A Modest Proposal: Donations for Reviews

OK, let’s try something new. Due to a number of other responsibilities, I’ve been remiss in keeping up this blog, and have seen relatively few films in general over the last six months. However, I have about three months before I throw myself headlong into school again, meaning I have some of the necessary time, if not the motivation. I don’t really want or need money for contributing to this blog, and don’t think I’ve paid enough dues to justify payment anyhow. The natural compromise, then, would seem to be a cause deserving of cash, with the promise of reviews as further enticement.

I have no idea how this will turn out, but I have time and a willingness to write in the name of a charitable institution, if anyone has the money to help out. At least to start, it will work like this: I will review one film of your choice from the Cannes or New York festivals (see pages for qualifying movies) for any donation of a minimum of $10 to the Hot Sun Foundation (more info below), a program that is using film to help foster community development, as the nation is in state of transition to a society with more civil liberties than before–including freedom of expression in media. I can’t say I have any personal connection to this cause or Kenya in general, but promotion of visual media education and aid for people in need are two causes I figure my readers espouse.

tl;dr version:

Donate at least $10 to the Hot Sun Foundation, send me a digital receipt or proof of payment, and I will watch and review any movie from the Cannes or New York film festival of your choice . These reviews will be decidedly longer than the usual capsules I post–500 words minimum, and I’ll even add some plot description if that’s your thing. You can choose a film I’ve already seen but haven’t reviewed here, or even Cannes competition films before my artificial cut-off date. Whatever. Email or leave a comment with your proof of donation and film choice, if you choose to take me up on this.  I’ll be sure to add your name to this post and mention you in the review, if you’d like.  

Below is a short video explaining a little bit of what the Hot Sun Foundation does, and the “Give Now” button links to the page with additional information and the opportunity to donate. Thanks in advance for any contributions.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)

As a portrayal of a dialectic between reactionary and reactive ideas, existential freedom and necessary restraint, A Dangerous Method is utterly, perhaps disappointingly solid. This is the fourth consecutive feature that Cronenberg has directed from someone else’s screenplay, and it’d be fair to say that his 21st-century output is markedly less sui generis than his earlier work, even as critics scrutinize these recent films for his signature. That is not to say that Method is entirely self-evident, though. Lurking under the surface of the movie’s explicitly scientific concern with psychoanalysis and its offspring is its doubling as a form of textual interpretation. Jung’s argument for a less parochial, more scientifically naive method of research looks forward to postmodernism’s distrust of reason and models which purport to be self-complete (i.e., any solitary method is dangerous), while Jung himself attempts to circumvent the fatalism of his own psychosexual hang-ups. At the same time, individual psychological reading is subverted by the economic disparity between Freud and Jung, pointing to modernism’s other critical forefather, Karl Marx. Unfortunately, these aspects generally take a backseat to staid, well-acted (Fassbender especially) period drama that feels increasingly stagey. Also, I’d be remiss to note that the first 10-15 minutes are dominated by Keira Knightley’s grotesque twitch-show, which at least functions to relativize the rest of her performance.

Grade: Worth a Look.

New York Film Festival, 2011

House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello)

Bizarrely received with relative indifference at the latest Cannes – no awards, and only a handful of vocal apologists – Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance has started to develop a steadily increasing fan base since its American release in November in theaters and on demand. Regarding the latter distributive medium, House is one of the most ironic releases imaginable; not only does it boast a couple hundred of the most striking (and strikingly filmic) compositions of the year, but its last minute is essentially a middle finger to digital video’s ascendancy at the sake of film stock. Alas, most folks outside of major cities will be forced to see it on demand or on home video, but of course one of the paradoxical values of digital technology is its capacity to allow Bonello’s film to be seen by anyone who so desires – the trade-off is obviously rife with complexity.

Thankfully, so is House of Tolerance‘s fin de siècle dirge for independent bourgeois-serving brothels, pre-20th century capitalism, and celluloid – the bell frequently tolling for specific and symbolic entities simultaneously. The film’s overture is set at the twilight of the 19th century, as the eponymous brothel is ominously thrown into the 20th century with one prostitute’s face being sliced into a Joker grin. The chronologically-jumbled sequence builds up a foreboding tone through its use of repeated scenes and a sparely ambient score, pierced by aural shock cuts. The still photograph opening credit montage set to The Mighty Hannibal’s “The Right to Love You” announces the film’s intentions to draw comparisons between then and now, and the following title card’s announcement of the dawn of the 20th-century is easily suggestive of our own recent turn into a new century.

Bonello’s wacky chronology is not unmotivated, as proprietor Marie-France has contrived the women’s employment at the bordello to be essentially indefinite, as they are forever working off their debts for the ostentatious clothes and cosmetics necessary for their services. Yet the prostitutes are relatively more independent than they might be at home, and more secure than if they were to transfer to an urban brothel. These complex circumstances allow for a strange, diluted sense of nostalgia; the girls dream of bring proposed to by their clients, and yet they are deeply interdependent on one another. The near-absence of inter-female drama is almost startling, the sense of unarticulated community reaching its emotional climax in a brief revenge fantasy wherein the girls all sport lipstick scars in solidarity for their effaced friend. In fact, without implementing any obvious plot beyond the house’s looming foreclosure, Bonello elicits a number of similarly cursory moments of genuine catharsis–as when the “exotic” Algerian Samira breaks down reading a bogus phrenological study that explains that prostitutes are neurologically equivalent to criminals. In comparison, the film’s proper culmination, a manifestation of a dream in which the lacerated woman literally cries tears of come, loses a good portion of its punch by needlessly replaying a description of the dream featured in the opening movement. This mistake is easily forgiven, however, as the film’s last minute jarringly shifts from film to VHS-quality digital, a despairing subtraction echoed by one of the final, anachronistic shot of the oldest prostitute posted on the curb of a contemporary French street, turned toward the camera with an ambiguous countenance of perhaps fear, shame, or yearning. House of Tolerance captures the complexity of nostalgia in a myriad of ways, and yet neither entirely condemns nor capitulates to its attraction.

Grade: Essential.

Cannes Film Festival, 2011

The Descendants (Alexander Payne)

It’s been seven years since Alexander Payne struck middle-aged, middlebrow gold with the modestly budgeted road trip comedy Sideways. That film impressively filtered Payne’s brand of cynical satire through relatable characters and situations, balancing the neurotic Giamatti with the more immediately likable Thomas Haden Church (as Payne formerly failed to do in the grating About Schmidt). With The Descendants, Payne seems to be aiming at a similar audience, although this time pandering to one’s parental rather than bachelor self. The hiatus has not been good to Payne, though, as this movie’s balance is entirely off, as if the screenplay were a desultory amalgamation of one draft written as a comedy and a second as straight drama.

Worse yet, neither the comedy nor its sentimental depiction of familial complications are particularly good. Presumably some auds have been taken in by the “naturalistic” teen and pre-teen dialogue, which showily strives for parental nods of acknowledgement with every use of “hoe-bag” and “bro.” Struggling to improve upon his hilarious high school satire Election, Payne’s most egregious idea is the gratuitous Sid character, an implausibly unfeeling idiot who is, of course, dimly sweet by film’s end. Defending his intelligence to Clooney’s patriarch Matt King, who is inexplicably housing and paying for Sid’s travels around the islands of Hawaii, the latter boasts that he’s vice president of the chess club–and always has good weed. Payne takes an actual empirical trend–(some) teens’ increasingly blithe attitude toward adults–and augments it to the point of parody. Fine, if Sid’s not then going to poignantly reveal that he’s lost his father only a few months before. The Descendants wants both that exaggeration of contemporary behavior and earnest melodrama, which, if possible, calls for a lot defter handling than that.

In terms of Matt King’s problems, they are far more complicated than complex. The subplot regarding the property sale is either forced or underdeveloped, providing little more than a fourth quarter twist and a symbol for familial responsibility. Matt’s pursuit of his wife’s lover, meanwhile, provides both the highs and lows of the film’s attempt to balance realistic humor with sympathy. Clooney’s deck shoe scuffle to his friends’ house seems to tip the scale more toward comedy than pathetically real, confirmed by the awful decision to make the Kings’ friends the comic relief (the male friend is played by Rob Huebel, who is unable to deliver lines un-ironically). The trajectory, and film, peak with King’s confrontation with his wife’s beau. The scene is bookended by Matt’s daughter’s funny and accurate accusation of his being a “pussy,” and a spontaneous kiss with the beau’s wife that alone captures the blend of comedy and sensibility the rest of the film misfires on. That this is getting eaten up in its limited-theatre run is unsurprising; that it’s winning over critics, too, is somewhat baffling.

Grade: Dispensable.

New York Film Festival, 2011

The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar)

Something of a dream project for an auteur whose filmography is dominated by themes of gender, corporeal transgression, and convoluted family histories that might’ve been gleaned from telenovela trash bins, Almodóvar’s adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s novel Tarantula affords his most on-the-nose contemplation of gender identification–for better and for worse. Despite its evocation of Georges Franju’s classic body horror Eyes Without a Face and Hostel-esque trappings, the film carves very little new territory in the director’s work, especially with the introduction of the first flashback title card. As is typical in of his work, the plot includes murder, rape, and familial reunion; but at the film’s center more blatantly than ever is, as Lacan would surely approve, the literal phallus.

I would advise those who appreciate surprise to stop reading now, for it is imperative to mention that The Skin I Live In is about a young man’s involuntary transsexual surgery at the hands of the father of a girl who he kinda sorta raped while tripping on pills at a wedding reception. The facts of the matter aren’t entirely inferable until about halfway through the movie, after Dr. Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) has already attempted intimacy with his psychotic dermatology patient, Vera. In this case, though, the old Crying Game trick is played solely on the audience, not the characters involved, as flashbacks reveal that Vera, who looks uncannily like Ledgard’s wife, is in fact Vicente, the aforementioned rapist-cum-victim. My impatience for plot description having run its course, there is yet more to the soapy story line, but the film is at its best when focusing on Ledgard and Vera/Vicente. Banderas is perfectly cast, instilling a necessary level of urbanity into Ledgard’s sexed-up Dr. Frankenstein, whose room is dominated by an enormous widescreen TV which receives input from a camera aimed at V’s bed. The digital image of his/her body is rhymed with large-scale oils of women in Olympia poses throughout Ledgard’s mansion; yet while the doctor is a voyeur and a surgeon of the body, his own sexuality is undercut throughout the film, as it’s revealed that his first wife actually ran off with his lascivious half-brother.

The more obvious sexual consideration is that of Vera/Vicente, though, who transforms from chauvinistic yet not entirely unsympathetic male to an almost quintessentially beautiful female (played by Elena Anaya), with the help of Dr. Ledgard’s transgenetic experimentation and bottomless wallet. Vera’s reception of the procedure, which spans several years, is initially rebellious–in a particularly exquisite shot, V collects the pieces of torn up dresses with a vacuum hose–but she eventually comes to complete identification with Vera, inflected by opium and a touch of Stockholm syndrome. Vera’s memories are suppressed by yoga and sublimated into the construction of creepy straw busts pasted with fabric rippings, and she and Ledgard initiate a (pointedly never consummated) love affair until a newspaper photo of Vicente shatters her defenses. When V reunites with his unconditionally adoring mother in the final scene, the screen fades out with his/her tear-stricken, potently symbolic admission: “It’s Vicente.” Almodóvar’s metaphor comes full circle, culminating in a beautifully pithy cap to one of his more circumlocutory representations of gender dislocation.

Grade: Recommended.

Cannes Main Competition, 2011
New York Film Festival, 2011

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn)

Reining in the superfluous bravura which both distinguished and inhibited his earlier features, Nicolas Winding Refn’s biggest budget and narrowest scope yet helps focus his immense stylistic talents in Drive. Conflating present-day Los Angeles with a romantically impressionist facsimile of ’80s thrillers, the film is unabashedly retro, constructed on Hollywood archetypes without calling attention to its own quaintness (save for Albert Brooks’ cursory subversion of an pizzeria as mob front for a Jew).

Of course, even expertly crafted pastiche of an imperfect source comes at a price; when tone is of primary importance at the expense of substance, the attempt to cultivate sincere human relationships comes into conflict. Ryan Gosling’s platonic romance with a mother whose husband’s in prison is portrayed in the same language as its car chases, relying on a sustained mood between crime and love with an evocative electronic soundtrack and picturesque montages.

But with a filmmaker as skilled at manipulating viewers’ viscera as Refn, the hollowness is hardly felt. The shifting rhythm between high-adrenaline car chases (of which, for all the pretense, there are about one and a half) and Gosling’s quiet self-reflection (see Le Samourai for monosyllabic source material) and passive romantic pursuit crescendoes at the intersection between those two worlds in an elevator, in which a sexy fracturing of reality segues into a stomach-turning murder.

Whereas Refn’s Valhalla Rising, which he co-wrote, boasted a similarly unabating tone, Hossein Amini’s adaptation of James Sallis’ novel keeps the viewer from suffering with menacing humor via Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, and Ron Perlman. Cranston’s serpentine performance is particularly impressive, his balance between mendacity and avuncularity injecting the necessary pathos into his tragic demise. Indeed, where Refn’s writing tends to grasp for pretentious symbolism, Amini’s reductivism allows for simply equivocal shots as in Gosling’s final killing of Brooks, wherein his wraithlike character is pruned to a shadow. Seductively superficial, Drive represents an earnest throwback to a less-is-more disposition toward action filmmaking.

Grade: Recommended.

Cannes Main Competition, 2011

The Ladykillers (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Diametrically opposed in comedic style to Alexander Mackendrick’s mild, quasi-dark original, the Coen brothers’ screwball takeoff on The Ladykillers is much more complacent than any of their coyly dubbed Idiot Trilogy. The film’s logline will claim that it’s about a casino heist pulled off with the incognizant assistance of an elderly widow, but plot plays second fiddle to the Coens’ mirthful mining of Southern dialects for all their comically mellifluous value. The plan for the heist is deliberately simple and desultory (though the criminal quintet still adumbrate it meticulously), and never seems in jeopardy of collapse from the police’s ingenuity.

The directors’ passion for the project is only fully apparent in ringleader Professor G.H. Dorr (Tom Hanks) and widow Marva Munson’s (Irma P. Hall) power-shifting exchanges and digressions. Munson is lonely, black, Jesus-loving woman who talks to her erstwhile husband’s portrait (a reference to Jean Renoir’s middle-class murder pic, The Crime of M. Lange) and spends her overabundant free time griping about hip hop, hilariously and anachronistically mocking, “I left my wallet in El Segundo, hmph!” Dorr, meanwhile, is the original picture’s Alec Guinness character re-imagined as a poetry-reciting, nihilistic intellectual whose genteel affectation is only less disguise than moral re-orientation. Hanks and Hall are both excellent with their stylized dialogue and Southern accents, his breathy bombast set against her pitifully sincere championing of Bob Jones University and the Bible.

The brothers’ try their hand at a third cultural argot, to much less success, in the hip hop culture to which Hall wags her finger at, embodied by inside thug Marlon Wayans. With this caricature, subtlety is swapped for excess, as Wayans dons a gold dollar-sign chain and repeatedly discomfits white people by addressing them as “nigga.” One could easily mistake the Coens’ authorship here for Wayans’ own, circa Scary Movie 3, sans the self-conscious self-deprecation. The nadir of their catalogue, however, is reached with J.K. Simmons’ running (ha, ha!) gag about irritable bowel syndrome, a painfully ill-advised plot device. When Hanks and Hall’s patois are dancing around and deflecting off of each other, the eccentric rhythms are beguiling; but, by the time the heist’s aftermath demand center stage, the characteristically absurdist ending reads more like a tired distillation of their other works’ philosophies.

Grade: Worth a Look.

Cannes Main Competition, 2004

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas)

With its contemplative focus on elemental beauty and transcendental ambition, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light may one day noted as a predecessor of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, despite obviously different approaches (and budgets). Where Malick is impressionistic, Reygadas is aesthetically rigorous; where Malick uses Americana to familiarize viewers with his central family, Reygadas constructs an alternate universe for his characters.

What the two movies share, however, is formal bliss which at times overwhelms the not always equally ambitious diegesis. Silent Light begins with a starry sky that slowly, effortlessly dissolves (though not in the filmic sense) into an orange dawn, an endless, flat landscape continuously transforming with the change in light. The concept, however picturesque the shot may be, is hardly novel–but its patient, humble absence of commentary or artifice invites one to be transfixed without need for persuasion. Transitioning from the universal to the specific with successively closer shots of and inside a house, a rural family sits in silence around a dinner table. The endless stillness around the table suggests a devastating trauma, but alas, they are merely praying until the aging pater familia is satisfied. Set in a Mennonite village in ostensibly modern time, the film’s design is to defamiliarize the community (the family a synecdoche) with viewer expectations. Where these people might seem anachronisms in the present world, the occasional glimpse of a digital watch on father Johan’s wrist or a Ford pickup truck suggests entirely different views toward materialism, pragmatic but unsaturated.

The film’s fey, atavistic atmosphere is also built up by deliberate subversion of narrative conventions. In the middle of the movie, Johan leaves three of his children under a stranger’s (“that fatso”) care while he rendezvouses with his mistress. When he’s finished and his kids are no longer where he left them, a restaurant patron says that they’re in his van. Cut to a long shot of Johan’s unhurried advance toward a markedly dubious conversion van, wherein the anonymous babysitter is…letting the kids watch a French soloist perform on his eight-inch, black-and-white screen. This kind of expectational trickery has been explored by the Dardenne brothers, et al., in years past, but Reygadas is appropriating it to create an almost alternate reality (with minimal magical realism). In one of the first scenes, after Johan inexplicably weeps by himself for several minutes, he walks to a corner of the room and grabs a stool. Placing it near the doorway he stands on it and reaches out of frame. In conventional cinema as we know it, the context strongly indicates an attempt at suicide. But in fact, he is stifling the heavy ticking of an old-fashioned clock’s pendant.

Despite incidents such as these, the bulk of the film is observation of Johan’s family’s quotidian activities. While not exactly a defender of all cinema rigorous and deliberately leaden (I found Liverpool and Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, to choose two arbitrarily, soporific), Reygadas’ ambient control and unscrupulous formalism are captivating. The sound–which takes on Bressonian importance amidst the spare dialogue–is mixed so meticulously that it sometimes overtakes the images, as in a scene at a local garage where the competing noise of heavy machinery, a female radio host and conversing employees nearly makes the visual represenation of a service station redundant.

Although Silent Light exhibits a level of artistic maturity sorely lacking in Reygadas’ previous work, Battle in Heaven, his thematic development appears comparably stunted. Despite many of its self-aware narrative acuity, the film’s attempt at transcendence falls well short of its formal ambitions. I must confess to having some of the the climax’s cumulative impact sullied by constant critical references to (IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT YET, JUST STOP READING…NOW) Carl Dreyer’s Ordet; even without this unfavorable comparison, the deus ex machina doesn’t feel earned. Some contemplation on the difficulty of distinguishing between God’s plan and evil temptation is given, but Reygadas’ formal (and narratological) commitments leaves the analogous content relatively undeveloped. All is easy to forgive, though, when the purple sun is setting on the empty horizon and the camera pans up toward the black sky in inevitably cosmic denouement.

Grade: Recommended.

Cannes Main Competition, 2007
New York Film Festival, 2007

New York Film Festival 2011: The Main Slate

Just announced is the complete lineup for the 49th New York Film Festival’s Main Slate. There are plenty of familiar faces (Almodovar and von Trier continue to be near sure things) but also a handful of titles I know next to nothing about: Corpo Celeste, The Student, and Policeman. Also, there are a relatively high number (seven) of Cannes Main Competition films here, all of which I’ve heard at least polarizing buzz about, save for Footnote, which was shrugged off by nearly everyone I trust. That said, with the forced absence of The Tree of Life due to previous release and the likely ineligibility of Drive due to its box office prospects, my most anticipated Cannes films are pretty much all here (We Need to Talk About Kevin and This Must Be the Place proving the exceptions). As are Sundance darling Martha Marcy May Marlene, Un Certain Regard fave Miss Bala, and several of the Venice competition’s most piquant selections. Below is an extremely cursory prioritization of the list, obviously complicated by having heard feedback about some but not others. For more information on titles, check out http://www.filmlinc.com/blog/entry/49th-new-york-film-festival-the-main-slate

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
Shame (Steve McQueen)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (Sean Durkin)
Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranja)
Pina (Wim Wenders)
A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg)
The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar)
The Kid With a Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev)
Carnage (Roman Polanski)
The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius)
The Descendants (Alexander Payne)
Goodbye First Love (Mia Hansen Løve)
Le Havre (Aki Kaurismäki)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Agnes Hranitzky)
My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis)
Sleeping Sickness (Ulrich Köhler)
4:44: Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara)
A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)
Play (Ruben Östlund)
Footnote (Joseph Cedar)
George Harrison: Living in the Material World (Martin Scorsese)
Corpo Celeste (Alice Rohrwacher)
The Student (Santiago Mitre)
Policeman (Nadav Lapid)

Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson)

Five Easy Pieces, following just a year after director Bob Rafelson and producer Bert Schneider’s BBS Productions capitalized on the unrest of ’60s youth with Easy Rider, is a different sort of rebellion picture. Where biker movies (Easy Rider being the cycle’s apogee) tended to glorify the reactive disposition toward bourgeois conventions, protag Robert Dupea is the miserably penurious Prodigal Son whose passive rejection of his upper middle-class upbringing has offered no less angst than he left behind. The film is at its best when observing Dupea’s pathetically mundane life, in which double-date bowling after oil rigging in the sweltering sun is the closest thing to pleasure he partakes in. Nicholson’s performance is perhaps the rawest of his career, and the role partially mirrors his own disappointing career up to that point, past his physical prime and pigeonholed as a grindhouse actor. The first word that comes to mind with respect to Dupea is ugliness, both physically and behaviorally. He treats his (admittedly idiotic) girlfriend like shit, cheats on her with grotesquely average-looking women, and the apparent absence of any make-up and frequent close-ups highlight his spotty complexion and rashed neck. Although the film is sometimes (particularly in its latter half) stultifying in its insipid material, the physical transparency suggests a rare degree of sincerity. The picture fails in its development of Dupea’s reconciliation with his past and present family and his pursuit of and denial by a dignified, unpretentious woman living in his family’s house, but the emotional weight of successful individual scenes stack on top of each other to justify Nicholson’s painful confrontation with his mute, dying father and final rejection of both his past and present life. It’s difficult to weight the sometimes painfully ordinary mediocrity against scenes as abruptly poignant as an endless pan across Dupea family memorabilia while Nicholson plays Chopin. His subsequent rejection of any emotional investment in the performance is as frustrating to the viewer as it is Sally Struthers’ Betty; the wall of family photographs is as close as we get to breaking through Nicholson’s impregnable shell, only to be convincingly, cursorily denied any advantage. The film is as difficult to love as it is to hate.

Grade: Recommended.

New York Film Festival, 1970