September 28, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Foreign, Romance
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Bright Star
2009 (UK / Australia / France)
Director: Jane Campion
Viewed: September 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
Jane Campion’s new film, Bright Star, is positively swollen with exquisite sorrow. Unabashed and yet sober in her embrace of the romantic, Campion exhibits a shrewd talent for blending personal and cultural understandings of love, and Bright Star is further, devastating proof of her instincts. In presenting the tale of the relationship between seamstress Fanny Brawne and the English poet John Keats, Bright Star relies on the viewer’s own romantic reference points as well as their understanding of generic tropes. The film slathers on the components of a textbook romantic tragedy: a soul in creative torment, attraction concealed behind bickering, social barriers that suffocate the lovers, a meddlesome third party, emotions that quickly veer from ecstatic to distraught, and a world that seems almost malevolent to love. Campion assembles these well-worn elements into a whole that is not only deeply affecting, but also visually and aurally compelling. Bright Star does not ask for our indulgence. It earns it, by sweeping us along into a world where poetry expresses what blunt declarations, and even physical intimacies, cannot. It operates much like poetry itself. To borrow a phrase from Campion’s masterpiece, The Piano, it is not so much an account of a chaste love affair as it is a mood that passes through you.
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September 24, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Kid Stuff, Animation, Fantasy
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Ponyo (Gake no ue no Ponyo)
2008 (Japan)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Format: Theatrical Print
Viewed: September 17, 2009
Japanese animated film-maker Hayao Miyazaki has an unusual talent for telling stories that are visually and emotionally compelling despite the admittedly murky character of his fantasy worlds. In films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away, one gets the sense that fidelity to a coherent mythology is, at best, an afterthought. Miyazaki’s works operate on the senses and the heart. That’s not a backhanded complement, but a truism that, once embraced, leads to an appreciation for his unusual and rewarding films. Ponyo is no exception to this principle. Trying to decipher every jot of this weird, wild aquatic fantasy is an exercise in futility. Better to sit back and absorb it, revel in it, and let it weave its enchantments. As with all of Miyazaki’s films, and in contrast to most works of animated kiddie fare, Ponyo lingers on both the intimate and epic while examining the intersection of the mundane and the fantastic. Indeed, consistent with the animistic thread that runs throughout the director’s work, Ponyo presents the worlds of flesh and spirit as tightly entwined and ultimately interdependent. This is underlined not merely through exposition—which is sparing and on-the-nose—but also through the rhythm and emphasis of the film’s scenes. The steeping of noodles in hot water receives as much attention as a titanic sea goddess drifting through the ocean depths. Such is the way of Miyazaki, who sees the human magic within the banal details of life and connects them to unrealities that possess a mythic tinge.
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September 14, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign
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2008 (UK / Ireland)
Director: Steve McQueen
Viewed: September 13, 2009
Format: DVD - IFC (2009) (Blockbuster Exclusive)
[I’ve been missing so many high-profile films in their theatrical release this year, I’ve decided to start reviewing new films recently released on DVD. Such “Late to the Game” quick reviews will cover the film itself, not the DVD presentation or features. The addition of yet another review format will hopefully enable me to provide more content for relevant, interesting films that slipped through my fingers during their brief sojourn in theaters.]
On a purely sensory level, Hunger functions as a grim, riveting depiction of humanity’s capacity for depraved indifference to others and to the self. In portraying the conditions inside a British prison during the IRA’s “blanket strike” and “no-wash strike” in 1981, first-time director Steve McQueen conveys a searing sense of place through texture and sound, especially minute details such as a single snowflake melting on skin. Hunger is a film of pregnant silences and violent outbursts, but the fulcrum of the film is a mesmerizing conversation where IRA zealot Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) explains to a priest (Liam Cunningham) why he is about to start a hunger strike. In this peerless sequence, which consists mainly of a single shot and lasts more than fifteen minutes by my count, McQueen drills down into the humane essence of the film, beyond the spectacle of the grueling battle of wills between guards and prisoners. Hunger ‘s concerns are ethical, even transcendental, conveyed with the authority of a supremely focused and confident film-maker. With disturbing intensity, McQueen asks us to consider the meaning of sacrifice, and whether it is morally superior to dehumanize oneself rather than suffer the cruelties inflicted by others.
September 14, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas
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2008 (USA)
Directors: Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck
Viewed: September 13, 2009
Format: DVD - Sony (2009)
[I’ve been missing so many high-profile films in their theatrical release this year, I’ve decided to start reviewing new films recently released on DVD. Such “Late to the Game” quick reviews will cover the film itself, not the DVD presentation or features. The addition of yet another review format will hopefully enable me to provide more content for relevant, interesting films that slipped through my fingers during their brief sojourn in theaters.]
Given that their previous film, Half Nelson, featured a borderline outlandish premise, it’s intriguing that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck would tackle a story like Sugar, which concerns itself with mediocrity and shared experiences. Decisively rejecting sports movie cliché, Boden and Fleck’s latest film follows the rise and fall of Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), a Dominican pitcher with dreams of Yankee Stadium and a new Cadillac, cultivated at the Caribbean training camp for a big league franchise. Sugar’s narrative is comprised of arcs of hope and despair, as Santos journeys into the American farm teams, where he contends with culture shock and the awful realization that he is not, in fact, hot shit. Boden and Fleck occasionally aim for facile melodrama—Sugar falls for an Iowa farm girl!—but the film truly engages when it simply observes how an athlete manages the insufferable tangle of expectations from without and within. Boden and Fleck suggest that commercial athletics all too often treats players as commodities, extinguishing their joy of sport before tossing them aside. To say that Sugar is subversive is too strong, but it is refreshing and commendably precise in its evocation of mood.
September 14, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas, Foreign
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2008 (Belgium)
Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Viewed: September 9, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
There’s something inexplicably chilly in the Dardenne brothers’ most recent film, the urgently observed and somewhat confounding Lorna’s Silence. At the center of its narrative is a complex and thoroughly indecent proposal. Albanian drycleaner Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, compelling even as a derelict) at the behest of gangsters in order to obtain citizenship. Their plan is to kill Claudy with a fake overdose and for Lorna to marry a Russian heavy, in a kind of murderous immigration two-step. Naturally, the enterprise comes apart, partly due to Claudy’s shaky resolve to clean up and partly due to Lorna’s flickering conscience. The brothers shoot with their customary vérité ruthlessness, leavening the gravity with sparing mirth and bringing tragedy down abruptly like a hammer. However, the film fails to develop much psychological detail within the confines of its style, which dampens the potential drama. Doboroshi’s performance is engaging, but perhaps too inscrutable, and the film never achieves the emotional depths necessary to move it much beyond thriller tensions or crude sympathy for its heroine. Still, the conclusion veers into intriguingly unexpected territory, posing stinging doubts about the absence of human connection in an increasingly mercenary world.
September 14, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Dramas
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Tetro
2009 (USA / Italy / Argentina)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Viewed: September 8, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
There’s a searing line in Michael Chabon’s hardboiled / speculative history novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, from a scene where half-Jewish, half-Tlingit police detective Berko Shemets confronts his estranged father. “It has nothing to do with religion,” he howls, “It has everything to do, God damn it, with fathers!” With a slight adjustment, this could be the tagline of Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, a film fashioned from equal parts unabashed passion and tightly-wound bitterness. In it we are introduced to the Tetrocinis, a clan for whom literature, film, dance, and especially music are sustenance. Tetro isn’t really about art, however; it’s about fathers. Coppola himself is the son of the composer Carmine Coppola, and his family is perhaps the most renowned tribe in cinema, comprising daughter Sofia, sister Talia Shire, and nephews Nicholas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, to name a few. While it’s not particularly illuminating to psychoanalyze a director through his work, it’s probably a safe bet that the operatic and yet mischievous Tetro is Coppola’s most personal work in years. In those places where the film stumbles, it’s due to tonal awkwardness and narrative silliness. Nonetheless, Tetro’s visuals are sumptuous, its audacity invigorating, and its pathos deeply felt.
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September 3, 2009
Andrew
Essays
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It took about forty-eight hours for me to tumble to the fact that Quentin Tarantino’s superb Nazi-stomping fantasy, Inglourious Basterds would occupy a niche similar to Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and the Coens’ No County for Old Men did in 2008 and 2007, respectively. That is, while it may not be the best film of the year, it has prompted me to a greater quantity and deeper quality of reflection than any other cinematic offering of recent vintage. Happily, it took only a week or so for me to discover that Basterds has also provoked a comparable level of deliberation from just about every American film writer and blogger worth a damn (not that I count myself among that number.) The poobahs of my favored haunts—Glenn Kenny, Tim Brayton, Jim Emerson, Kevin J. Olson, Charles Bowen Jr., Sam Juliano–and their commenters are all in fine form, whether their assessment is positive or negative. However, a particular shout-out needs to go to Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule and Bill R.of The Kind of Face You Hate, who have offered up a meticulous, marathon exchange about the film (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). The tone of their back-and-forth has been unabashedly gushing (as it should be), but the conversation has nonetheless been vigorous, enlightening, and often pointed, especially where the film’s lonely detractors are concerned.
In that spirit, I want to expand on some thoughts that have been rattling around in my cranium since I authored my review, particularly since I’ve now had a chance to view Basterds for a second time and also to peruse a fraction of the excellent commentary that’s been pouring forth from the Internet’s tubes. [SPOILERS AHEAD]
***
Many pixels are being expended on the topic of Inglourious Basterds’ morality, or lack thereof. Interestingly enough, the furor seems to be as much about the response of some critics (*cough* Jeffrey Wells *cough*) to the film’s violence as it is about Tarantino’s own notorious inscrutability on the matter. I find myself mostly sharing Dennis Cozzalio’s stance on this, which is to say that my own feelings about Basterds’ violence are comprised of a heaping helping of giddy enthusiasm with a twinge of nagging discomfort. However, while I can’t say that I share Bill R.’s full-throated enthusiasm for the film’s violence, his commentary on the topic has prompted me to examine my own reactions to Basterds more carefully. I still stand by my assessment that the gleeful bloodthirstiness of the Basterds’ “work” (and Shosanna’s revenge scheme, to a lesser degree) has an undercurrent of moral ambiguity. I can’t deny that I feel some uneasiness at the prospect of reveling in the execution and mutilation of German enlisted men and civilians. Is it telling that I never had so much as a twinge of remorse for the eighty-eight (or so) ninja bodyguards that The Bride mercilessly hacked her way through in Kill Bill, Volume 1, even though many of them were guilty of nothing more than fervent loyalty to their mistress? Perhaps this distinction depends on the particular cartoonish quality to Kill Bill’s violence in the House of Blue Leaves sequence, but I think there’s something else going on.
Nazi stories seem to have a particular capacity for evoking considerations of violence, culpability, and racism. I suspect that when confronted with the swastika in either a historical or fictional context, any person will dwell, however briefly, on their own morality, and how easily human beings set aside decency in the name of tribalism, jingoism, and pure sadism. Of course, in a film like Inglourious Basterds, this has the effect of prompting second thoughts about wishing violence on the very monsters that prompted those second thoughts in the first place. Tarantino equivocates quite a bit about this in the film. He coaxes us to whoop with delight as Nazis are machine-gunned and roasted alive, even as he presents us with a Nazi audience…whooping with delight as Allied soldiers are picked off like rabbits on screen at the Nation’s Pride premiere. It’s hard not to feel a little sting at the comparison. On the other hand, there’s Shosanna’s fate, wherein her momentary pity for Zoller gets her brutally murdered. This suggests that whatever hesitation we feel for dishing out punishment to the deserving is softhearted folly, and likely to have nasty consequences for us. No doubt some authoritarian-minded Neanderthal will latch onto this as a validation for contemporary American warmongering and torture, but Tarantino has never been so overtly political. His provocations are far deeper, striking at the intersection of pop culture and unexamined social values. Bottom line, I don’t think that Tarantino is offering any easy messaging in Basterds, certainly nothing in the vein of Death Proof’s rather uncluttered (yet still misconstrued) indictment of misogyny and male entitlement.
***
One thing that struck me square between the eyes on a second viewing is how much Inglourious Basterds is interested in celebrity, as a plot point, motif, and theme. Consider that nearly every major character in the film—with the conspicuous exception of Shosanna—is well-known in certain circles. Aldo Raine, Donny Donowitz, Hugo Stiglitz, Hans Landa, Fredrick Zoller, Bridget von Hammersmark, and even Smithson “The Little Man” Utivich are all celebrities in one way or another, and much of the film’s intrigues are related to their identities and reputations. And, of course, the film also includes the real-world figures of the Third Reich. This current of celebrity is consistent with Tarantino’s filmography, which has often been concerned with identity, and especially with its capacity to bestow power on the one hand and to confine and suffocate on the other. Tarantino’s exploration of identify achieved its pinnacle in Kill Bill, wherein a wronged woman’s road to vengeance becomes an exploration of the self, but it can also be observed as a major component of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
While Tarantino’s characters have always been larger than life, he’s never before trafficked in a cast of characters that is consistently renowned within their own universe. This is more than appropriate, given Inglourious Basterds’ conspicuous fixation on cinema. Andrew Dominik’s casting of Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was a self-consciously clever feat that paid significant dramatic dividends, and Tarantino seems to be playing a related game here by tapping the tabloid darling to portray Aldo Raine. Yet, consistent with his prankster spirit, the director casts Pitt not as the steely man of war, but as a broadly comical good ol’ boy, and not even in the lead at that!
Few commentators have observed that the Basterds’ questioning of their Nazi captives in Chapter 2 is a callback to Hans Landa’s interrogation of LaPadite in Chapter 1, and moreover that both confrontations hinge on the characters’ reputations and infamy. Landa seems genuinely interested in whether LePadite knows of him, and specifically whether his moniker, “the Jew-Hunter,” is known to the dairy farmer. Likewise Aldo Raine asks his Nazi prisoner if he has heard of Donny, Hugo, and Aldo himself. Both scenes also hinge on the subject giving up some vital piece of information, although the threat of violence is much more explicit for the Nazis the Basterds have under their thumbs. It’s a bold twinning, as it overtly links the menace that Landa cultivates about himself with the fear that the Basterds aim to inspire among the Germans ranks. While Tarantino is drawing a line of connection between Landa and Raine, and therefore critiquing his own (and our own) glee at the Basterds’ brutal methods, he’s not really posing the comparison as a moral equivalency. This is made clear late in the film, when Landa expresses a kind of professional respect for Raine, and seems crestfallen when the American lieutenant fails to exhibit a reciprocal admiration. Raine won’t, of course, because he’s a practical sort, and not preoccupied with abstractions like honor. More significantly, Raine regards Landa as a moral monster, and therefore he is undeserving of any respect at all.
***
Mélanie Laurent has received a lot of attention—and deservedly so—but can we talk for a moment about the luminous Diane Kruger and her portrayal of Bridget von Hammersmark? Kruger was colorless eye candy as Helen of Troy in Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 swords-and-sandals epic, and apparently she’s been a recurring character in those National Treasure films, which I’ve studiously avoided. Certainly, I had seen nothing that prepared me for her deliriously captivating performance in Basterds. Tarantino deserves credit for scripting Bridget as one of the most fascinating and most precisely drawn characters in the film, and also for his well-established ability to bring out the best in his performers. Let’s not short-change Kruger, however. She slips effortlessly into the role of a 1940s screen diva, right down to the poised yet relaxed way she perches on her chair with cigarette and coquettish smirk. Kruger is the picture of Teutonic sparkle, but the allure of Bridget isn’t simply due to the actress’ appropriation of the Marlene Dietrich look. Watch the whirl of emotions that Kruger permits to peek from beneath Bridget’s mask of droll, eager-to-please sweetness. Listen to her carefully during the now-notorious tavern scene, and you’ll see how cunning and fearless Bridget is, and also how apparent it is that Archie Hicox and the Basterds, not her, are the ones who let their anxiety get the better of them. Every step of the way through that scene, Bridget attempts in vain to keep the Allied spies from panicking, to maintain a sense of calm and even warmth. It’s not so much that Bridget is a good liar—I don’t think she is—but that she knows how to use her looks, her charisma, her fame, and her audience’s expectations to her advantage, to smooth out things that might otherwise look suspicious. And, good Lord, what a death scene! If any viewer harbored a speck of sympathy for Landa, surely his unusually graphic strangulation of Bridget banished it? (The slaughter of the Dreyfus family should have, but no matter…) Forget the re-writing of history: Tarantino exhibits epic chutzpah in presenting an act so violent and overtly misogynistic without flinching from it. Only the brutal daylight stabbings in Fincher’s Zodiac have come close in recent memory to banishing the sex appeal of fictional violence.
***
Wandering outside the film blogging world for commentary on recent releases is always an enterprise fraught with peril, but Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has long been providing consistently enlightening insights into pop culture from a feminist perspective amid her postings on reproductive rights and other issues. It was Amanda’s take on Death Proof that got me to appreciate its sexual politics, and has had a strong influence on the way I approach the film. Her assessment of Inglourious Basterds is no less enlightening, and while her writing at Pandagon is in the conversational style of political blogging, she uses the mode she’s familiar with to raise some interesting points. Most fascinating in my mind is Zoller’s embodiment of the Nice Guy archetype that has long been an object of discussion among socially-minded Third Wave feminists. Tarantino addressed the Nice Guy phenomenon with a gentler hand in Death Proof, but Zoller represents a much more frank repudiation of the obsequious, resentful sexist. The Shosanna-Zoller subplot seems designed to resonate with any woman who has ever had to parry a sycophant who refused to take “No” for an answer. The rather unfair characterization of Tarantino as a purveyor of a hyper-masculine sensibility has also been a stubborn one, to the point where four (or five) consecutive films featuring assertive female protagonists have been insufficient to dispel it. Although not all of these films pass the Bechdel Test, I suspect it’s Tarantino’s obsession with genre and his awestruck attitude toward female sexuality that ultimately hinder him being taking seriously as a male ally of feminism. That said, notice how sympathetic Basterds is to Shosanna’s utterly no-nonsense stance towards Zoller. She never gives him an inch, and Zoller’s frustration builds until his underlying entitlement boils over into violent rage. The viewer never really trusts Zoller either, and not just because he’s a Nazi and a Goebbels protege. It’s the false modesty during his early scenes that made my Spidey-Sense tingle, if only because it’s so unusual to see a character take such a stance in a Tarantino film. The trait that seems to hold for almost all of Tarantino’s characters is their swagger, whether warranted or not. Who was the last modest Tarantino character? Poor Marvin from Pulp Fiction? This more than anything signaled to me that Zoller’s initial “humility” about his fame was a disingenuous strategy to impress Shosanna. And, again, what does Shosanna’s momentary softening for the schmuck get her? A brutal, agonizing death. As much as Shossan’s ugly demise seems an affirmation of the film’s merciless Nazi-snuffing, it equally represents a warning never to let your guard down around your creepy wannabe-boyfriend.
September 1, 2009
Andrew
Film Diaries - Andrew, Reviews, Film Diaries - Libby, Film Diaries - Chris, Action, Science Fiction
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2009 (USA / New Zealand)
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Viewed: August 27, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print
The lusciously realized science fiction setting of District 9 almost compensates for the film’s slack qualities. Eschewing deep space wonders, director Neill Blomkamp brings his extraterrestrials into the dusty, militarized locale of modern South Africa. The first twenty minutes of District 9 constitute its most lively and gratifying stretch, as Blomkamp lithely blends faux footage from news programs, documentaries, security cameras, and other sources to set up his tale. However, what starts out as a gripping, blackly comic work evolves into a wearying slog, with the film reverting to the obnoxious chase-escape-chase rhythm of countless action films. (It’s telling that a COPS-style ride-along early in the film is its best sequence.) The film’s visual flourishes are arresting and often witty, from the swirl of flickering symbols within an alien cockpit, to the sight of giant insects in castoff human clothing. Such pleasures, however, aren’t worth the surrounding ballast. The attempts to analogize the alien “prawns” with real-world refugees are clumsy and illogical. The story depends on a protagonist who acts head-slappingly stupid with irksome consistency, and doesn’t evoke the sympathy that Blomkamp imagines he does. Most disappointingly, District 9 eventually succumbs unfortunately typical scifi tedium.
