Gateway Cinephiles

Publish or Perish

The Ghost Writer
2010 (France / Germany / UK)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: March 14, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

Roman Polanski’s thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync.  Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality.   Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody.  So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur’s customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings.  Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts.  Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.

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Uffish, But Not Frumious

Alice in Wonderland
2010 (USA)
Director: Tim Burton
Viewed: March 5, 2010
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

Any film treatment of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books must overcome a conspicuous stumbling block: How does one adapt a pair of Victorian nursery stories, consisting mainly of a succession of absurdist dialogues, into engaging cinema?  A literalist, scene-by-scene recreation of the Alice tales would make for an unconventional film, but also a wearisome and distinctly un-cinematic experience.  Given his gothic fairy-tale sensibilities and enduring fascination with outcasts defined by their hyperbolic physical and emotional qualities, Tim Burton would seem a comfortable fit for Carroll’s brand of amusing dementia. However, the director’s track record with big-budget adaptations has been woefully mixed, with Exhibit A in the negative column being his misguided, excruciating Planet of the Apes remake.  Happily, Alice in Wonderland, while hardly the rich, cerebral adaptation that Carroll’s works deserve, proves to be a solid little adventure tale that traipses through a deliciously gratifying Burton-esque landscape. In Wonderland, the director discovers an expansive sandbox for the funhouse impulses he favors in his most inventive works. Unfortunately, Alice never remotely achieves the madcap vigor of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, or Batman Returns (all exemplars of Burton’s vision at its most fiendish and uninhibited).  The story is little more than a boilerplate Hero’s Journey, but coiled within are both the sensory splendors we expect from Burton the Fabulist, as well as some welcome jottings of subversion.

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Film Diary: In The Loop

2009 (UK)
Director: Armando Iannucci
Viewed: March 7, 2010
Format: Blu-ray - MPI Home Video (2010)

Innocence and Other Noble Lies

The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band)
2009 (Austria / Germany / France / Italy)
Director: Michael Haneke
Viewed: March 3, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke’s Palm d’Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution.  Unlike the director’s brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers.  The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon’s bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight.  Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community.  Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film’s striking emotional and intellectual vigor.  Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes.  Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts.  This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.

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Film Diary: Wonderful Town

2007 (Thailand)
Director: Aditya Assarat
Viewed: February 23, 2010
Format: DVD – Kino (2009)

Revisiting this superb Thai romantic tragedy for the first time since I caught it at StLIFF in 2008, I was struck by how closely it hews to the rhythms and style of an American indie film.  There’s something about the relaxed but deliberate pace, the delicate soundtrack with the odd foray into pop sentiment, and the aura of small town menace that pushes into the film’s final sequences that lend it the tone of a Sundance feature (in the best possible way).  Yet it also possesses the unperturbed gaze and absorption with places—their sights, sounds, and, above all, textures—that have emerged as hallmarks of contemporary East Asian film.  Unlike many cinephiles, the appeal of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s obscurantist works eludes me, so it’s refreshing to see director Assarat (in his feature film debut, no less) offer an alternative entry point into Thai cinema.  I appreciate the shattering third act U-turn in the narrative, and the themes of calamity and recovery that it underlines, but the primary joy I take from the film is how exquisitely it conveys its romantic elements.  When was the last time a film-maker so closely followed the process by which two lonely adults fall fitfully, hopelessly in love?  Assarat’s achievement rests on an uncluttered, engaging portrayal of how unexpected and irresistible the heart’s beckonings can be.

Experimental Treatment

Shutter Island
2010 (USA)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Viewed: February 21, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt.  Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America.  Even Scorsese’s most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film’s anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, cultural settings only seem to hold the director’s attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others’ rules and his own sins.  Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the “mere” creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film’s promotion.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn’t the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase “Master of Horror.”  Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it’s only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.

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Film Diary: Black Mama, White Mama

1973 (USA / Philippines)
Director: Eddie Romero
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)

The hallmarks of a sexy, scuzzy Women-in-Prison feature–including a gratuitous shower scene complete with frolicking, and hard-assed lesbian guards in ridiculously short shorts–are pretty much dispensed with in the first fifteen minutes of Black Mama, White Mama.  What remains is an exploitation The Defiant Ones, as Pam Grier and Margaret Makov (the former a working girl, the latter a freedom fighter of some sort) scurry from one ludicrous set piece to another.  This is a straight-up Z-movie guilty pleasure, just the sort thing one can imagine a teenage Quentin Tarantino devouring.  It’s a shame director Romero was so enamored with tedious gunfights, as it gives him less time to indulge in the loathsome weirdness that is the film’s real appeal.  The torch-bearer of BMWM’s oddities is undoubtedly genre fixture Sig Haig, as a creepy, strangely high-spirited bounty hunter in a Jim Croce ’stache, whose choice of wardrobe and automobile are best described as “Roy Rogers on LSD.”  That’s him above.  Just take a moment to savor that shirt.  Truth be told, I spent the better part of this film trying to puzzle out where the hell it’s supposed to take place.  The vague “island” setting seems, at different times, to be somewhere in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Vietnam.  Between the Spanish-speaking Asian gangsters and the stray police uniform patch with the word “Manila” stitched onto it, I eventually tumbled to the fact that we are, indeed, in the Philippines.  Such is the way of cheap, sleazy films bound for grindhouses the world over.

Film Diary: Black Caesar

1973 (USA)
Director: Larry Cohen
Viewed: February 19, 2010
Format: DVD - MGM (2001)

Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learned from Black Caesar is this: Do Not Fuck With Fred Williamson. Not only can the man take a bullet in the gut and keep on coming for your traitorous ass, he will, as the above screenshot demonstrates, beat you within an inch of your life with a shoe-shine kit.  I had been aware of ex-football star Williamson primarily from Italian dreck like Warrior of the Lost World and his campy performance in From Dusk Till Dawn.  Little did I know that he had a significant career as a blaxploitation leading man, a career that this film kicked off.  Intriguingly, many of Black Caesar’s elements crop up in Scarface, and especially in Goodfellas (including that aforementioned shine-box, which a corrupt cop uses to humiliate Williamson before it is turned on him as a weapon).  Do you think that DePalma or Scorsese would ever cop to cribbing slightly from the fellow who directed Q, It’s Alive, and The Stuff?  And by the by, that James Brown soundtrack? Pure gold.

Hurry Up and Wait

Police, Adjective (Politist, adj.)
2009 (Romania)
Director: Corneliu Porumboiu
Viewed: February 9, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Tivoli Theater)

Corneliu Porumboiu’s willfully staid and yet wholly absorbing new feature, Police, Adjective, operates on two interlocking planes.  On the one hand, it is a police procedural of the driest sort imaginable, an agonizingly attentive study of how peoples, objects, and information travel through a drug investigation in a small Romanian city.   In this city, the Eastern Bloc bureaucracy (and furniture) is still firmly in place, as are draconian narcotics laws that the rest of the European Union has discarded.  Strictly as a lesson in how dull police work can be, and specifically how dully absurd it can be in a former Communist dictatorship, Police, Adjective is an intriguing work, whose stifling realism serves as a direct refutation to the bombast of the Cop Picture (regardless of nationality).  Porumboiu, however, is far too talented and unruly a director to simply engage in a bit of genre revisionism and call it a day.  Accordingly, there is another, more impressive level to the film, one absorbed with language and the way it shapes, steers, and constrains us.  What truly fascinates about Police, Adjective is how easily Porumboiu grafts what is for all practical purposes an academic treatise on linguistics onto his police procedural, and how the two complement and fortify one another.

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Bad Bad, Not Good Bad

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
2009 (USA)
Director: Werner Herzog
Viewed: February 7, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Theaters Plaza Frontenac Cinema)

Full disclosure: I have never seen Abel Ferrara’s pitch-black 1992 character study, Bad Lieutenant.  Neither has German film-maker and madman Werner Herzog.  Unlike me, however, Herzog has directed a film titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, so he perhaps needs a better excuse than my all-purpose cover for any patch of cinematic illiteracy, “It’s in my Netflix queue.”  If the reports are to be believed, Herzog does not regard his new feature as a remake, reboot, re-imagining, or anything of the sort.  He claims that he doesn’t even know who Ferrara is, and that the film’s producers dictated its title.  All this makes me much more comfortable approaching tBL:PoC - NO (yeesh, it hurts to type that) as a standalone work, rather than a tribute to or riff on Ferrara’s film.  Unfortunately, even if one regards Herzog’s film as a wholly original work, there’s no way around the fact that it is his sloppiest film in years, especially when compared to his last narrative feature, the lean, propulsive Rescue Dawn.  Did I mention that the corrupt, degenerate, possibly psychotic police lieutenant of the title is played by American actor and madman Nicholas Cage?  Letting Cage run loose in such a role might have been a nutty stroke of genius, but alas, Bad Lieutenant proves to be just another Bad Nick Cage performance, surrounded by a tonal and thematic muddle.

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