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.

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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.

Film Diary: About Schmidt

2002 (USA)
Director: Alexander Payne
Viewed: August 2, 2010
Format: DVD - New Line (2003)

Film Diary: Inception

2010 (USA)
Director: Chistopher Nolan
Viewed: July 27, 2010
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

[SPOILER ALERT] My second descent into Christopher Nolan’s breathless heist-of-the-mind proved to be a far richer experience than I had anticipated.  I settled into my seat prepared to engage in a little due diligence: putting to rest some lingering questions vis-à-vis the mechanics of the film’s “shared dreaming” conceit, as well as resolving my creeping suspicions that Inception’s aspirations of thematic profundity would prove to be hollow in the cold light of another viewing.  On this second point, I was pleased to be proved wrong.

While the film’s labyrinthine plot has been subject to endless online parsing—see Sam Adams’ essential, exhaustive summary and exegesis at Salon, if you’re still sorting it out—all the crunchy specifics quickly receded into the background on a second viewing.  A pre-existing familiarity with the story’s stacked levels of consciousness and elaborate science-fiction rules (thin on the science end though they might be) allowed me to engage with the film’s other facets, which proved to be deeper than I remembered.

With hindsight, it’s apparent that Cobb is not only not the hero of this story, but may actually be the villain, albeit one that is more negligent and selfish than actively malicious.  His obsessive attachment to Mal and his determination to be re-united with his children (and who can fault him for the latter?) results in a horrendous lack of judgment, setting up the story’s most perilous conflicts. For the other team members, there’s not that much as stake in the inception of Robert Fischer.  If their mission fails, all that’s lost is a share of their reward from Saito.  Cobb’s deceptions–he conceals both his problems with Mal and the risks associated with Yusuf’s custom sedative–put them all in danger, including Saito himself, who’s bank-rolling the whole endeavor.  Almost as quickly as she is introduced, Ariadne steps into the role of Cobb’s conscience: she’s having none of his taciturn, lone wolf posturing, in light of the peril he’s placing them in. These aspects stand out much more starkly the second time down the rabbit hole, almost to the point where the heady action–which is so intrinsic to the film’s initial wallop–becomes its least interesting aspect to dwell on.

Admittedly, there’s not much spark between DiCaprio and Cotillard, and Nolan isn’t willing to do the heavy lifting to justify his leads’ glistening tears and howls of anguish.  Still, Cobb’s reluctance to let go of his wife’s memory is the dynamo that generates Inception’s dark energy, and on my second go-around, I was much more taken with the story of the man’s profoundly damaged psyche.  In this, the film shares much with Nolan’s Memento, as both feature protagonists who exude confidence and street-smarts, and yet dwell inside bubbles of fantasy and denial.  At least in poor Leonard’s case, his delusion is entwined with his short-term memory loss; Cobb, meanwhile, has no excuses for his behavior, other than his apparent belief that his skill at extraction makes him exceptional, and therefore above his own rules.  If the story of Fischer Senior and Junior is somewhat lacking in emotional vigor, it’s nonetheless fascinating to witness all the ways in which Cobb’s journey parallels that of the young billionaire.  The film’s heist is, of course, as much about Cobb’s catharsis as Fischer’s.  While I’m not convinced that Cobb is “really” the subject of the inception, or the more baroque theory that Araidne is actually his therapist, the contours of Nolan’s script suggest that Cobb’s tale is the one that matters here.  Everything else in the story comments upon and adds texture to that fundamental drama of one man’s stubborn refusal to move on.

While my own reaction to the film has been quite positive, some of the criticisms aimed at the film are nonetheless observant and ably articulated.  Dennis Cozzalio’s take, particularly his trenchant pinpointing of some of Nolan’s questionable storytelling choices, comes closest to the reaction of my own Dark Side, a bitter imp that hates everything brash, everything self-important, and especially everything brashly self-important (which Inception most certainly is).  That said, talking about criticism itself (or, horrors, talking about criticism about criticism) makes me a little queasy, so for now I’ll just point you in the direction of some of the usual suspects, some of whom are much less sanguine than I about the film’s merits: Glenn Kenny, the Film Doctor, Jason Bellamy, J.D. at Radiator Heaven, and, naturally, Jim Emerson, whose antipathy for Nolan’s films is well-known and always impressively elucidated.