Gateway Cinephiles

Up
2009 (USA)
Director: Pete Docter
Viewed: June 18, 2009
Format: 3D Theatrical Print

One of the most pleasurable aspects of Pixar’s rise to the artistic apex of American commercial cinema has been the expanding sophistication of the themes that the studio is willing, even eager, to tackle.  That sophistication reached its pinnacle to date in last year’s WALL•E, an unexpectedly stirring film experience that addressed myriad science fiction concerns with a grace, liveliness, and humor unmatched by any genre offering in recent decades.  This trend—the studio’s determination to make the most challenging kid-friendly fare the public will accept—first emerged with Monsters, Inc., so it should come as little shock that that film’s director, Pete Docter, has delivered yet another feature whose breathtaking surface conceals deep currents.  If Up feels slightly less groundbreaking than Pixar’s recent offerings in terms of sensory dazzle, perhaps that’s because the comparison is so monstrously unfair.  Standing alongside the virtuoso direction and cinematography of Ratatouille, or the futurist vistas and elegant storytelling of WALL•E, Up is merely marvelous, rather than devastatingly marvelous.  However, Docter delivers what is the studio’s most essentially human story since Monsters, and certainly its most mature in terms of its psychological resonance.  Woven into a relatively straightforward tale of adventure, Up offers a poignant examination of how the reality of everyday life can gnaw at our dreams and seed cynicism in our hearts, tragically hardening us to the possibility of emotional connections with other people.

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The Girlfriend Experience
2009 (USA)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Viewed: June 9, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Perhaps unexpectedly, Steven Soderbergh’s lean, chilly The Girlfriend Experience shares two key elements with the director’s previous film, the four-hour biopic Che: an admirable lack of artistic compromise and a thematic nucleus that is oddly straightforward given the elaborate character of the presentation.  Once again stepping away from his brand of pleasurable, blissfully hip commercial fare to create a film wholly on his own terms, Soderbergh brings his talents to bear on a relatively simple story of entrepreneurial and sexual peril that plays out in the hotels, restaurants, and boutiques of Manhattan.  Perhaps “story” is the wrong word.  In contrast to Che’s grand, exhaustive study of revolution as process, Girlfriend barely bothers with a plot.  Or, more accurately, the plot is so thoroughly fragmented that the film’s events and their relationship to one another are plainly not Girlfriend’s focus.  (This alone is a fascinating departure for the director of the Ocean’s films, where the elaborate heists are the Whole Point.)  Employing a structure that one could term “narrative cut-up,” Soderbergh slices and dices the life of a New York call girl in October 2008 into a collage of cinematic musings on self-worth, loyalty, and autonomy.

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Drag Me to Hell
2009 (USA)
Director: Sam Raimi
Viewed: June 7, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature.  In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002’s The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a “genre exercise” seems faint praise.  While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi’s film are standard occult thriller fare.  The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films.  Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi’s smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan.  Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like “tribute” or “throwback.”  Let’s be clear: It’s a damn fine horror film in every way.

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