Gateway Cinephiles

These Are the Best Days of My Life?!

Adventureland
2009 (USA)
Director: Greg Mottola
Viewed: April 22, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Don’t permit the promotional campaign to fool you into supposing that Greg Mottola’s wistful, kitschy coming-of-age tale, Adventureland, is in any significant way a successor to the director’s superb, bromatic comic odyssey, Superbad.  Certainly, the two films share an unexpected curiosity and emotional generosity towards their characters.  If one can discern a pattern from just two feature films, then a signature feature of Mottola’s work is his oddly humanistic approach to caricature, where he glories in ridiculous characters even as he probes at their inner lives with remarkable affection.  If anything, Adventureland, with its rich stable of personalities and the enthusiastic, bittersweet tone of a “That Crazy Summer” anecdote, applies this approach much more generously.  What it lacks, however, is Superbad’s deliciously crude belly laughs, the poignancy of that’s film’s central narrative of a delayed pubescent leave-taking, and—let’s be honest—the presence of Michael Cera and Jonah Hill.  That first item is the most conspicuous, as the gags featured in Adventureland’s trailer are, more or less, the only gags in the film.  Mottola’s script, based loosely on his own experiences working in a cruddy amusement park, just isn’t that funny.  Which is okay, since Adventureland isn’t really comedy but a bemused and pleasantly miserable bit of post-collegiate nostalgia.

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Long is the Way, and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads Up to Light

Sin Nombre
2009 (USA / Mexico)
Director: Cary Fukunaga
Viewed: April 19, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Here is a simple story, familiar almost to the point of triteness.  A Good Woman searching for a better life in a faraway land and a Bad Man haunted by his past meet by happenstance on the road.  They bond, after a fashion, and gradually the fates of these two travelers become entwined.  In Sin Nombre, the stark directorial debut from Cary Fukunaga, the Good Woman is a young Honduran named Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), heading across Latin America with her father and uncle to an uncertain, undocumented life in New Jersey.  The Bad Man is a Mexican gangster known as Willy (Edgar Flores), who is fleeing the wrath of his gang after having committed the gravest of sins.  The road they share is a freight train heading north, towards Estados Unidos.  In most reviews, this would be the point where I suggest that the particulars don’t really matter, that Sin Nombre plumbs thematic territory that transcends its setting.  Yet I can’t, in good conscience, make that claim.  The Timeless Story that Fukunaga is striving for is modestly successful, hindered by occasional clumsiness and all-too-frequent contrivances.  Sin Nombre’s principal appeal is firmly grounded in its specifics.  The details of his setting—both sulfurous and sweet—lend the film a mythic richness that the creaky story and weakly drawn characters fail to convey.

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Film Diary: Vertigo

1958 (USA)
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Viewed: April 18, 2009
Format: DVD - Universal (1998)

It’s time to start working through the highlights of the TSPDT 1,000 list and touching base with films I’ve only seen once or never seen at all.

Film Diary: Chinatown

1974 (USA)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: April 16, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Featured in a one-night screening at the Webster University Film Series.

Film Diary: Serenity

2005 (USA)
Director: Joss Whedon
Viewed: April 19, 2009
Format: DVD - Universal (2005)

Film Diary: Watchmen

2009 (USA)
Director: Zack Snyder
Viewed: April 16, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Scrubbing Out the Dead

Sunshine Cleaning
2009 (USA)
Director: Christine Jeffs
Viewed: April 11, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Christine Jeffs’ Sunshine Cleaning lounges comfortably within the plush confines of the indie dramedy framework, but it mostly resists the roteness and simple-minded platitudes that usually bedevil the genre.  It’s apparent from the first scene that we are not traipsing through feel-good territory: an anonymous man walks into an Albuquerque sporting goods store and proceeds to blow his head off with a shotgun.  However, another early scene more gracefully signals Sunshine’s modestly sophisticated approach to the well-traveled premise, “Spunky Protagonist Discovers Her True Purpose.” House-cleaner and single mom Rose (Amy Adams) stands in her bathroom, still dripping from a shower, and reads aloud from a note taped to the mirror: “You are powerful.  You can do anything.”  It’s an intriguing gesture that reveals a woman both more vulnerable and self-aware than one might expect of a film like Sunshine.  (There is even a gentle echo when a character later discovers a poignant reminder note posted on a door.) And so it goes: Jeffs begins with a story that seems dully familiar, but adds sufficient half-twists to fashion something far more satisfying than might have otherwise emerged.  Often these are omissions that intrigue by their absence and add dollops of authenticity to the film’s quirky form.  Jeffs shaves off bits and pieces here, skips over the unnecessary there, and generally keeps the viewer on their toes while also ensuring they leave their seat pleased as punch.

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Film Diary: Reprise

2006 (Norway)
Director: Joachim Trier
Viewed: April 12, 2009
Format: DVD - Miramax

Film Diary: Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímenes)

2007 (Spain)
Director: Nacho Vigalondo
Viewed: April 5, 2009
Format: DVD - Magnolia (2009)

My original impressions from StLIFF 2008 are here.

Film Diary: Mother of Tears (La Terza Madre)

2007 (Italy / USA)
Director: Dario Argento
Viewed: March 31, 2009
Format: DVD - Dimension (2008)