actor's ego that fuels
his bluster is singularly alienating, contemptible even,
calling into question not only Billy's motives but his sincerity
as well. Is this just another New York wannabe-celebrity,
or a genuinely righteous crusader? The documentary lets the
viewer decide, but also provides an inescapable sense that
Reverend Billy is fighting a both necessary and hopeless
cause, and for only some of the right reasons. SEAN NELSON
Riding Giants
dir. Stacy Peralta
Opens Fri July 16
This fascinating exploration of the culture of big-wave
surfing by the director of the skateboarding documentary Dogtown
and Z-Boys is distinguished first by the quality of
its footage. I have no idea how Stacy Peralta and his crew
managed to get on top of the water the way they do, but the
actual surfing in this movie is heroic. Your heart rises
and your breath leaves you as the surfers take on waves of
20, 30, 80 feet, waves that could easily kill them, then
go back for more, then go back again. It's a cliché to
say that surfers live to surf, but after seeing this film,
it's a lot easier to understand why.
The main reason for that is the degree to which Peralta
treats his movie as a sociological inquiry into a legitimate
American subculture. After a brief, animated introduction
to the origins of surfing itself, Riding Giants turns
its attention to three specific chapters of surfing lore.
In the late '50s, when few Americans had even heard of the
sport, a handful of WASP kids from SoCal moved to Oahu's
North Shore to ride 20- to 30-foot waves. The movie treats
them like exponents of the growing bohemianism of late-'50s
America, as inspired as the Beats; only instead of going
on the road, they went on the beach. Of all the film's subjects,
this small group comes off as the most impressive, thanks
largely to the fact that they were genuine pioneers, inventing
a culture for which there was no precedent, in spite of obvious
social resistance. They were also totally insane. Speaking
of insane, the second chapter involves Jeff Clarke, the kid
who in the mid-'80s discovered Mavericks, a surf break off
Northern California whose waters are ice cold, and whose
coastline is massive, jagged boulders. You have to paddle
for an hour just to get to the 40- to 50-foot waves. Then,
the waves do their best to kill you, as they killed Mark
Foo, then the most famous surfer in America.
Which brings us to Laird Hamilton, who is now the most famous
surfer in the history of surfing, thanks to his innovative
tow-in technique, which, with the aid of a jet ski, allows
him (and the 10 other living humans with the nerve to try
it) to ride 80-foot waves in the middle of the goddamn ocean.
I promise that you have never seen anything like Hamilton's
climactic ride in this film. You have also never seen anything
like the respect that is afforded the surfers in Riding
Giants. Instead of the usual stereotype of dumb, quasi-mystical
hunks, Peralta offers his subjects up as athletes and innovators.
At times, he fails to obscure their dumb, quasi-mystical
tendencies (Clarke calls the ocean his "saltwater church"),
but then you see them ride and have no choice but to bow
down. SEAN NELSON
Russian Ark
dir. Alexander Sokurov
Fri-Thurs Feb 7-13 at the Varsity
Walking through a museum can be like walking through
history, depending on the museum and the walker. It's
this principle that inspired this revolutionarily ambitious
movie that consists of 867 actors, hundreds more extras,
and 300 years of Russian history, all packed into a single
Steadicam shot lasting just over 90 minutes.
First things first: This film is a spectacular technical
achievement, with some of the most elaborate choreography
ever mounted in the cinema; the camera pushes through
the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, glancing from painting
to ballroom to snowbank, from Peter the Great to Catherine
II to Pushkin, with seamless grace and flawless execution.
By the end, a majestic orchestral set piece, you're left
exhilarated and exhausted. Before the end, however, you
may just find yourself drifting. For all its technical
marvels, Russian Ark is essentially a monologue
of Eastern European cynicism—"Peter the Great ordered
the death of his own son. The man who taught the Russians
to enjoy themselves. How funny!"—fleshed out with
visual aids from history (Catherine looking for a place
to pee). The disquisition is led by an arch French diplomat
in a waistcoat, who stalks through the Hermitage and
history, opining and meditating on human nature while
the camera (standing in for the character of "the filmmaker")
follows him. Some of the observations, particularly those
flecked with sorrow (because all cynicism is, at heart,
wounded sentimentality), have the ring of wisdom, but
most are along the lines of "Russia is like a theater" or "could
this be theater?" The answer to the latter question is
no, because without the novelty of the single shot and
the unstuck-in-time conceit, this movie wouldn't be a
play, it'd be a journal entry. The film's insufferable
theatrical conventions—mainly a function of the
actors—can be forgiven because of the scope of
the production; but when you peel away the technical
novelty, you're basically watching a bunch of old paint.
SEAN NELSON
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
PRODUCER: B. D. Brockhurst
PLAYED BY: Donald Pleasence
This tragically brilliant acid nightmare is based
ever-so-loosely on the Beatles' classic LP. The Bee
Gees (!) plus Peter Frampton (!!) are a fun-lovin'
(and self-produced) small-town band that gets lured
to the big city to become rock stars. Thanks to the
insidious influence of big-time record producer B.
D. Brockhurst (played malevolently by the late Donald
Pleasence), the boys succumb to corruption and sins
of the flesh, including bucket-sized snifters of booze
and interracial sex. SEAN NELSON
Shanghai Ghetto
dir. Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann
Learning your history from documentaries is a sucker's
game. It seems there will never be a shortage of movies
made on low budgets by concerned filmmakers bent on exposing
the littler-known corners of even the most-storied stories.
I'm not saying this isn't important work, or part of
the eternal glory of the documentary form. I'm just saying
that if you see enough movies like Shanghai Ghetto,
which tells the story of German Jews in exile in one
of the world's unlikeliest cities for Jews to have been
exiled, you start to feel like an illiterate clod who
learns all his or her history from goddamn documentaries.
The Jews in the film moved to Shanghai because they
could move there without visas, which Nazis had stopped
allowing them to have. The city was an embattled front
in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the emigrants were
shunted into ghettos every bit as squalid as their famous
Polish counterparts. They suffered every indignity imaginable,
and only at the end did they learn about the unimaginable
horror that had transpired back in Europe. As one interviewee
reports, "We thought we were in hell; turns out we were
in paradise." Many of the subjects were small children
during the war and speak of their trials in the matter-of-fact
manner typical of survivors. They speak as though discussing
everyday nuisances, like a shoe with a worn-through heel.
It's only when their emotion surges, and we see them
actively stifle it, that the full weight of their private
history becomes clear to the cameras. SEAN NELSON
The Shape of Things
dir. Neil LaBute
The latest film by the laureate of sexual embarrassment
flips the script somewhat by arguing that women are just
as capable of being complete pricks as men are. Schlubby
Adam (Paul Rudd) and hottie Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) have
an unlikely affair, during which Adam loses weight, gets
a nose job, dresses better, and ditches his friends—all
at Evie's behest. But this self-improvement campaign
comes at a price that only the most insecure paranoiac
alive could swallow (much less predict). LaBute's climax
retroactively changes the entire film, causing the troubling
theatrical conceits that have gone before (Adam and Evelyn—get
it?) to seem like intentional diversions, and forcing
the audience to decide whether or not what it has just
seen was a filmed play or some kind of Skinner box. I
must say that the big twist pissed me off initially,
in much the same way that the surprise in Fight Club did.
Afterward, however, I found myself wrestling with the
film for days. SEAN NELSON
Spider
dir. David Cronenberg
The first shot of Spider tells you everything
you need to know: After the opening titles (which make
Rorschach patterns out of peeling paint on decrepit walls),
we find ourselves in a train station. A long line of
diversely normal people disembark from the train, happily
moving toward their average lives. Then, after the last
healthy citizen has breezed past the camera, out steps
Spider (Ralph Fiennes), looking gnarled and crepuscular
in a shabby suit, spiky hair, and four shirts, carrying
a ratty suitcase. Everything about the way he carries
himself screams psychologically damaged, and the nature
of the shot defines the character's troubles in relation
to the rest of the world. In short, this is a film about
a cipher, and the only dramatic motion the filmmaker
affords himself is in revealing just how much of a cipher
Spider is. Cronenberg clearly views this as an opportunity
for humanism; the problem is that Spider represents a
window into only the narrowest corner of humanity—a
man whose illness prevents him from getting over the
primal issues of adolescence—and so we're forced
to empathize with an almost perversely vulnerable figure.
But what you really feel is a kind of pity, watching
him wander through his unreliable and violent childhood
memories (which are artfully realized by the director).
More than that, you feel like the film is pretending
to be suspenseful as it winds toward a revelation that
everyone but its main character can see coming a mile
away. SEAN NELSON
Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town
dir. Micha X. Peled
Sat Nov 30 at the Little Theatre
After watching this sad little documentary about a small
Virginia town's attempts to prevent Wal-Mart from opening
a local supercenter (spoiler alert: The bad guys win), I
couldn't help but think that the critical question raised
by the matter had less to do with economics than with presentation.
This point is raised by a member of the opposition, a reasonable
Southern man (the kind you don't see in films), who reports
with some dismay that he's been advised to remain dispassionate
in the battle. Such advice is unthinkable to him and his
cohorts, because passion is at the heart of their protest—passion
for a way of life, for a model of commerce, for smallness.
This passion doesn't prevent them from making a strong, eloquent
case, but it does lead them into a quaintly theatrical style
of discourse that undermines their argument. They adopt a
trivial name (the Pink Flamingoes) and appeal to sentiment—not
cheap sentiment, but sentiment nonetheless—in the face
of cold, economic truth.
The spirit of the opposition's effort isn't entirely misplaced,
but neither is it entirely sufficient to combat the reality
of modern corporate dominion over cities and states. The
townfolk freely admit to a complete lack of experience in
such matters, which makes the sight of one protester dressed
up as a gorilla in a party dress shouting at cars all the
more frustrating. It's somewhat heartbreaking to see their
desire thwarted by the Wal-Mart juggernaut, especially when
the argument in favor of the superstore is presented by drones
and semiliterate boosters. Credit goes to director Micha
X. Peled for resisting the impulse to make the pro-Wal Mart
forces and fence sitters look ridiculous or corrupt. There
are many sides in this argument, and Store Wars distinguishes
itself by treating a question like a question, even when
it's clear that nobody likes the answer.
Emotions aside, the scenario presented in this documentary
is familiar enough that one begins to focus on the inevitability
of the outcome, rather than the injustice of it. A sense
arises that the struggle is a struggle against social evolution—which,
needless to say, is a worthy struggle. But it's a struggle
that demands more than pink flamingoes. SEAN NELSON
Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
dir. Charlotte Zwerin
Wed Jan 8 at the Experience Music Project
Even though I have very little time in my life for jazz,
that aesthetic graveyard of American musical expression and
mausoleum of the intelligentsia, I will always have time
for Thelonious Monk. This 1989 documentary about the great
jazz piano innovator features lots of interviews with fellow
musicians, family members, and admirers—in addition
to copious scratchy black-and-white archival footage of Monk
himself, playing in smoky jazz bars, spinning around in circles,
and generally running rings around his contemporaries (and
fans). As a player and a composer, Monk was untouchable.
As a man, he was defiant, inscrutable, fun-loving, and troubled.
As a documentary subject, he's positively stunning. SEAN
NELSON
Till Human Voices Wake Us
dir. Michael Petroni
In this semi-gothic romantic agony, Guy Pearce plays an
urbane doctor who returns home to rural Australia to bury
his late father, and once there embarks on a memory-soaked
erotic reverie prominently featuring the ghost of his boyhood
love, played by Helena Bonham Carter.
Like many of its genre forbears, Till Human Voices Wake
Us wraps itself around an unfortunately shallow and
easy-to-predict plot development that's presented as a
revelation long after the film has stopped being compelling.
There are all kinds of nice premises at work, and the acting
is as good as one could hope, given the film's enslavement
to atmosphere. (The truth is, this is a Roger Corman movie
that's been dolled up as a high-rent romance.) Additionally,
Pearce and Bonham Carter make a very sexy pair of lovers
(even if one is just an astral projection). The problem,
at long last, is that the film is long and boring, all
setup and no payoff, and makes you want to fall asleep.
At least the title lets you know that going in. SEAN NELSON
Tribute
dir. Kris Curry and Rich Fox
Wed Oct 23 at 7 and 8:45 pm, EMP
For those who saw Russ Forster's Tributary a few weeks
back, consider this film, which tackles the same subject
matter (the world of pro cover bands), a like-minded
but infinitely superior investigation of the phenomenon
at hand. Examining bands that salute KISS, Queen, Judas
Priest, Journey, and, most hilariously, the Monkees,
Tribute unearths the devotion, desperation, and delusion
that fuel the fires of people who pretend to be other
people for a musical living, and who are drop-dead
serious about it. The filmmakers extend their inquiry
to fans (including one very disturbing Queen worshipper),
wannabes, and has-beens, on the way to painting a bleak
psychological portrait. It's also hilarious. SEAN NELSON
The Truth About Charlie
dir. Jonathan Demme
It's a relief to see Jonathan Demme return to making films
with a sense of humor. After the vaunted creepiness of Silence
of the Lambs, the airless advocacy of Philadelphia,
and the supernatural piety of Beloved, Demme has
gone back to what he used to do best: madcap romantic comedies
whose multicultural agendas remain where they belong: in
the subtext. The Truth About Charlie harks back
to Demme's best films, Something Wild and Married
to the Mob, in which the director's politics informed,
but did not define, the narrative. The new film is a remake
of Stanley Donen's Charade, a communion-wafer-thin
'60s comedy that has only stood the test of time thanks to
the presence of Cary Grant and crappy old Audrey Hepburn.
Grant's rakish update is Marky Mark Wahlberg, a travesty,
though the part (and the story) have been updated (and improved)
to keep pace with Grant's absence. Thandie Newton (also known
as the Most Beautiful Woman on Earth) stands in for Hepburn
as a widow who, by finding herself at the center of a web
of international intrigue, discovers that her late husband
was into some pretty dastardly business. The film, like its
predecessor, is a smart kind of dumb; a romp with a love
of movies, faces, and all things Francophile at the center.
SEAN NELSON
Two Brothers
dir.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
Opens
Fri June 25
Unless his
next film is about the misadventures
of a pack of fluffy bunnies,
it's hard to imagine that
Jean-Jacques Annaud (who
also made The Bear; in
addition to Seven Years in Tibet and
Quest for Fire) is ever
going to trump the cuteness standard
set by this DV tale about
two tiger cubs in Indochina
who get separated from
their mom and from one another.
The wee tigers are so goddamn
cute that you almost start
crying before the bullets
fly, before the cage doors
slam shut, before the fires
blaze. And when those calamities
get going, forget it. But
Two Brothers, I'm relieved
to note, is more than mere
kitty porn for hippies
and little girls.
Annaud's great
trick is to turn the essential,
undeniable, heart-exploding
adorability of the cubs
(and the constant threats that
come their way) into the
stuff of proper drama.
Annaud handily pulls off that feat
by making Sungha and Kumar
distinct characters—one
is timid and sweet, the
other ferocious—and
by suffusing their plight
with emotions you can
only call human. Because this
is a movie about animals,
he also supplies an endless
array of scenes in which
beasts suffer and die
at the hands of men. And because
the animals remind you
of your sweet little housecat,
you cry. But somewhere
in there, you also become invested
in the story, which is
so primary as to be almost Greek,
and is told with techniques
so purely cinematic as
to confirm the essential power
of movies. Two brothers
grow up separately, and are reunited
as strangers in combat.
Will they recognize one another?
Will they be tigers or
will they be brothers? Will I
dry my teary eyes with
Kleenex or a handkerchief? Two Brothers dares
to ask all these questions and more. And Guy Pearce
is in it, too, as the token
human. SEAN NELSON
We Don't Live Here
Anymore
dir. John Curran
Opens Fri Aug 20
If
I were in charge of
Hollywood, this movie
would be called Still
Afraid of Virginia
Woolf, and not just
because this dirge
about the shallow moral
lives of two partner-swapping
New England academic
couples feels like an
update of Edward Albee's
masterpiece. It's that
the film has almost no
sense of humor, and could
really use one.
Mark
Ruffalo is married to
Laura Dern, but he's
having an affair with
Naomi Watts, who is married
to Peter Krause (Nate
from Six Feet Under),
who sleeps with anyone
he can, and Laura Dern
in particular. Ruffalo
and Krause are writers
who teach writing at
a small liberal arts
college; they are also
narcissistic, selfish,
and horrible to their
spouses and to each other,
even though they're best
friends. The two couples
spend a lot of time together,
getting drunk and flirting,
and generally acting
like people who never
grew up, despite the
presence of an ever-growing
number of slow-eyed,
lonely kids. (It's to
the film's credit that
none of these kids has
to die in order to wise
the characters up, but
the shadow of youth imperiled
by parental neglect is
present throughout; it's
easy to picture the kids
growing up fat and needy.)
There are some nice moves
along the way, of course,
most of them provided
by the world-class acting.
The way Ruffalo and Watts
register the awkwardness
creeping into their passionate
exchanges as the affair
passes from hot-blooded
whim to
cold calculation, the
way Dern challenges Ruffalo
to look at her when they
have sex, the way Krause
pretends to be free and
easygoing even as he
feels himself getting
too old for the pose—these
are powerful and intense
scenes from crumbling
lives. The problem is
that the film that contains
them doesn't stop to
let any light in. It's
all so dour and gray
and awful. If life were
like that, suicide would
be as common as jogging.
The movie is two-thirds
over before anyone says
anything honest, which
is laudable, and maybe
even realistic, but it's
an absolute bummer to
watch. Even George and
Martha had some laughs.
SEAN NELSON
White Oleander
dir. Peter Kosminsky
If I were a woman, I would be deeply offended by a movie like White
Oleander, which posits that female strength is necessarily
tied to violence, control freakery, and frigid sexuality,
and furthers the insulting notion that being an artist means
being an inscrutable, pretentious hypocrite. Since I am not
a woman, however, I will say that Oleander is a
waste of talent (Michelle Pfeiffer and Renée Zellweger
may not be great actresses, but they're better than this
movie lets them be) as well as time. When the main character
(a teenage girl whose artist mother goes to jail for murdering
her boyfriend) is adopted by white-trash Christians, the
film comes momentarily alive, but only to stereotypes that
can't outstretch the cast's valiant efforts to transcend
them. SEAN NELSON
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