Gateway Cinephiles

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 Plaza Frontenac)

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: 300 (RiffTrax Edition)

2006 (USA)
Director: Zack Snyder
Viewed: January 15, 2010
Format: DVD – Warner Brothers (2007) with RiffTrax audio (2006)

This was two firsts for me, my first viewing of 300, and my first RiffTrax.  I saw it with a room full of friends in San Diego, with a liberal application of booze.  Super fun!  I fully recommend seeing action movies with RiffTrax, even on the first viewing of the movie.  The RiffTrax commentary did a good job of staying out of the way of the movie’s dialog enough that I didn’t feel like I missed anything, while mitigating the problem that I normally have with action movies being basically dumb visual entertainment.

300’s visual style and over-the-top action sequences were beautiful and compelling.  I was impressed with the movie’s ability to suck me in and make me feel like I was rooting for the most epically bad-ass underdogs in history, and I loved the ending.   It was great to see an action movie that just focused on being a great action movie.  300 knew what it was, didn’t try to be something more, and did its job wonderfully.

The RiffTrax was also very funny.  Mystery Science Theater 3000 was always a bit hit-or-miss for me, but this RiffTrax was solid throughout, and made me eager to see more.

Mr. Cameron Wants You to Be Comfortable While He Does His Thing

Avatar
2009 (USA)
Director: James Cameron
Viewed: December 22, 2009
Format: 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive)

I was only one year old when Star Wars was released in 1977, which means that for all practical purposes, I’ve always lived in a post-Star Wars world.  While I later participated quite enthusiastically in the broader consumer phenomenon often summed up as simply “Star Wars,”—encompassing sequels, toys, comics, and card games, to name just the few products I personally devoured—I was too young to catch Star Wars: A New Hope in its original theatrical release.  Even if I had been a few years older at the time, I obviously wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it as anything other than an entertaining tale of adventure.  Accordingly, when older generations speak of the revolutionary nature of Star Wars as cinema, of how it blew their minds and opened up previously undreamed possibilities in terms of the places movies could take us, I’ve always nodded along without ever truly understanding what they were saying.  How could I?  Subsequent cinema has been irrecoverably altered—or tainted, depending on your point of view—by the existence of Star Wars and is phenomenal commercial success.

Perhaps the highest praise I can bestow on James Cameron’s mind-bogglingly expensive 3D science-fiction epic, Avatar, is that I can now understand how my forebears felt when they first settled in to let Star Wars wash over them.  There’s nothing particularly nuanced about Avatar, which is essentially a standard science-fiction adventure, straight up, no chaser.  Thematically, emotionally, and structurally, its ambitions are modest, even pedestrian.  However, like Star Wars before it, Avatar is a revolutionary film.  You’ve heard it a hundred times before, but this time is indisputably true: This Is Like Nothing I Have Ever Seen.  It is fitting that it has been birthed by James Cameron, a technophilic film-maker whose finest works tell simple stories with relentless energy and discreet intelligence.  It’s a cliché to insist that a movie must be seen in the theaters to be appreciated, but Avatar is the first film in memory than positively demands that it be experienced in its full glory, and that means 3D digital theatrical projection.  This is a film that will be a shadow of its former self on even the most elaborate home theater system.  Trust me on this: cough up the funds for that overpriced multiplex ticket, and prepare to see a new world unfold before your eyes.

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

Antichrist
2009 (Denmark)
Director: Lars von Trier
Viewed: November 3, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Antichrist is an aggressively unpleasant film, but that’s not the same thing as a bad film.  In fact, the latest effort from Lars von Trier, the noted asshole and self-appointed ambassador of pretentious European film-making, is the most intriguing work from the director I’ve yet seen.  I have never understood the contempt his films often arouse, but my prior experience with von Trier has been admittedly underwhelming.  Antichrist, however, proves to be audacious and original. The film is suffused with unforgettable images, seemingly plucked out of a bad dream and given a rotten, mythic life on the screen.  Von Trier has achieved a fresh alchemy, blending his essential cynicism with intellectually engrossing themes and a new-found instinct for terror.  While a bothersome lack of emotional heft prevents it from succeeding as a genuine work of horror, Antichrist is nonetheless harrowing, provocative stuff.  It seems ordained to lurk in the cellar of cinema for years to come, it noisome bellows drawing attention to our unexamined assumptions about remorse, sex, and especially gender.  You are forewarned: von Trier has summoned forth an ugly, ugly beast, and staring it down is not enjoyable in the least, but there is something nonetheless compelling in its scabrous eyes.

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Quick Review: District 9

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.

Now We Are All Sons of Bitches

Inglourious Basterds
2009 (USA / Germany / France)
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Viewed: August 21, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

I really should know better at this point.  My reaction upon hearing of an upcoming Quentin Tarantino film is reliably a mixture of excitement and trepidation.  When I think about it for more than a moment, however, this response seems disgracefully childish, if completely understandable.  I was one of countless thirty-somethings whose early appreciation of independent American film was driven primarily by Tarantino’s first two films, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.  Consequently, my responses to his subsequent films are tinted by an unfortunate reactionary urge, whispering at me to contrast his latest feature with the Real Tarantino on bombastic display in Dogs and Fiction.  Of course, this is monstrously unfair.  Tarantino has grown significantly as a director in the past fifteen years, parlaying his success as the American wunderkind of thrilling, densely referential cinema into ever more ambitious works.  Even as he refined the familiar stylistic trappings that are comfortable for him (the “how,” if you will), he has tackled increasingly challenging stories and themes (the “what”).  With a little effort, I’ve shaken off my blinkered way of looking at Tarantino’s post-Fiction output.  What’s more, I’ve come to regard Kill Bill Volume II and Death Proof as among most vital works of American cinema in the past five years.  And so here we are with Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s answer to the World War II film.  And damn if it doesn’t exhibit every sign of continuing the director’s recent arc of daring, socially aware films that triumph as both giddy entertainments and bracing studies of desperately held cultural values.

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Film Diary: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2009 (UK / USA)
Directors: David Yates
Viewed: August 2, 2009
Format: IMAX 3D Theatrical Print

Film Diary: Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

2004 (USA)
Director: Adam McKay
Viewed: July 14, 2009
Format: DVD - Dreamworks (2004)

Film Diary: Heat

1995 (USA)
Director: Michael Mann
Viewed: July 14, 2009
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2007)