Gateway Cinephiles

Film Diary: Cannibal Holocaust

1980 (Italy)
Director: Ruggero Deodato
Viewed: August 27, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

The legends surrounding Ruggeo Deodato’s exploitation magnum opus are so fulsome and contradictory, I think it’s probably best to simply appraise what is on the screen, and leave questions of sincerity and intentions aside.  Revisiting the film following a Halloween DVD screening in 2008—and for the first time theatrically—it’s more self-evident to me that Cannibal Holocaust is a fairly daring slice of nastiness, rather than merely nasty.  Granted, it’s gratuitous, skuzzy, and stomach-churning, and in its lowest moments it quite deliberately apes a Mondo feature, lending it the whiff of a repulsive spectacle with no purpose other than to revolt.  I’m thinking particularly of the on-screen animal murder, which is admittedly gruesome, but also comes off as sort of vapidly shocking and pointless, aspirations of crude metaphor aside.  However, what’s fascinating here is how much time Deodato devotes to things that aren’t violent and appalling.  Robert Kerman’s anthropologist spends a healthy chunk of the film negotiating with guides, sparring with television executives, and interviewing acquaintances of the murdered documentarians.  Not exactly the sort of stuff that keeps squirming teens in their seats when they came for gore and titties.  Of course, the film’s innovative found footage / double-timeline structure definitively betrays the filmmaker’s interest in the artificiality of cinema. Errol Morris it ain’t, but that’s sort of the point; if it accomplishes nothing else, Cannibal Holocaust puts to rest the notion that metafilm is necessarily a pretentious, high-brow endeavor.

It’s in the pursuit of its social commentary that the film finds its most gratifying traction, amid all the excessively drawn-out, oddly-scored scenes of turtle gutting and awkward, sweaty post-atrocity coitus.  Sometimes this commentary has all the subtlety of a jackhammer, as when Deodato repeatedly cuts from the disturbing found footage to the restless executives in the screening room, who shift uncomfortably in their seats and throw horrified glances at one another.  (Get it?!  You’re culpable too, Mr. and Mrs. Viewer!)  Occasionally, however, the film exhibits some genuine black wit.  One of my favorite moments occurs when documentary director Alan Yates (Carl Gabriel Yorke), upon stumbling upon an impaled woman, is observed cracking a shit-eating grin.  When Yates’ cameraman alerts him that he is being filmed, the director reverts to carefully arranged look of grim sorrow.  Now that’s delicious satire!  My main problem with Cannibal Holocaust is the old saw about having and eating one’s cake.  The film bottoms out on the shoals of tastelessness even as it lobs righteous hand-grenades at filmmakers, journalists, Big Media, and consumers.  Of course, the “wants to have it both ways” charge is leveled at almost every work that addresses violence, sex, or other potentially offensive subject matter, but I think the often jarring contrast between Cannibal Holocaust’s leering tendencies and its cleverness supports at least an indictment for two-facedness.

Film Diary: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2010 (USA)
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: August 23, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

Revisiting Edgar Wright’s bitingly funny, pixelated mash-up of geek culture and romantic comedy tropes, this time with the Lovely Wife, I was struck by how relaxed the film is about its ambitions.  Compared to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, which are deliriously fun but embrace their respective generic legacies a little too unquestioningly at times for my taste, Scott Pilgrim always retains a touch of the sardonic.  And yet it never acquires the grating self-satisfaction that plagues so many satirical films.  Perhaps it’s just that Wright’s full-throttle comedic approach smooths over the rough edges.  However, a second viewing and a thumb-through of the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel reveals that the film’s admirable balancing act flows directly from its strength as a shrewd adaptation.  Bryan Lee O’Malley’s manga-tinged black-and-white funny books necessarily lose some of their indie scruffiness in the translation to the big screen, but Wright’s approach is in a different key than the slavish (or desperate) devotion of a fanboy.  He preserves the visual inventiveness of the comics, borrows liberally from O’Malley’s writing (sharpening the quips with his own sheer velocity), and uses his chosen medium to fine effect.  Exhibit A: The characters of the comics, who are lovingly written but often pictorially indistinguishable with their wide eyes and unfussy lines, are each brought to striking and distinctive life in Wright’s film by a succession of marvelously cast performers.  Secondary characters such as Scott’s snide roommate Wallace Wells might be caricatures, but Kieran Culkin makes him memorable, dammit, and not just with the prickly lines he spouts, but all the wonderful details of his physical performance.  (Culkin’s slightly tipsy, archly helpful delivery of “Scott! Look out! It’s that one guy!” might be one of my favorite throwaway moments this year.)  This sort of creative doodling and the exploitation of cinema’s potential—its actors, motion, sound, and so forth–is what makes Scott Pilgrim the film such a pleasurable experience.

Quick Review: Life During Wartime

2009 (USA)
Director: Todd Solondz
Viewed: August 29, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Memory, culpability, and above all forgiveness snake with python-scale brazenness through Todd Solondz’ Life During Wartime, a sequel (of sorts) to Happiness, his 1998 pitch-black slice of middle-class disillusionment (and, memorably, pedophilia).  Recasting all of the characters from that film, Solondz revisits the frayed, stymied lives of middle-aged sisters Joy, Trish, and Helen Jordan (here played by Shirley Henderson, Allison Janney, and Ally Sheedy) as they attempt to forget, move on, and start over.  Building upon its predecessor’s single-minded theme—You Hardly Ever Get What You Want—Life During Wartime gazes on the tangled, habitually dysfunctional lives of the Jordan clan and pointedly asks who we should blame for our miseries, and whether our offenders should (or can be) forgiven.  Solondz’s approach is his customary swirl of jarring frankness with comical anguish.  The forthrightness of the film’s aims lend it the aura of a morality play, as does its curious structure, which forgoes conventional narrative for a succession of linked set pieces, each one amusing and aching in its way, and each something of a self-contained short film.  Solondz’ despairing yet earnest sensibility remains an acquired taste.  Yet while Life During Wartime is unmistakably slighter and less bracing than its forebears, it also reveals a more disciplined and adroit filmmaker.

Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 (USA)
Director: Edgar Wright
Viewed: August 16, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

There’s no denying that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World seems engineered to tap into the brainstems of Gen-Xers raised on The Legend of Zelda, tickling their nostalgia centers with a blend of hipster banter and sheer awesomeness until they submit, giggling with delight.  More broadly, the film presents a romantic comedy that doesn’t just name-check slacker cultural touchstones such as comics, video games, and indie rock, but earnestly drapes itself in their idioms and aesthetics.  Based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and set in a wintery, shabby Toronto of indeterminate era—characters fiddle with their Nintendo DS Lites, but also visit CD stores (how quaint!) and wrestle with AOL dial-up—Scott Pilgrim follows the amorous travails of the titular character, an awkward twenty-two-year-old played by Michael Cera (a bit redundant, I know).   Director Edgar Wright previously showcased his droll wit and rapid-fire stylings in the genre-tweaking, deliriously funny Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, co-written with leading man Simon Pegg.  Here his writing partner is actor Michael Bacall (last seen playing separate characters named Omar in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds), but Pegg’s absence hasn’t diminished Wright’s facility for maintaining a cutting and relentless comic cadence while slathering on outlandish spectacle.

Read the rest…

Interview with Ryan Eslinger, Director of Daniel and Abraham

Production photo courtesy of Ryan Eslinger.

Alton, Illinois native Ryan Eslinger made his first feature film, Madness and Genius, between his sophomore and junior years at New York University.  The film went on to premiere at the 2003 Toronto Film Festival, and garnered attention for Eslinger as an emerging talent.  His second feature, When a Man Falls in the Forest, boasted the sort of star power that independent sophomore efforts can rarely claim, with a cast that included Dylan Baker, Sharon Stone, and Timothy Hutton. Developed at the Sundance Institute’s workshops, the film went on to be nominated for a Golden Bear at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival.  Eslinger’s latest film, Daniel and Abraham, is a micro-budget feature that utilizes just two actors and a snowbound forest.  It was screened at the St. Louis Filmmaker’s Showcase in July, and is headed to the St. Louis International Film Festival this November.  As a follow-up to my piece on the film at Look/Listen, I spoke with Ryan about his approach to film-making, and what’s going on beneath Daniel and Abraham’s frosty surface.

GC: In some respects, Daniel and Abraham represents a fairly significant shift from your previous film, When a Man Falls in the Forest, particularly in terms of the scale of the production.  Was that reactive in response to your experience making When a Man Falls in the Forest, or has the sort of micro-budget, total-control approach utilized in Daniel and Abraham been a long-gestating interest?

RE: I did not film Daniel and Abraham as a reaction to my experience making When a Man Falls in the Forest.  Aside from the fact that I think a gritty micro-budget best serves the story of Daniel and Abraham, I was also trying to find new ways to challenge myself. Daniel and Abraham was definitely not a project on which I had total control. When you shoot out in the woods in the middle of winter, you don’t have control over much of anything, including the weather and your ability to hold your hands steady. The one thing you do have control over is your inner drive to keep pushing forward and put one foot in front of the other. It is an almost meditative experience. I had hoped this would be the case, and I wanted to experience working in these conditions.

GC: The screenplay is what really captured my attention about Daniel and Abraham.  It contains straightforward thriller elements, but also strong allegorical currents. The conflict between the titular characters almost comprises a dialog on abstract concepts like gratitude, duty, and humility.  Can you talk a bit about the genesis for this story, and how you and your co-writers developed the film’s distinctive tone?

RE: I originally wrote Daniel and Abraham as a completely different script that had eight or nine characters. However, the story was not working, so I threw out most of it and kept only two of the characters. I had a couple passages of dialogue that I gave to [co-writers and actors] Gary [Lamadore] and David [Williams], and we all sat down together and they read through the material. They began to improvise scenes, and I recorded and transcribed portions of those scenes. I used their improvisations to write twenty pages, then I brought this back to them, and they rewrote the new material to fit their own voices and improvise more. This process was repeated until we had a completed script.

GC: The winter setting is one of the keys to the aura of menace that pervades the film.  The link between the savagery of nature and savagery of man is one of the hoariest tropes in fiction, but Daniel and Abraham establishes it very unobtrusively, and the effect is quite potent.  Was the winter environment always a part of the story as you originally envisioned it?

RE: It was fairly early on that I decided I wanted to shoot in the winter. No matter how many layers of clothing we wore in the woods, the cold always found its way in. You would get so cold that your bones hurt. In a similar sense, Abraham finds his way into the deepest levels of Daniel’s subconscious, so much so that, as the film moves along, you begin to question whether Abraham is real or a projection of Daniel’s mind. I think I prefer that symbolism to a savagery of nature/man symbolism.

GC: Gary Lamadore is astonishing in the film, but in many ways David Williams has the more difficult task as an actor.  The film follows Daniel’s perspective, and we’re inclined to be sympathetic to him.  Yet the film is in a sense about his rapid moral slide into selfishness and aggression, or perhaps just about the sort of situation that reveals his true character.  Was developing the character of Daniel a difficult task for you and David?

RE: Personally, I think both Gary and David have equally difficult parts. David slips into selfishness and aggression, as you said, but Gary’s character also transforms. At the beginning, he seems threatening and conniving, but as the story moves along, we begin to think that maybe he really does know what he is talking about. After all, if Daniel had listened to him at key points instead of cutting him off, Abraham might have helped him properly clean his wound, et cetera. That is the ambiguity we tried to instill in both characters. Whenever David and Gary would be reading a scene and something would seem too one-dimensionally good or bad, we would try to add layers and additional motivations to their actions.

GC: In a sense, both When a Man Falls in the Forest and Daniel and Abraham are films about failure and stasis.  Where the former is steeped in the ennui of middle age, the latter brackets this in a way, touching on both the aimlessness of the young and the regrets of older individuals.  Do you see introspective characters as essential to the kind of stories you want to tell?

RE: I wouldn’t say it is essential to the stories I want to tell. I’m always willing to throw out everything and tackle a different style and subject altogether.

GC: Given those environmental challenges you faced during the production of Daniel and Abraham, does the notion of “art from adversity” have any resonance for you? That is, do challenges (anticipated and otherwise) help a work becomes something better than it would have been otherwise?  Would that apply to Daniel and Abraham specifically, or to film-making in general, or is that too sweeping a statement?

RE: I definitely think that challenges can stimulate creativity, but I also think it depends on the person. I thrive on pressure. I played basketball for many years, and, in one game, I experienced a somewhat clichéd moment when my team was down by one point, there were only a few seconds left on the clock, and I had to make two free throws in order for us to win. Intense pressure like that makes you realize that you are in control of your life. You control the outcome of the game, whether it’s the last few seconds or first few seconds on the clock. Some people probably don’t like being reminded that they are in control of their life, but I do.

GC: Taking a another step back, it sounds like your greatly value filmmaking as a personal challenge for yourself.  Is that a fair assessment?  For you, does a film’s value as a personal accomplishment have more, less, or equal weight than its function for the audience: conveying a message, providing entertainment, evoking a mood?

RE: I do value the personal challenge, because what is the point of doing something you know you can do? Records would never be broken, technology would never be invented, et cetera. Regarding an audience’s reaction: my favorite films tend to be those that can be interpreted a hundred different ways by a hundred different people. Their meaning can change over time, too. The films almost feel like living organisms. I strive to create these types of films, so in that respect, their function for the audience is extremely important. It is equally important as the personal challenge factor.

Quick Review: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinksy

2009 (France)
Director: Jan Kounen
Viewed: April 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

Jan Kounen’s speculative (and frequently downright fictional) film about an affair between two artistic titans sumptuously affirms that not every tale of erotic craving need address romantic love.  Years after witnessing the notorious 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring, Coco Chanel (Anna Mouglalis) invites a hard-luck Igor Stravinksy (Mads Mikkelsen) to her chalet, with his wife and kids in tow.  The designer desires to give the composer the freedom to create, but before you can say “kindred spirits,” the pair are engaged in a sweaty, desperate, but oddly chilly affair.  British writer Chris Greenhalgh adapted his own novel for the film, and both he and Kounen emphasize the white-hot obsessive knots–and inevitable implosion–that can occur when two like-minded souls collide.  Both the Rite, which serves as a recurring musical motif, and the dramatization of Chanel No. 5’s creation underline the film’s fascination with mystery, whether that of the artistic mind itself or the process of inspiration.  These themes prove far more compelling than a flimsy notion of fumbled True Love.  In Kounen’s expressive hands, what might have been a slight (albeit sexy) slice of biopic achieves something finer, a more cerebral cousin to Jane Campion’s poetic ruminations on emotional states.

Quick Review: The Kids Are All Right

2010 (USA)
Director: Lisa Cholodenko
Viewed: August 11, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print

It’s too much to assert that Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules’ (Julianne Moore) lesbianism is incidental to the emotional vigor of The Kids Are All Right, given that sexual and gender anxiety undergird many of the story’s conflicts, not to mention that the plot depends on it.  However, writer-director Cholodenko uses the upheaval generated when Nice and Jules’ teenaged kids seek out their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo) for the purposes of highlighting the universal qualities of middle-class, middle-aged families. The message seems to be, contra Anna Karenina (which the film alludes to), unhappy families all share the same gremlins: resentment, frustration, shame, jealousy, and emotional befuddlement.  There’s nothing especially cinematic about Cholodenko’s approach here, aside from one long, devastating close-up of Benning during a moment of traumatic revelation.  Fortunately, the nuanced performances carry the film, elevating dialogue that sometime strays into clumsy satire.  It is Cholodenko’s talent for finding the wry humor in the strangest places that is most endearing, particularly when it comes to human sexuality, which the film acknowledges is rarely explicable or neat.  It’s enough to make one forgive the faintly schematic character to the film’s narrative arc, or its mean-spirited racial digs and hippie-bashing.

Film Diary: Miami Vice (Unrated Director’s Edition)

2006 (USA)
Director: Michael Mann
Viewed: August 9, 2010
Format: Blu-ray – Universal (2008)

The film’s relatively recent vintage notwithstanding, the dreaded consensus seems to have already decreed that Miami Vice belongs in the lower tiers of Michael Mann’s oeuvre.  However, the film has its lonely and dogged boosters, among them Slant luminaries Ed Gonzalez and Nick Schager, as well as Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies blogger Kevin J. Olson.  Truth be told, it was Kevin’s recent appreciation for the film that provoked me to finally visit Mann’s contemporized vision of Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs’ neon-drenched world.  While I can’t share the aforementioned writers’ assessment that it is a great work, there is far more roiling beneath Miami Vice’s slick surface than might be immediately apparent.

The film’s design lustily embraces the faint air of the ridiculous that permeated its namesake television series, at least when it comes to the fashions, cars, and architecture.  The world of Miami Vice is one where undercover narcotics officers drive Ferraris, dwell in dazzling condos, and pilot speedboats in their off hours.  The cops and crooks alike possess flawless Caribbean fashion sense, sip mojitos behind velvet ropes, and have access to an unlimited supply of firepower, gadgets, and vehicles.  Yet Mann presents this world without a wink or a titter, with absolute conviction.  It is as though the goal is to submerge us in kitsch to the point where we can no longer detect that it’s kitsch.  The effect is undeniably heady, particularly when paired with the film’s lurid, domineering aesthetic.  (The sky itself essentially becomes a canvas for Mann to paint with some truly astonishing hues.)  Miami Vice is an aggressively cool film, but it never seems to be striking a pose.  It just happens to have been filmed in an aggressively cool alternate universe.

Mann, who also wrote the screenplay, has a focused and elegant conception of what Miami Vice should be, and he is scrupulous about keeping it on track.  There are action sequences, but it’s not really an action film. The chases and gunplay primarily serve as jittery releases of dramatic tension, rather than delivery devices for drama.  It’s a story about cops, but it’s not really a police procedural.  Mann fetishizes the visual language of law enforcement rather than its logistical minutiae.  Given that the film maintains the director’s preference for emotional chilliness (or at least a forlornness that precludes flamboyant emotional clashes), it can’t really be regarded as a character study.

So what is Miami Vice?  Ultimately, I think it proves to be a surprisingly simple tale of moral vexation, where the triumph of righteousness—and the tears that result—was never in doubt.  While Mann has long exhibited an absorption with male honor codes, his focus has always been on the proximate consequences of such codes.  Here he takes a much more melancholy, even meditative approach, particularly in his presentation of the male-female dyads of Sonny-Isabella and, to a lesser degree, Rico-Trudy.  Rarely have characters in a Mann joint smelled their unhappy fates on the wind with as much precision as these four, and yet they are still willing to luxuriate in fleeting moments of pleasure, joy, and human intimacy.  Whatever the film’s flaws or self-imposed restraints, its tone is an undeniable achievement: Mann evokes decadence and moral peril without the aura of doom. Miami Vice is ripe with the sensation that this fallen world cannot accommodate compromises or hesitation, and will never forgive us our bad choices.

Film Diary: The Damned United

2009 (UK)
Director: Tom Hooper
Viewed: August 9, 2010
Format: DVD – Sony (2010)

This prickly tale of the rise and fall (and subsequent humbling) of notoriously sharp-tongued football manager Brian Clough provides an array of unexpected pleasures.  To be sure, the film boasts a worthy pedigree.  It was adapted by Frost/Nixon and The Queen writer Peter Morgan from a novel by David Peace, who also penned the Red Riding quartet, which was itself adapted into one of the finest British films of the past decade.  However, director Tom Hooper was not known to me, save by reputation as the helmsman of all seven episodes of HBO’s lauded John Adams.  Accordingly, it’s rewarding to witness Hooper’s adroit handling of The Damned United’s twin timelines (a structure that echoes, among other works, Sean Penn’s Into the Wild), as well as his determination to tweak sports movie conventions.  There are plenty of histrionic confrontations and tearful reunions, all of them entirely unsurprising, but for a film about football, it boasts remarkably little gameplay footage.  Hooper and Morgan keep the focus on Clough’s personality: his unflagging ambition, unfortunate taste for conflict, and self-destructive hubris.  It’s a daring thing to make a sports film about the limits of personal achievement, even if the subject is a manager rather than an athlete.  The Damned United’s full-throated commitment to its themes is impressive, and that commitment drips from every frame and performance.  Cinematographer Ben Smithard’s striking recreation of 1970s England is exquisite, from moldering Leeds to sun-kissed Brighton.  And while Michael Sheen doesn’t quite seem to inhabit the same world as his fellow performers, his portrayal of Clough—the startling blend of priggishness, throbbing ego, and lip-curling desperation—is mesmerizing stuff.

Amateur Film Writer Becomes Occassionally Professional Film Writer

Still courtesy of Ryan Elsinger.

If posting has seemed light lately, there’s a damn good reason: I managed to land myself a semi-regular gig writing about film for Look / Listen, the newly re-launched arts and culture site for St. Louis Magazine.  My inaugural piece for the launch is on Daniel and Abraham, the new film from Alton, Illinois native Ryan Eslinger.  Check it out, and take a look at the other work posted there now and in the coming days.  The staff of StLMag have done a great job of pulling together a diverse group of writers with a deep knowledge of the arts.

Duel of Wills: Ryan Eslinger’s Daniel and Abraham

And don’t worry: I’m not going anywhere. I’ll continue to post reviews, essays, and other short pieces here at Gateway Cinephiles, although the frequency of posts might decrease a touch to accommodate, you know, paying work.

A big thanks to all you loyal readers out there.  Your interest in my meager thoughts on cinema have kept my own interest in writing about film alive for the past three years.  That in turn led to the fortuitous series of events that brought me to Look / Listen, and for that I thank you.